What Barbarians At The Gate?

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judi bandarqLast Saturday I went to see Jeff Wilhelm speak at Rhode Island College. The Rhode Island Writing Project Conference was ostensibly on the Common Core, but Jeff was there in part to promote his new book, Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom. For those of you who don’t know Jeff or his work, Jeff was a high school English teacher for 15 years before getting his PhD and moving to higher ed. He started the Maine Writing Project and then the Boise State Writing Project. I first saw Jeff speak in Vermont at the inaugural New England Writing Projects Regional Network Retreat, in about 2000, a few years after You Gotta BE the Book first came out.

I have known Jeff for years and have really enjoyed his work. Jeff has always promoted engaged and interactive approaches to teaching and writing, but his new book goes much further than any previous. Some aspects will strike some readers as too touchy-feely or quasi-spiritual, but Jeff’s intentions are solidly humanist and democratic, and he backs up his ideas with a lot of research, including cognitive science.

I was particularly struck by the way Jeff and his co-author Bruce Novak framed their argument in the context of political and social movements and consequent pedagogical responses. For instance, Jeff and Bruce talk about two important conferences, familiar to most students of composition but not necessarily familiar to most teachers. They are the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 and the English Coalition Conference of 1987 at Wye Plantation in Maryland. Without getting into too much detail, the Dartmouth Seminar responded to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which was a politically conservative response to Sputnik. The Wye Conference responded to the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk , which was another politically conservative call to educational arms. Both the NDEA and the A Nation at Risk report pushed education toward standardization, assessment, and, especially for the field of English, a narrowing of the profession toward a skills-based understanding of literacy. Dartmouth and Wye were both push-backs against conservative trends.

In Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom, Jeff and Bruce identify the current climate under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To the Top (R2T) as one that demands another push-back. Their book is a clarion call for teachers, and especially teachers of English. And although Jeff is originally a New England guy, he’s in Idaho now, so he’s not particularly aware of Governor Malloy’s education reform proposal, but this book addresses exactly what’s going on now in our state.

In the late 50s, the NDEA was driven by a militaristic mindset that stressed the need for math and science to help us defend against the Soviet barbarians at the gate. In the 80s, A Nation at Risk spurred President Reagan to form the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which was largely comprised of private sector and government figures with a few token educators, and they too were charged with defending against the new barbarians (still the Soviets but with the Japanese on the ascendant). The 2001 NCLB act had similar private and governmental backing but little support from the education community, and it took aim at defending against foreign threats such as the Arab world and China.

And if you look now at the individuals influencing Governor Malloy’s Senate Bill 24, you will see once again that ConnCAN is private sector and the Connecticut Council for Education Reform, the main body behind Malloy’s education agenda, is comprised of bankers, insurance executives, and members of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. Nary an educator to be found. And while Malloy might not be influenced by a concern for outside threats, his proposals are clearly an attempt to get R2T money and a NCLB waiver. So the mindset of reforming education in order to compete against rising economic powers and defend against threatening military powers remains operative.

By contrast, Jeff challenges us to reform education, especially the field of English, so that we reclaim and reassert the goals of the humanist and democratic traditions—nothing less than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He urges us to resist the corporate reformers who would reduce Education in general and English in particular to a barren field of “information and skills delivery and test preparation,” and he insists that we regard teaching as “an artistic, creative, and imaginative endeavor” that shows students how to regard “reading, writing, and living as creative and imaginative pursuits.”