Clueless in Academe
Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe attracted me with a great subtitle:
How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind!
Graff bemoans the inability of his students to engage in argument.
He suggests that academic discourse – Socratic questioning, proving a point with evidence, digging beneath the surface for hidden meanings, restating an opponent’s position well, persuasion and debate – is a sort of foreign language to many of today’s students. Schooled in the relativism and cynicism of postmodern culture, caught in the conflict between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ educational philosophies, students are less and less able to enter into what Graff describes as “academic intellectual culture.”
Happily, for parents and teachers, he suggests ways to “bridge the gap between critical discourse and student discourse.” We must re-ground argument within “motivating conversation,” modeling the truly interesting way we ‘riff’ and ‘play’ and ‘build’ upon what others say in natural conversations. We can call students’ attention to the ways and modes of academic discourse – teaching about why we speak and argue in order to learn, as opposed to winning a contest. “Once students are let in on the secret that most influential intellectual work…springs from having something to contest, they can proceed with a clearer sense of their task.”
We can refuse to compartmentalize the conflicts raised in science, health, humanities, and other classes (“conflicting course-perspectives that never engage, inducing students to compartmentalize clashing views and thereby fail to learn how to deal with contradictions”) and help our kids escape the false dualism that leads to intellectual apathy.
Finally, we can help them imagine “a world in which their arguments would make a difference.” Graff’s concern for his students’ anti-intellectualism is, at root, concern about this despair they have soaked up from the dominant culture. If truth, words, arguments don’t really matter, why should they bother to use their minds at all? Unfortunately, there are those within the Church who have taken up this anti-intellectual prejudice against argument in an effort to be ‘nice,’ thereby leaving the fold prey to wolves. We have a lot to learn.
“For many students, the very word ‘argument’ (like ‘criticism’) conjures up an image not of spirited conversational give and take, but of acrimonious warfare in which competitors revile each other and make enemies yet rarely change each other’s minds. Disputes end up producing winners and losers or a stalemate that frustrates all parties; either way they are useless except for stirring up bad blood. This tendency to equate persuasion with aggression is especially rife among students who grow up in liberal pluralist surroundings, where ‘Live and let live’ is a ruling maxim and ‘whatever’ the popular mantra.”
“Among the results of this romantic battle between poetic creativity and scientific-industrial reason was the now conventional bifurcation of the academic disciplines into sciences and humanities. The split has often been harmful to both arts and science education, to say nothing of modern culture, especially when it dissociates both art and science from critical rationality, leaving art to be seen as a kind of vacation from rigorous thinking while science becomes a moral imbecile with a calculator. The arts and humanities are defined as soft, anti-intellectual and ‘caring’, while the sciences are defined as hard, value-free, and devoid of conscience and feeling.”