ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH
ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
& PRESENTATIONS
on TEACHING ENGLISH 
By
Edmund J. Farrell, Ph.D,
University of Texas at Austin“Coming by different roads out of the
past, all the peoples of the earth are now arriving in the new world community.
No road into the present need be repudiated and no former way of life forgotten.
But all of these different paths... must be treated as precursors.” (Mead,
1970, p. 93)
Like most citizens, I have been a minor-league futurist
since childhood. I look forward to weekends, parties, holidays, trips, and
the promises of each day aborning. Though continuing to harbor such
short-range anticipations, as I grew older, I became increasingly concerned
about the long-range future, not with what might lie dead ahead or weeks away
but with what the state of the union and the profession of English might be
decades hence.
Because of those growing concerns, I completed a doctoral
dissertation in 1969 that was a forecasting study of the responsibilities of
secondary teachers of English over a thirty-year period, 1970-2000.
Published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1970 as a
research monograph titled Deciding the Future, the dissertation had as its
underlying thesis my belief that programs of teacher education prepare teachers
for the status quo, not for education as it might evolve during their careers.
The consequence is that both beginning and experienced teachers are ill-prepared
to anticipate societal changes that may affect education and to help guide those
changes rather than to be victimized by them. If teachers are unprepared to
anticipate how society may evolve over a span of time, one may infer that they
are not well versed in how to teach students to anticipate national and
international issues with which they may need to deal within their lifetimes.
Included in the dissertation were numerous futurists’
predictions of impending growth in population and urbanization; spread of
violence, weaponry, and war; depletion of natural resources; employment and
distribution of income; expansion in the storage and retrieval of knowledge via
computers and cybernation; “advances” in the biological sciences entailing
probable biological and electronic engineering of human growth and behavior,
with subsequent alterations in human values. All of these societal forces
or changes, to a greater or lesser extent, continue to affect the tenor of
American society and, with it, the tenor of its educational system.
A Call for a Revised Curriculum
What is urgently needed at present, I believe, is a
revised curriculum in the upper years of high school, a curriculum that will not
only familiarize students with present and impending societal issues but also
teach them how to address those issues through sophisticated techniques in
problem solving. To accomplish such a revolution, teachers need to
convince legislators and the general public that current high-stakes testing
programs supportive of a rigid curricula fail to help students deal thoughtfully
and creatively with issues such as the following, issues that as adults they
will confront:
l. Growing economic disparity between the rich and
the poor.
At present, 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people live in deep
poverty, the highest level since 1975 and one that has risen steadily over the
past three decades. An estimated one-third of the most economically deprived is
under age 17 (Pugh, 2007, p. A11). As the poor get poorer, the rich get
richer. In March 2007 Forbes magazine issued a list of the top 30 richest
people in the world, 13 of whom are Americans who collectively own 306.2 billion
dollars in assets. Although top athletes, rock idols, and movie stars
command—deservedly or undeservedly—salaries in the millions, CEOs of large
corporations often cap those incomes through salaries, stock options, and
buyouts. When The Wall Street Journal surveyed executive compensation in
2006, it found that the average CEO in the United States earned 411.1 times what
the average worker earned. In 1980, the ratio was 42.1 to 1 (Palaima,
2006, p. A11).
How to shift that imbalance to prevent the United States
from degenerating into a Third World nation will tax the intelligence of all
citizens and test in particular the humanity of the well-to-do. The latter
will have to make serious fiscal sacrifices to prevent the nation from becoming
in time a two-tiered society, one in which the prosperous reside in gated
communities or guarded high-rise condos and the poor are permanently trapped in
inner cities, where despair and crime are often yoked.
2. Diminishing faith in democratic institutions.
With large corporations and wealthy donors pouring hundreds of millions of
dollars into major political campaigns, average citizens feel increasingly
disengaged from the political process and from those ostensibly elected to
represent them. Furthermore, because of inability to woo the huge funds
needed to manage major campaigns, capable potential candidates often choose not
to run or are forced to withdraw prematurely. Qualified voters are
sufficiently intelligent to recognize that large donations are usually
accompanied by the expectation of some kind of quid pro quo in the form of
legislation to support contributors’ interests.
Compounding the problem is that the bulk of money donated
to candidates goes to public relations and ad agencies hired to sell “images” to
prospective voters. Speechwriters put words in their clients’ mouths, and
“spin doctors” translate their views, views truncated into “sound bites.”
In short, American voters place less and less trust in the media’s presentation
of candidates and in a political system that increasingly promotes the welfare
of moneyed special interest groups, not that of the general citizenry.
Unless graduates from our schools can find ways to radically reform the present
electoral system, I fear the demise of representative American democracy.
3. Preservation of the environment.
The world now has a population of approximately 6.5 billion, an increase since
1850 A.D. of well over 5 billion humans. Attendant to every birth is some
diminution of the natural resources needed to feed, clothe, transport, and house
the individual during his or her lifetime. Our burgeoning population is
already outgrowing the earth’s supply of potable water. In addition,
over-fishing may soon destroy our available supply of seafood; our coral reefs
are deteriorating; our supply of fossil fuels is declining; and the
concentration of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere continues to
rise steadily, increasing the world’s temperature and threatening not only its
economy but also the existence of its inhabitants.
A report commissioned by the British government and
released in October 2006 found that greenhouse gases are now 54 percent higher
than before the industrial revolution and, if left unchecked, could double that
increase by 2035. The result could be an average rise in temperature of
more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 and of 5 degrees by the end of the century.
Such an increase would lead to
… melting glaciers, triggering floods while reducing the
snow pack that feeds the water supply, consequences that could threaten the
world’s population. Other effects
would include reduced crop yields, leaving hundreds of millions without the
ability to produce or purchase sufficient food; an increase in vector-borne
diseases; up to 200 million people displaced from rising sea levels and intense
droughts; and the possible extinction of 15 percent to 40 percent of species
(Murphy, 2006, p.1).
Al Gore cannot alone conserve the world’s remaining
resources. In good part it will be the onus of those now in our classrooms
to discover clean renewable sources of energy, to better the lives of those in
impoverished nations by making dedicated conservationists of those in
industrialized nations, and to accommodate continued growth in population
without savaging the environment.
4. The preservation of privacy, dignity, and civil
liberties.
Through MySpace and YouTube, the Internet provides tens of thousands
of individuals a forum to parade daily their thoughts and lives to millions of
interested readers and transfixed voyeurs. Individuals blog about their
families, their illnesses, their intimate relationships, their loneliness; and
they video for public consumption aspects of their existences that would have
traumatized the Victorians.
As we move through our days, we are photographed by
overhead cameras at banks, stores, and intersections; we hesitantly disclose our
Social Security number on insurance, employment, and medical forms; we sign
authorizations to release our medical histories to various agencies; we overhear
revealing cell-phone conversations in waiting rooms and planes, on sidewalks and
treadmills; and we submit to the federal government each April precise details
of our annual income and expenditures.
Educational agencies record, accumulate, and forward our
test scores to other agencies. Credit-card companies track our global
buying habits, while local stores and on-line companies keep accounts of our
shopping preferences at their locales. Our names, street and e-mail
addresses, telephone numbers, and occupations are matters of public record; and
diligent interested parties can quickly locate our Social Security numbers.
We justifiably worry about viruses, hackers, and identity theft.
Because we live in a time of potential domestic terrorism, we allow ourselves to
be searched and our luggage inspected at airports; and we let our government
seize and scrutinize our telephone and financial records without authorization
(Andrews, 2007, p. A10). We permit that same government to
incarcerate suspected terrorists, both American citizens and not, for indefinite
periods of time without recourse to writs of habeas corpus.
We
play computer games that let us pulverize mock human beings with the push of a
button; and we nightly view TV programs on which characters are stabbed, shot,
blown up, eviscerated, and autopsied for our entertainment. We have become
inured to violence and risk losing any sense of the worth of an individual human
life.
In brief, today’s students will have to grapple throughout
their lives with the issues of how to maintain maximum individual freedom in an
age of violence and terrorism, and of how to maintain human value, dignity and
privacy in an era cavernously opened by electronic media.
5. Medical
costs, medical ethics, and federal debt.
Despite the lack of national
health care for Americans, millions of whom are medically uninsured, Medicare,
which now accounts for about 12 percent of federal spending, could consume about
25 percent of the budget by 2030. By that time, Social Security will
need an infusion of trillions of new dollars to remain solvent. How that
money will be found is problematic. According to the Government Accounting
Office, the federal government’s total liabilities, including those from
imbalances of trade, soared from about $20 trillion in 2000 to about $50
trillion today, approximately $440,000 for each American household (Editorial,
2006, p. 15; Achenbach, 2007, p. G1).
Unrelated, at least directly, to the problem of a soaring national debt are
issues related to medical ethics and the sanctity of human life. Sperm banks,
artificial insemination, in vitro births, and amniocentesis followed by
abortions of deformed fetuses have in recent decades modified the gene pool.
At present, we are genetically altering our food-stuffs, cloning animals, and
inching ever closer to tolerating the cloning of humans. Reminiscent of
Brave New World, the Abraham Center of Life in San Antonio began offering in
January 2007 ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can
order. Available to prospective clients is detailed information about the
race, education, physical appearance, and personality of both egg and sperm
donors.
About the new embryo bank, Robert George, a Princeton
professor who serves on the President’s Council on Bioethics, commented,
“This is just more evidence that we haven’t been able to restrain [the] move
toward treating human life like a commodity. This buying and selling of
eggs and sperm and now embryos based on IQ points and Ph.D.s and other traits
really moves us in the direction of eugenics.” Other ethicists are less
disturbed, arguing that fertility clinics already offer sperm and eggs in
separate, rather than combined, transactions (Stein, 2007, p. 1).
Although heart, liver, and kidney transplantations have
been occurring for some time, and although aging joints are now commonly
replaced with bionic parts, continuing research on stem cells brings with it the
promise of eradicating serious disabilities and further prolonging human life.
In addition to the possibility of freeing our species from severe physical
disabilities through the use of stem cells is the growing possibility of making
cyborgs of us, mixtures of humans and machines. Already pet owners can
implant into their dog or cat a computer chip that transmits information about
the pet to animal shelters and veterinarians. Computer chips could be
implanted to track sex offenders or to locate persons with Alzheimer’s disease
given to wandering. Through implanted chips paralyzed people or those
afflicted with severe tremors might regain some movement or control of their
limbs. Moreover, chips might also be used to enhance individuals’
ability to remember, to compare and analyze, to think more deeply and logically.
But, warns Kevin Haggerty, associate professor of criminology at the University
of Alberta, the day will come “when all people will be implanted with computer
chips and [the] government will be able to track them all the time, recording
their smallest behavioral traits (Melvin, 2006, p. A5).”
In
summary, as adults, our current students will be called up to deal with profound
fiscal problems related to reducing the national debt while, at the same
time, ensuring the perpetuation of federal entitlement programs like Social
Security and Medicare. To prepare them for the burden of that future
responsibility, they should have available classes that enable them to examine
in depth issues attendant to those problems. Moreover, because of the
magnitude of the ethical and fiscal implications being raised by on-going
research, students need to find in the curriculum elective courses in which they
could examine and weigh carefully the pluses and minuses of medical or
electronic alteration of human health and behavior, courses which would help
them determine the future of our species.
6.
The spread of weaponry and nuclear power.
Billions of dollars are
involved annually in international arms trading, with the United States being
one of the larger arms merchants. Because of the tens of thousands of jobs
involved nationally and the hundreds of thousands of jobs involved
internationally in the making and selling of arms, the economic implications of
shutting down the trade are mammoth.
Beyond the manufacture and sale of fighter planes, armored tanks and trucks, and
such assault rifles as AK-47s is the creation of biological and chemical
weapons. Because of advances in biotechnology, thousands of
laboratories in the world have the means to create new toxic strains of
pathogens that would be immune to current antibiotics or vaccines.
Unfortunately, most countries still legalize the making of such biological
weapons. Although the majority of key nations agreed to abolish chemical
weapons following the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, among nations not
signing the accord were North Korea, Libya, and Syria, each known to possess
such weapons, and Egypt and Serbia, thought to have such weapons. Always a
potential threat in the hands of rogue nations or terrorists are such biological
weapons as anthrax, cholera, or bubonic plague, and such lethal chemicals as
lewisite, sarin, hydrogen cyanide, or phosgene (Wikipedia, 2007).
The
National Resource Defense Council estimated that by the end of 2002 there were
over 20,000 nuclear warheads stored by known nuclear powers, with approximately
10,640 possessed by the United States (www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/nuclear.html
and www.nrdc.org).
Besides this nation, countries known to have nuclear bombs are Russia, India,
England, Pakistan, China, North Korea, and France. South Africa has
reportedly dismantled its warheads, Israel has never acknowledged that it owns
any, and Iran is feared to be developing ones at present. The world
clearly possesses enough nuclear weaponry to destroy itself many times over.
How to mitigate if not end that foreboding threat in the future will require
the deepest, most judicious, and most creative thinking of students now in our
classrooms.
Interdisciplinary Courses with a Global Perspective
Jets transport millions of passengers to destinations only
dreamed of by their grandparents. Conversations are transmitted
instantaneously and globally over the Internet. When stocks tumble in
China, the effects are immediately felt on exchanges in Tokyo, London, Paris,
and New York. Premier films enter the United States from scores of nations,
while the pop-art languages of rock, rap, and jazz echo around the globe.
Regardless of country of origin, reputable novelists are quickly translated,
their works circulating internationally. In short, the world is increasingly
finite. As a result, we no longer experience national problems: all
important problems, particularly those of independent nations, reverberate
across the world.
Consequently, I believe that American education, beginning in the upper years of
high school, must shift its focus away from discrete subjects to include
problem-solving techniques that address in multi-disciplinary fashion problem
areas that resound across national borders. These areas might include ones
I sketched above as well as others I overlooked or are yet to emerge. In
the first semester of their junior year, the great majority of students would be
presented an inter-disciplinary overview of major problems and issues with which
they will need to be at least cognizant as adults. Over the following
three semesters, they would elect one problem area per semester to study in some
depth under the tutelage of a cross-disciplinary team of faculty.
In these courses students would work in groups and would learn to apply group
problem-solving techniques: (1) defining the issue, including its
parameters, in precise language; (2) agreeing upon values that must be honored
in any proposed resolution of the issue; (3) researching the issue in depth; (4)
proposing and discussing tentative hypotheses for resolving the issue; (5)
integrating proposed hypotheses into what seems to be the most sound hypothesis;
(6) testing the hypothesis by putting it into action; (7) revising and retesting
the hypothesis in light of data gathered. To aid students as they
attempt to put these steps into action should be computer and video simulation
games, some of which are already available (Borja, 2006).
I realize that for major issues, high school students will not be able to carry
out steps six and seven. I further realize that not all students will be
engaged during their lifetimes in trying to resolve or mitigate critical issues
facing humankind. But some, if not many, will be. At the least,
almost all students should be exposed to those issues in some depth by the time
they exit high school, and they should be familiar with the techniques by which
the detrimental effects of those issues might be reduced or dissipated. In
addition to teaching writing and research skills, English teachers could
contribute to these courses their knowledge of literature dealing with such
matters as science fiction, poverty, nature, warfare, and the making of ethical
decisions.
What I am proposing is not unheard of. The universities of Texas,
Pennsylvania, Ball State, and Harvard have recently changed their undergraduate
distributive requirements to include a number of interdisciplinary courses.
Those at Harvard address such broad topics as “Ethical Reasoning” and “The
United States in the World.” About the new requirements, interim president
Derek Bok commented, “Students will be more motivated to learn if they see a
connection with the kinds of problems they will encounter later in life (Caplan,
2007).” A number of groups, among them The Time, Learning, and Afterschool
Task Force, financed by the Charles Mott Foundation, and the American
Association of Colleges and Universities have called for courses in the high
school curriculum that would teach students to use project-based learning, to
make interdisciplinary connections, and to think critically (Greifner, 2007 and
Klein, 2007).
Toward An Unknown Future
No one of us can foresee all the problems that may emerge
during our students’ life spans, nor can we predict societal alterations that
may result from emerging technologies. When I completed my
dissertation in 1969, no one then anticipated the scourge that AIDS would become
or the widespread terrorism that would emanate from the Middle East. No
one predicted nanotechnology as well as the emergence and eventual ubiquity of
personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, Black-berries, Palm Pilots,
iPods, CDs, DVDs, and the World Wide Web. Obviously, all we can do as educators
is to acquaint students with pressing issues that we know will affect their
lives and teach them the skills by which to deal not only with those issues but
also with those yet to be foreseen. To do anything less is to do far, far
too little to equip those in our charge for a world steadily undergoing dramatic
change.
References
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Andrews, Edmund L. (2007). "Official alerted F.B.I.
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Palaima, Tom (2006). "Greed's blowing pay gap all
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www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/nuclear.html
This article previously appeared in English in Texas.