The Second Language of “Standard English”
by Alison Powell
A recent editorial in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach?” generated enough controversy and enthusiasm to merit that he write two follow up pieces. In the first, Stanley Fish argues that the problem with English composition courses is they don’t teach composition at all; rather, they are poorly masked cultural studies courses focusing on history, political thought, and the like. Echoing George Orwell’s famous piece “Politics and the English Language,” Fish criticizes the prioritizing of a general, catch-all “humanities” education in composition courses if it comes at the expense of basic grammar and mechanics.
Fish’s perspective generates in me (an English composition, creative writing and literature instructor), an ambivalent reaction. On one hand, the transformation within academia brought on by waves of queer theory, feminist theory, culture studies, postcolonial studies, etc., was inevitable and has improved scholarly endeavors in ways that are profound and overwhelmingly positive. And importantly, the weaknesses Fish attributes to the focus of these disciplines — in particular, his belief that undergraduates are worse writers because colleges have instead tried to make them “better citizens” — may very well come from any number of reasons, including a general decline in the American public school system (not the use of, say, popular film in the classroom to teach cultural analysis).
But it’s important to note that Fish is not critiquing at its base the importance of these disciplines. Of the composition courses he examined before writing the editorial, he says: “instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”
After six years of teaching college English — creative writing, composition, and literature courses — I agree for the most part with his main ideas. The first difficulty, of course, is that no two universities are alike, just as no two communities are alike. My former undergraduate students in the Midwest (Indiana and Missouri) were fair to middling writers, but their critical thinking skills left much to be desired. Much of this was due to a failure in the public education systems in those states (which are notoriously lacking), as well as a general culture which discouraged critique of authority — and by authority, I mean anything ranging from your high school principal to MTV to the National Rifle Association. I was (and continue to be) very fond of my students from these states and feel I can understand as a Midwesterner myself (though not accept) their reticence to question the status quo.
By contrast, I have my students in New York. I am often in awe of their sophistication regarding social issues at such a young ages, yet find they struggle somewhat more with basic mechanics and writing skills. The significant consequence is that, though my students here bring much diversity of experience to the classroom (in terms of age, race / ethnicity, sexual orientation, political orientation, and economic background), as well as a generally sophisticated and complex way of looking at politics, media, and the world around them, they have a very difficult time expressing this in their essays. This leads me to believe that my students do not need assistance learning how to think critically, in particular about their society or about pop culture. Fish notes that the emphasis in composition courses is often on these subjects, and I would agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally misguided (if benevolently intended about such an approach. Instead, my students need help articulating their already interesting, complex, and idiosyncratic ideas about the world, at the most basic level. They need help identifying and using the nuts and bolts of the English language.
Both these groups of students have writing issues which are basic enough to fundamentally impinge on the expression of their arguments: passive voice, subject / verb agreement, spelling and punctuation, etc. I’m not sure in what ways (or why) the secondary education system is failing our students, but because I myself am trained to teach rhetoric, argumentation, and literary interpretation, I frequently find myself at a loss for how to address more basic problems.
Can anyone stomach another sentence diagram? I’m not sure when I last did a sentence diagram — after all, I’m only a bit more than a decade older than my students, and was thus more or less subject to the same public school upbringing. I’d be lying if I said I was entirely comfortable breaking down the more advanced nuances of grammar and sentence structure. Yet Fish acknowledges this, asking: “What good is it to be told, ‘Do not join independent clauses with a comma,’ if you don’t have the slightest idea of what a clause is (and isn’t), never mind an ‘independent’ one? And even if a beginning student were provided with the definition of a clause, the definition itself would hang in mid-air like a random piece of knowledge. It would be like being given a definition of a drop-kick in the absence of any understanding of the game in which it could be deployed.” Instead, he advocates for a slow and steady approach, in which a composition course is more or less a series of lessons that works on the sentence level, breaking down various structures both to see how they function in the English language and as pieces of a larger argument.
There is the issue of how diversity expresses itself in writing. My background and passion is in creative writing and poetry, so my own hesitations arise when I think of teaching a class that bulldozes difference — that attempts to eradicate unique expressions or ways of speaking in formal writing. After all, Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t have become the writer she is if she had abandoned all her Southernisms in favor of a more anesthetized, standard English. But the fact of the matter is I’m not teaching creative writing, and as O’Connor’s own essays make clear, she knew when and how to turn it off (and strongly advocated doing so). Fish addresses this in his third editorial, saying: “… you must clear your mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world…: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’” He continues: “The issue is whether students… will prosper in a society where norms of speech and writing are enforced not by law but by institutional decorums. If you’re about to be fired because your memos reflect your “own identity and style,” citing (dialects of nurture) is not going to do you any good.
He in no way disagrees that the prioritizing of “standard English” is wielded unfairly against those who are less formally educated, but points out that while “it may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination — all dialects equal, all habit of speech and writing equally rewarded. You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices.… And if students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft multiculturalism declare, ‘I have a right to my own language,’ reply, ‘Yes , you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.’ (Who could object to learning a second language?) And then get on with it.” Despite the many ways that language changes — being itself a living, breathing, adaptable animal — it is still true that the American workplace has marked a certain writing style as being that which is useful, strong, intelligent, analytical and practical. And that style typically follows standardized sentence structure and grammar rules which, in my experience at least, we are increasingly failing to offer to our young students.
I am one of those English teachers that assigns reading — – and a lot of it. My students read Hemingway, Stein, Updike, O’Connor, Faulkner, Bambara, Tan, and the like; essentially, I assign as many words to them without inciting potential mutiny. And they’re accountable for it, and must write in class spontaneously and often about what they’ve read. This is simply because, like most teachers, I teach the way I learned, and I learned to write by reading, and then reading some more. The knowledge that our public schools and American culture generally is gently but consistently recoiling from the art of reading gives me energy and conviction about my courses.
But Fish’s essay has convinced me that it’s time to face my own demons and come up with some grammar and sentence structure exercises that at least approximate being interesting. I like this idea that teaching students how to write is akin to teaching them a second language — I may make this analogy in class tomorrow, before a lesson on sentence fragments. And then I’ll get on with it.
