Everyone seems to agree that education is a good thing. To a point. Once it helps you to get a wuk, and, with no more effort than attending classes, makes society "better," it's great. But mention "book reading" and "think- ing" outside classrooms, and face does swell up. You taking this ting too far. And that's the teachers talking. The standard argument for a strong humanities curriculum (as mentioned last week), that for an individual and nation it brings huge returns in the quality of life, impresses no one here. The expansion of access to tertiary education is only happening because white people say we need the numbers to increase to reach "First World" status. And as anyone who has ever faced a classroom of bored, s/t/exting illiterate and proud miscreants knows, their contempt for actual education, as opposed to job-training, can be crushing. But to hear it-jes' tell we woh we need fuh de exam-at a staff meeting, messes you up. I was briefly, uhm, involved with an allegedly tertiary institution in the distant past where this was the stated (not written) policy. (I can't seem to remember the institution's name-and it's not on my resume.) But the policy is common across institutions, and it's killing us slowly and painfully. The World Economic Forum reports on innovation and competitiveness suggest that with more higher education, local businesses and society are less productive and anti-innovative.
Everyday experience shows us every day the other consequences: that ordinary social situations are violent and confrontational, and the national character is small-minded and deviant. The TV6 News last Friday ran several stories about dysfunctional schools, including a video of a schoolgirl being beaten by another schoolgirl and her relative. Don't delude yourself that this is anomalous. No one has asked why this is happening. One reason is the school system, but it's not the fault of the students. It is the fault of a small handful of people at UWI responsible for teaching the humanities, especially literature, to the thousands of high-school teachers, who are unleashed on the secondary school population. Others are those responsible for UTT's Arts Academy and State culture policy-but that's another column. But UWI. Most of the students at UWI, who go on to teach at secondary school, have two pronounced deficiencies: first, appal- ling (if any) ideas about literary reading and interpretation; and second, small-church morality, and the cluelessness about basic human nature and society. Most literature grads are women, and their idea of reading is Mills & Boon romances, or for the richer ones, no reading unless absolutely necessary-all get their social and moral ideas from Bible study and/ or Sex and the City and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
I nearly peed to hear an all-female class at a post-grad seminar discuss Nadine Gordimer's novel, July's People-saying that there was "something sexual" between July (the black South African yard man) and the white lady. Power, the possession of the car, the ambiguous masculinity gradient between the two men when the social order was inverted. Pffttt. When Pinter won the Nobel Prize, I mentioned to final-year theatre students that we "must be all excited about Pinter." But we didn't know who Pinter was. When you see the nonsense that those who are supposed to be teaching these students write in essays, and babble publicly and at conferences, you realise where the problems come from-the teachers, and the corrupt system of hiring friends and familiars. After decades of this, the system is warped into uselessness and we're all paying for it. At one institution, trying to teach basic literary analysis, I asked students to analyse Donne's First Satire (a very funny, bawdy poem) and read Hardy's Jude the Obscure-because both were less romantic and more brutal, and their themes were quite contemporary. After two months, no one had read, far less written anything. I failed them all at midterm and told them to stop wasting my time and theirs by coming to class without doing the reading. Management was vex with me. Why give a "hard" poem? Why ask them to read "such a long" novel? And why fail them because they didn't? Apparently when students don't do required reading, you "give them notes" which they reproduce in exams-and pass.
Again, I don't blame the students for this. But what they're being deprived of by the slackness is a real crime. Cultural psychologists now know what good readers have always known: that literature, especially the novel, provides simulated imaginative envi- ronments that allow us to live other lives, feel feelings and think thoughts we could not do on our own, and incorporate the wisdom into our worldview. Using novels, or television, a good teacher can help a student in thinking out emotional and moral responses for a maddeningly complex world. How could we like Tony Soprano knowing he's a murderer? Could Humbert really love Lolita? Does this excuse Humbert's criminality? What about the South Park episode where Cartman fakes being retarded to enter the Special Olym-pics? Any parallels to cultural studies at UWI? More than conclusions, the reasoning is important. If those who are supposed to teach this cannot think these thoughts, and believe morality to mean Bible studies, or Koranic, or Ramayanic studies, they would not have the faintest idea what's at stake here-the production of a complete, sentient human being, and no less than our salvation. And neither will those they teach. Then there's the class issue in all this, which I'll probably discuss next week.