I’m about to teach, but wanted to mention that Jenny’s and my Inside Higher Ed piece — the excerpt from Teaching Beauty — has generated a lively comment thread. It’s here.
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Speaking of teaching — The semester’s just about over, and it shows. Before I said anything today in my Novels of Don DeLillo class, one of the students raised his hand.
”Why don’t you advertise on your blog?”
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:56PM
no final?
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:11PM
There’s a final in both of my courses, if that’s what you’re wondering, goodstudent. Essay-style. In-class.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:16PM
Let’s say you’re grading a final exam. The student is smart enough, but maybe a bit lazy, maybe a bit ignorant to what a good analysis looks like, and for these reasons her papers always kind of skim the obvious–never going very deep, never attempting something very hard. There’s a phone-it-in aftertaste when you read her writing. Doesn’t she know what a liberal education requires from the student herself?
What kind of advice do you give to this kind of student?
What kind of effort does the student have to put forth to get the most out of the liberal education offered at a place like GWU (and every day, really), and how does the student continue to put that best effort forward when the university seems to expect it less and less?
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:53PM
"Moral seriousness" has a qustionable pedigree.
http://www.slate.com/id/1008127/
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:22PM
lance_steel: Almost all of the people who use the term “questionable pedigree” are evil capitalists.
http://www.google.com/search?q=questionable+pedigree&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7SUNA&start=0&sa=N
Mary: I don’t think, as I lecture and read student papers and talk to students in my office, in terms of abstractions like “liberal education.” What’s in front of me every day are the particularities of this course’s subject matter and that course’s syllabus — the business of conveying in a shapely and thorough way a restricted set of ideas about literature and culture. I’m also very preoccupied with student responses to what they’re reading and what I’m saying; I’m to some extent re-shaping the course as I go along in an attempt to respond to what seems to be emerging most strongly among students in response to the material.
Oh – Mr. UD just got home. More later.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:04PM
Mary: Nor do I think it makes much sense to give advice to students via this abstraction — “You should get more out of the liberal education we’re offering you.”
Here’s my experience at GW. There are very very few students at GW, even among our humanities majors, who have a strong sense of what the phrase ‘liberal education’ means. These few students work extremely hard to figure out, semester by semester, how they can construct a true liberal arts set of courses for themselves.
GW is not a Great Books university, and if you’re going to take liberal education seriously, it basically means some variant of the Great Books model. So these students truly have to think, and think hard (with help from people like UD) about how to structure their courses in order to get a strong, coherent grounding in philosophy, great literature, foundational political thought, and so forth.
It can be done, but it’s difficult.
As to the advice I give the student who’s smart but lazy and not well-focused and who is therefore not getting as much as she might out of her liberal education: If she doesn’t ask for it, I don’t give her any advice. I write all sorts of things all over her papers about how you go about doing a deeper, more serious close reading, analysis, whatever, than she’s doing; I call her work ‘promising,’ in hopes that she’ll be both encouraged and tipped off that it’s not where it should be yet. But I don’t sit her down and advise her to make more of the opportunities we’re giving her to become liberally educated.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:24PM
That’s good. And you don’t adopt "moral seriousness" yourself, other than to call it "interesting." But it can be used by bullies to suggest that their opponents are not just wrong but unserious. Not everyone in denial is an alcoholic.
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:18PM
lance_steel, so your point is just that the phrase "moral seriousness" can be abused? That’s true (who would deny it?), but it hardly follows that we should do without the concept or the phrase or that anyone who uses it must be a bully. There really is such a thing as moral seriousness. Of course we tend to be overeager to attribute a lack of moral seriousness to those with whom we disagree. That’s certainly a problem, but surely the correct response to it is to strive as best we can to transcend those biases, not to throw away a real and important distinction?
Not everyone in denial is an alcoholic, but there are alcoholics, and so long as there are alcoholics there’s a legitimate use for the concept of alcoholism.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:06AM
Thank you.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:04AM
if you’re going to take liberal education seriously, it basically means some variant of the Great Books model
It does?
April 24th, 2008 at 7:21AM
If you believe, as I do, that being liberally educated means above all having a foundation in the most important cultural thought, yes. Though I’m very flexible on the ‘variant’ thing — St. John’s College, I concede, is a pretty rigid model. The University of Chicago has been playing around with its model lately, and that seems fine to me, but I worry that once you lose the general idea of a reasonably restricted and carefully chosen list of the best that’s been thought and written, you lose coherence and quality.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:34AM
I think that letting students see great work of other students can be a huge help, Mary. In all but the best high schools, the bar is set so low that practically any paper that is 75% of the assigned length and employs the five-paragraph format gets a B, regardless of the content. I see some students literally gasping when they encounter real college-level work, and at least a third in a typical class perform noticeably better the next time around. It’s not a magic bullet–the slackers and dopes we have with us always–but for a significant number of students, seeing quality work by their peers helps them raise their own expectations of themselves.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:42AM
How should we read literature? With moral seriousness. That’s a joke because it’s not an answer to the question. If you want to argue for the aesthetic approach to literature, or the great books, argue for that. But don’t also pretend to occupy the high ground of moral seriousness (it’s so hard to avoid the quotes, as I’ve learned from UD).
April 24th, 2008 at 4:24PM
lance_steel, It looks to me as if you are objecting to a claim that no one has actually made. Who has claimed that "With moral seriousness" is an answer to the question "How should we read literature?"? Did UD or her co-author claim that anyone who disagrees with what they say must lack moral seriousness (or that anyone who agrees with them must possess it)? Here’s the quotation from Raymond Gaita:
"To be more than a high-flying dilettante you need more than intellectual skills. You must develop a certain kind of moral seriousness: you must try to overcome vanity, to have courage, to care more for truth than for status, and so on. That’s as obvious as the need to be kind and just if you are to be a good person and it’s just as hard. Critical thinking can be taught. How and why really to care for the truth can’t be, not, at any rate, in the same way. For that you need examples in your teachers and in the texts that you study. The examples won’t all come from the humanities, but only the humanities can give what you need to reflect on their significance."
This seems to me to be 1) true, 2) important, and 3) something that can be said without bullying or claiming to occupy the moral high ground.
Also, why can’t UD (or anyone else) argue for the value of an aesthetic approach to literature and the value of an education in which great books play a central role and for a conception of liberal education that involves more than the cultivation of intellectual skills? If we’re going to discuss how to approach the teaching of literature to undergraduates isn’t it entirely appropriate to make reference to what we take to be the goal(s) of a humanistic or liberal education? If Gaita’s point is pertinent to that topic, which it surely is, then I really don’t see what the problem is.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:34PM
[...] Teaching Beauty is a call for more attention to aesthetics in the literature classroom, and an excerpt appeared last week at Inside Higher Ed. Can we link this book to themes long-developed here at the [...]