Week of 2/4

Hill: “An Answer to the Cry for More English”

So, I’m trying to keep in mind when Hill was writing. Because the elitism implicit in his article annoys me. Immensely. His assumption that meaningful change must be made by those at the top of the hierarchical pyramid (46) shows a shocking lack of historical understanding.

Hill’s approach to teaching comp is product-focused. Nonetheless, I find myself in agreement with some of the things he says. It’s still the case that many students can’t spell. It’s still the case that students arrive at post-secondary institutions ill-prepared to write academic essays. It’s still the case that few students arrive in our classrooms with a “taste for good reading” (48). It’s still the case that many students “show . . . such utter ignorance of punctuation as to put commas at the end of complete sentences” (49). It’s still the case that elementary and secondary schools don’t function as we’d like (51). But Hill regards revision as merely correcting mechanical and grammatical errors. He doesn’t seem to understand that if children never hear Standard American English (SAE) spoken, they have no way of knowing that what they’re saying and writing is incorrect by its standards. I’ve worked more than one student who told me that they’d never heard the word whom used before, for instance. For many students, SAE is like a foreign language that they cannot use without translation. Hill seems completely blind to the realities of socioeconomic class. Worse, Hill’s approach to composition education seems designed to reinforce class divisions.

Hill’s epistemology is archaic, too. He believes knowledge to be cumulative. He thinks that language is merely a tool one wields in order to make some pre-ordained meaning clear. His ideas about language and its relationship to knowledge are outmoded as well. He says that thought is “aimless amusement” and learning “mere pedantry” without “the use of that great instrument of communication” (52). To this I would respond that the use of SAE is neither necessary nor sufficient to either profound thought or significant learning. It’s language that’s necessary (but not sufficient), not standard usage. Idiolect is enough as long as one doesn’t feel compelled to share thought or to teach, so language doesn’t even have to be a shared language to enable thought and learning! Implicit in this characterization of learning is, I think, what Freire calls the banking concept of education and what Elbow has pointed to as an error: the idea that learning requires teachers.

Hill also draws his “data” from a male-only school. Well, given women’s well-documented facility with language, I wonder what his data would have looked like had he considered the entrance exams to any of the women’s colleges extant in 1879. Perhaps he’d not have been so disappointed.

Isn’t it ironic that in an article that contains a list of egregiously misspelled words there are two misspellings (exercise 53; Shakespeare 56)? While I realize that this is probably due to editorial carelessness, it’s amusing anyway. More later . . .