In business, if the customer is happy the business thrives. For a time.
This is particularly true when the product or service provided is purchased only once, or, if there is a chance that the customer might return for a future purchase, the time between exchanges is so great that to the business it functions as a single purchase. Like when we purchase our education.
Tegan Bennett Daylight, writing in ‘The difficulty is the point’: teaching spoon-fed students how to really read for The Guardian, explains:
[T]he university’s relatively new status as a business means that it desperately needs students, and will make it as easy as possible for everyone, anyone to enrol. When I began teaching here the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank for education was officially 60, but many students were entering the university through alternative pathways: Technical And Further Education, bridging courses at the university itself, written application. Universities are businesses. Students are customers. The more customers, the better the business does.
And of course, the best way to retain a customer is to keep her happy. I’d suggest that happiness for students might arise from challenge, from hard work fairly rewarded, or from the acquisition of new skills. But there is of course a quicker route: you keep students happy by not failing them. And then—surprise!—when they graduate they are not literate, or numerate, or knowledgeable enough to perform the work they have been studying for.
Daylight has two stories to tell. The first is the above, that education as business is the wrong model if your goal is to produce a 21st century workforce capable of actually, you know, working. Her second story is the more important to me, that reading—really reading, not scanning, not watching the movie, not listening to a recorded book—is important. Daylight continues.
I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you have little to do with tertiary education you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from campus. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access just enough information about the course to pass. And no one can say a word about the fact that they never came to class.
Showing up isn’t just important, being there is vital.
[I]n English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
Lest we go all elder, lamenting the wilful sloth and ignorance of—insert moniker of youthful generation here—I would share my own undergraduate experience in journalism school during the first Reagan administration. At Ohio University, the Journalism School had two institutional quirks.
The first was that there was no math requirement, none, to obtain a degree. This alone caused many students with no real interest in journalism to flock to the major. (This changed after I graduated when the administration wisely added a requirement to take Statistics I and II and enrollment went off a cliff.)
The second was that all students were required to prove a rudimentary understanding of written English by passing an English Proficiency Exam. The catch was that you didn’t need to pass the test to take classes, you needed to take the test to graduate and you could take the test as many time as you needed to. A lot of seniors changed majors after they failed the test for the umpteenth time. (This also changed after I graduated and students were allowed only two tries before washing out of J School.)
But back to Daylight:
The first assignment in English One is called a Reading Reflection. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading.
What have our students been reading before they come to our class? Some—a very few, and almost always women—have read 19th century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some—a very few, and almost always men—have read 20th century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their and their friends’ Facebook pages, their own news feed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author.
OK, I think that reading is important, but I can hear all those non-English majors asking: who gives a shit about 19th century classics and what do they have to do with my ability to function as an adult and get rich (or at least move out of my parents’ basement)?
That is where Daylight goes.
You should read and follow.
