Keeping the English-teaching habit

A lot of what happens in schools runs on pure habit. Some habits cause more problems than they solve, and awhile back efforts were begun to reform them. Three decades later the reforming seems habitual too, though that’s not the topic at hand. Instead, let’s consider the good fortune that one habit has – so far – slipped under the reformers’ radar.

Here’s an interesting fact of American education: The only course most high school students must take all four years is English. And the one course required of virtually all college and university students is an English course, composition. Some colleges require two composition courses. Courses in literature are often required too.

Given recent curriculum renovations, this English requirement may be no more than an institutional habit that’s simply been overlooked. Take, for example, a student in a composition course I taught a few years ago. He was a bright young guy, quick-witted in class (though not the quickest) and of above average intellectual ability (though not the top). But he refused to put any effort into his writing assignments. Short weekly papers were a hastily scrawled sentence or two. His formal essays were pretty obviously typed the night before using what students misname “stream of consciousness.” Some weeks into the course, it became clear that the D’s he was getting didn’t bother him at all. So on the next essay, he got the F he deserved all along.

That got his attention. He came to my office to find out what minimum of forced labor he had to serve to pass the course. He did not put it like that, but would not have disagreed with the phrasing. I evaded his question by asking: “Sam, why don’t you just put more time into the essays?”

His reply was very clear. He said: 1) He could not write very well and never would because 2) he was good at math. To him, these facts disposed of the whole problem of his relationship to English. And it was pretty clear some authority had already approved this line of reasoning. He was a math major; English courses did not apply to him. He just needed to pass this meaningless requirement with a D.

I tried re-explaining a point we had belabored the first week of class. “These English courses,” I said, “are the most important classes you’ll ever take.”

Sam thought this was a joke claim. And no doubt other, more influential people will roll their eyes, too. But the fact is, there are powerful reasons why English is required of virtually all high school and college students, though they seem through force of habit to have been forgotten.

“English” courses, whether they emphasize reading, writing or speaking, are called that because they are (or used to be) the study of English, a language. But why would any practical person study language? You don’t need to study baskets to use one.

This habitually repeated notion that language is a tool has some validity. Language does carry information back and forth. But words are about as much like little baskets as the sun is like a lump of coal.

Language does transmit information, but the transmission can happen clearly and unclearly. Anyone who has tried to assemble bicycles or furniture from written instructions knows that some directions work and others might as well be in Chinese.

The upshot of this is simple, but has profound effects: When language is used well, things work better. If communication in the office is clearer, the office works better. Communication between diplomats, between troops, between businessmen is better when language is clear, and things work better. The primary reason American students are required to study English is so they’ll use it more clearly and things will work better.

But it goes way beyond this.

Here’s another quirky fact: English courses can exist without math, but Sam’s math courses cannot exist without English. In fact, the university itself cannot exist without English (or, obviously, some other language). Virtually everything humans do is affected or outright created by language.

So the more you know about your language, and the more you practice speaking, reading and writing it, the more effectively you live. In China, they study Chinese. In France, French. There is a lot more to words than the dictionary meanings they carry.

Sam understood all this only vaguely. Eventually he escaped the composition course with a D, never quite grasping that his relationship to English directly influences his ability to understand calculus. Not to mention life itself, but that’s a future topic.

I tell this story because a lot of people think this way about English classes. Some years ago a memo appeared in faculty mailboxes at a university of my acquaintance, warning that university, government and community leaders had discussed the notion that humanities courses, including English, should move out of classrooms and onto the Internet, mainly to save money. This is cheerfully called “efficiency.”

Now, whether you like to think so or not, an assumption underneath this notion is that humanities courses – including English – are not important enough to spend so much time, space and money on. They are burdensome old habits that can be curbed.

Given the importance of language in virtually every aspect of human life, we are all extremely fortunate these people have not gotten control of curriculums. Yet.

Dana Wilde taught college English for two decades and is now an editor and columnist for the BDN. His e-mail address is dwilde@bangordailynews.net.