Essays: June 2008 Archive Page

Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.... Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self.

The article includes an interesting anecdote about Nietzsche and his typewriter, and also offers a clever interpretation of the death of HAL from 2001.

As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein's lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and "Yes, Sister... No, Sister" was to give the kids something concrete but harmless on which to focus their rebellious energy.  I could come to school in mismatched socks and a garish tie, and nowhere in the student manual did it say I was doing anything illegal.

I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)

Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest."  (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?)  Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.

What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.