The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; 2119; English & Colleges

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. A man walked into a bank in Brooklyn yesterday intending to state a hold-up, and he shoved a note at a woman teller. She shoved it back because it was so badly written that she couldn`t understand it. By the time he went to rewrite it the alarms were ringing. So even to hold up a bank a certain amount of English grammar may be necessary today. To many the decline of basic proficiency in English has reached crisis proportions and is most disturbing in college. Here are some examples from student compositions. One freshman wrote:

"College also broadens your views, helps you keep up with things you will face in the future."

Another student wrote:

"In years or Centry`s ago people was dying because their minds were lazy they believed in a lot of superstition because they could not think of any other reason for what was happening to them."

A third year college student discussing apathy asked:

"Could it be an inherent personality trait mutating from some previous episode which created such a deviated atmosphere, or is it by nature o_ the vast numbers of people walking this earth today and their seemingly insurmountable task of constructive interaction or interrelations?"

Tonight we examine what many authorities are calling the crisis in college writing skills: The reasons for it, the remedies, and whether in fact such skills really matter anymore. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, the evidence that something has gone wrong with college level writing goes like this. Nationally, verbal scores in the major, college entrance examination, the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, has fallen 45 points since 1965, from 478 to 434. At Ohio State University last year, 30% of the freshmen were rated "unprepared to perform college level writing tasks." Other colleges and universities all over the country are saying similar if not worse things about their freshmen. Many schools have reinstated stricter writing requirements, and enrollment in remedial writing courses called bonehead English is booming. Students think it`s a problem too. They also have some theories on why it`s happening.

STUDENT #: There`s no doubt that there`s been a decline in skills. I see it all around me. In high school and in college all the signs are there that this country is facing a full-scale, educational disaster. And that isn`t an exaggeration. I see around me students who have gone through the educational process and absolutely are not capable to function in society. They`re functionally illiterate.

STUDENT #2: I think it`s due to a decline in reading skills. There`s a paucity of reading, teaching correctly -- of the ability to read correctly, I should say, among students in early elementary school. Therefore, by the time they reach college level they can`t read, so they can not write."

STUDENT #3: I don`t know. That may be so. It`s just -- but it may have to do with more people going to college too, that, you know, colleges, you know, may be less selective in who they choose and in more people going.

STUDENT #4: It`s a difficult problem because I think writing requires a terrific amount of discipline, and today discipline is not emphasized, you know. In our culture it`s something that`s . . . Because of increased freedoms the discipline has suffered.

STUDENT #5: My personal feelings are that it has something to do with television and a general lack of emphasis on written skills. In general people make-telephone calls; they watch TV. They don`t read books. I mean we are turning into a verbal society that`s nonliterate.

LEHRER: One man who has been keeping an eye on college level writing skills from the inside is Dr. James Scanlon, chairman of freshman rhetoric at the University of Illinois, and a veteran college English teacher.

Dr. Scanlon, from your perspective, how serious is this problem?

Dr. JAMES SCANLON: Well, while the problem is certainly not a new problem, there is increasing evidence that over the last several years, 10 to 12 years, and even particularly in the last five years, that the writing skills problem has become much worse.

LEHRER: Why now?

SCANLON: It`s a difficult question to answer. The reasons for it have been suggested all over the place from Watergate to Mayor Daly. But in fact I think . . .

LEHRER: Now wait a minute. How do they blame writing skills on Watergate?

SCANLON: The NCT, for instance, feels that government double-speak had reached its height during Watergate, and that students would have seen that material, and having seen that material might have been influenced by it. I think what I am trying to say is that the answer to the question is not simple. People who have blamed Watergate and mayor Daly I think are a little further from the point. The fact of the matter is that over the last 12 or 15 years apparently writing skills at all levels of education, particularly I think at the high school level and at the college level, have been treated with benign neglect. I think we are reaping the fruits of that benign neglect now; we have students entering college that are ill prepared. We have, I think, students leaving college who are ill prepared. The first group ill prepared for us; the second group I`m afraid ill prepared for their professions and their business and professional life.

LEHRER: What caused the benign neglect?

SCANLON :Well, I`m not exactly certain what cause I would attribute to the benign neglect, but I think there were changes in education in the 1960`s. There was quite rightly I think, a re examination of most things in this country, in particular education. There was a desire to increase the positive classroom atmosphere, to draw more on individuality in the classroom.

LEHRER: That means an open classroom, in other words.

SCANLON: Well, not inevitably an open classroom.

LEHRER: More freedom though.

SCANLON: But more freedom in the classroom.

LEHRER: Or as the student just said, there is not the discipline that there used to be, and that`s what he meant, right?

SCANLON: Yes. In fact, I think the problem became that a polarity was set up where the understanding was that in order to have individuality and individual freedom in the classroom, we had to take all that we used to do and get rid of it. The problem, I think, was that we weren`t able to accommodate the old with the new, and it seems to me at this point that`s the point of view that we are coming around to, and that is that we must be able to accommodate the old and new, and I think we can.

LEHRER: Based on your experience and on what you have found out that has happened at other colleges and universities, is this problem effect all kinds of students, or a particular kind depending on economic background or whatever?

SCALON: No. I think that the problem goes across all social and economic backgrounds. Whether you look at public universities which have open admission programs, public universities which have fairly selective programs, or even private universities, you find the same kinds of problems. Berkeley, Texas have found that the exemption rate for freshman composition is down to a third or below. Harvard and Cornell have doubled the money that they are willing to spend on freshman composition. So, no matter where you look, public or private, I think if you look at the students` writing itself, you will find that economic group, place of origin whether it`s rural or city or suburban has nothing directly to do with what you are going to see.

LEHRER: Thank you, Doctor. Robin?

MacNEIL: But how do we judge good writing from bad? Some feel that questionable standards, not inadequate skills may be at the bottom of the current, so-called crisis. Minority groups suggest that standard, written English is biases against them and their cultural heritage. Others believe that time and technology are changing the language. What was standard ten years ago isn`t necessarily best today.

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STUDENT #1: If you come from a predominantly black background as I do, obviously, and your parents might not be from a particular socioeconomic background, and you`re influenced by your environment, and you`re going to talk the way people around you talk. When you get into a situation, you go to college and things of that nature, you`re forced to talk the way that they want you to talk, and subsequently you`re forced to write the way that they want you to write. I think it`s not overt racism or leadism or anything like that. I just think that`s the way it`s mapped out by society.

STUDENT #2: I know for myself, and I`m a bio major, and `I spend a lot of time learning equations, and I don`t learn English language, so the things that I`m learning I communicate with people that communicate in my language, but I don`t communicate in theirs necessarily. And I think that`s a reflection of how the society is becoming more specialized and diversified. And when you have specialists, When you have-people going into different fields, they are going to be talking different languages. And I don`t know what the basic English language is that people want to teach anymore.

MacNEIL: Dr. Jasper Neel is the Director of English programs for the Modern Language Association in New York. He has also taught composition at the University of Tennessee and at Baylor University.

Dr. Neel, how do you react to those two points the last two students were making, the ethnic background and the sort of technological specialization points?

Dr. JASPER NEEL: Well, I think there is no question that someone from an ethnic background where what we would call standard, upper-middle class, white English is not spoken, is at a disadvantage when he goes to college and has to write upper-middle class, standard, white dialect in that he`s not simply putting cosmetics on a face that already exists, he`s got to develop a new face in more ways than one. The metaphor works in a lot of different ways.

To the second person .I would .say that-probably what he means is that in his chemistry courses, or his biology courses, or his math courses that he can assimilate the information that the teachers give him and communicate it back to the teachers in a form that the teachers can decypher, that he can tell them what they already know. And I would contend that writing is telling someone who doesn`t know what you know what you know. And so, someone who can only speak to those people who already know what he knows has got no real skill at all in writing. But there`s another more important thing that needs to be brought up, and that is the word crisis. I think that sometimes raises a false sense of insecurity throughout the country. If we mean by crisis that college students and high school students don`t write as well as we wish they could write, then certainly we do have a crisis. But if we mean by crisis that something dramatic has happened then we don`t have a good sense of historical perspective. For example, in 1960 55% of all colleges and universities offered remedial writing courses. in 1967 just ten years ago, 93y of all colleges and universities, and I don`t even include two year colleges in this. All colleges and universities required at least one term of composition, and 77%, or well over 3/4`s required a whole year. So the aberration from the norm is not that we are finding ourselves required to have remedial writing and required composition in college today. The aberration from the norm was in the late 60`s when we chose to abolish those requirements.

MacNEIL: Yes. Well, why are people so upset now?

NEEL: One of the reasons that they are upset is because of the reports of the national tests. For example, the SAT does not, as it was administered in the most recent past, does not include a writing sample. And while you can probably predict to some degree how well a student can write by giving him a multiple choice test, determining how well he writes entirely by multiple choice test would be a lot like determining how well he can ice skate by multiple choice test. The only real way to find out whether or not he can ice skate is to give him some skates and send him out on the ice. The only way to find out whether or not he can write is to give him a pencil and ask him to write. So that while the nationwide tests do have some effectiveness, and they are very useful, we shouldn`t be too concerned if people don`t do well on multiple choice tests.

MacNEIL: is it your impression with your own historical perspective that, on average, students in college and high school are writing as well today as they did in the 50`s or the 40`s or whenever?

NEEL: I`11 have to plead ignorance there. I don`t know how students wrote in the 50`s and the 40`s. Certainly not in the 40`s.

I wasn`t even born until 1946. I`ve only taught composition for six years, and I . . .

MacNEIL: You were the one who introduced historical perspective, and I wonder if you had a premise for . . .

NEEL: Ah! I see what you mean. My premise there is this. Composition was required in the 40`s, and that remedial writing was offered in the 40`s. Yale had its awkward squad way back in the 20`s. And if there was required composition, a year of required composition, and if over half the colleges offered remedial writing, I would presume that those people who read the writing of college students assumed that they needed required composition and that many of them needed remedial composition.

MacNEIL: I see. While there is disagreement about the nature and extent of the college writing problem, there`s no disagreement about the need to improve the teaching of writing. Colleges are beefing up their composition courses. Cornell University recently appointed its first Dean of Writing. But remedial medicine at the college level may be too little too late. The Bay Area Writing Project tackles the job of teaching writing skills in the elementary and secondary schools. James Gray is director of the project. He founded the program three years ago at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

Mr. Gray, does your program assume bad teaching or just a lack of background in English at home?

JAMES GRAY: I don`t think it assume either. There are causes for the writing problem, but we try to address what we can, do something about it with the project, and that is the quality of the teaching in the schools. From the amount of writing that teachers are given as they move in through the colleges and become teachers themselves, there is very little training of teacher composition. If the English major is a major primarily in the history of literature, we do not really teach composition skills to elementary teachers as widely as we should. Secondary teachers are trained as literature teachers. College professors are obviously trained in the history of literature. There`s been a neglect in the training of the English teachers. Now, the way we try to attack this is we try to identify those teachers in the elementary schools, middle schools, senior high schools and colleges who are having some success teaching composition for whatever reason, and the teachers who are successful approach it in a variety of ways. We bring these people together as a core for five weeks in the summer time, and we train them as consultants by having them teach each other what they know...about the teaching of composition and have them write a great deal themselves, feeling that the English teacher at any level ought to be if not master of the craft at least practicing it constantly so he is aware of what he is asking students to do, aware of the problems students face when they are asked to write.

MacNEIL: What do the successful teachers of English composition do that the unsuccessful ones don`t? What do they emphasize and what`s the difference?

GRAY: The one thing I`ve been able to point out over three or four years of the project that seems to identify all of the successful teachers is that they seem to know why they`re doing what they are doing. Their courses have pattern, have focus. You can look back and see sequence. They come at it, as I said, in various ways. Some will emphasize grammar; some will emphasize diction; some will emphasize writing to audiences; some will emphasize point of view. But the emphasis is something they are passionate about. The;7 know why they are doing what they`re doing, and that seems to be what`s important. Right now I wouldn`t say that this approach is necessarily better than this approach.

MacNEIL: I see. It`s making it seem important to the students as well.

GRAY: If the teacher has that passion it`ll come across to the students. Obviously there is a great deal of writing going on in all of these approaches.

MacNEIL: Where does the chief lack seem to be in students` writing skills that these teachers cope with?

GRAY: When we look at papers at Berkeley -- we look at a lot of papers of entering freshmen -- it seems to me that most of the errors are really errors of lack of experience.

MacNEIL: Lack of experience in writing, not of life.

GRAY: Lack of experience in writing. We can put failing papers in two piles. One pile, the smaller of the two, indicates seemingly to me with papers that start out, "I am a 17 year old boy, and I will write from the point of view of a 17 year old boy," or "This paper is true for 12 reasons." The poor kids have not had much experience writing about ideas on paper with words. The other paper, the other pile, larger, is papers filled with gross error. But even there, looking closely at the kinds of errors, we get a sense of what it is they haven`t been working with. They haven`t been working with their minds. They might have been asked to write a great deal, but we want them to not only write, but write also about ideas. We`re trying to get a movement.

MacNEIL: They haven`t been forced to address and manipulate abstract ideas? Enough.

GRAY: It seems to be a lack. I`m not going to say that we shouldn`t start necessarily, you know, old fashioned, strict kind of essay, 500 words essay every Friday. We`re trying to get a way to have the students become writers. We`re going to have them tap their own experiences. We`re going to move them from that, writing about experience to writing about ideas. If we can make that kind of separation there, and that`s an awkward one. But writing some assessment about or some analysis of; movement to analytical prose seems to be missing.

MacNEIL : Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: There is much discussion and disagreement over how writing skills should be taught. Hit grammar hard as in the old days when MacNeil and others were in school, or aim for more organization and coherence in thought and so on. Students have their own thoughts about what is important too.

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STUDENT #1: I think grammar is essential to good writing. I mean if you can`t express yourself in an articulate, clear fashion, using the language as it is meant to be used, then I don`t think you are using the English language well.

STUDENT #2: Grammar is important, but it`s not as important as learning to get your ideas down. It`s more important to know how to write, you know, your feelings and then correct the grammar and the spelling.

STUDENT #3: They`re trying to find a happy medium between giving the old, you know, routine, structural doctrine of grammar and having a new, sort of individualized and more liberalized approach. There`s got to be some in between place. You know you can`t have it so dogmatic that the student is going to get turned off, and you can`t have it so free and easy that the student just doesn`t do anything.

LEHRER: Gentlemen, let`s explore some of the ideas that those three students raised. Beginning with you, Dr. Scanlon. The first student said that grammar is essential to good writing; the second one said grammar is not as important as learning to get your ideas down. Where do you come down?

SCANLON: Well, it seems to me that you can make an accommodation between the rubrics, basic rubrics, basics of the language, and writing itself. The research in the field seems to indicate fairly clearly that the teaching of formal grammar may end up with the student knowing far more grammar, but it does not inevitably transfer into the student`s own writing. There is growing . . .

LEHRER: You mean there is evidence that says that there is no correlation between knowing grammar and writing well.

SCANLON: Very little correlation, and in comparison to the amount of effort expended, the effort might well be expended better in another way. And in fact that other way is to work functionally to work through the writing process itself. In fact the real problem with student writing . . .

LEHRER: Excuse me. How can you do that, Doctor, of you don`t have a basic knowledge of the grammar or the basic knowledge of the language to use it?

SCANLON: Most students have some rudimentary knowledge of the language. They have it largely from the community in which they grew up. They get some of it from school.. They get it from the media. They get it from various places. If you start students writing, you can work with their own writing, with something that means something directly to them; ask them to clarify it. Teach them about some of the basic forms of expression. In fact, from my own point of view, the basic problem of student writing is that students do not have a sense of the potential of the language, and the potential of the language really doesn`t come in being able to identify an adverbial clause. The potential of the language comes in being able to write well, and that means sentences. That means coordination, subordination and bedding in sentences. That means paragraphs, being able to work deductively and inductively in paragraphs. It means organizing essays as a whole. Hut-if you start with the writing you can work to the grammar, to the usage elements of the language through tire writing. If you start with the grammar quite frequently what you do is you end up with the grammar. In fact a study that I did last summer would seem to indicate that even those students who score very high on the ACT, English portion of national testing, 27 ACT English scores are in a position where good grasp of grammar and usage does not provide them with good writing skills, with good and varied sentence structure, with a firm sense of paragraphing, with a firm sense of the logic of the essay as a whole.

LEHRER: How do you feel about that, Dr. Neel?

NEEL: Well, I agree with Dr. Scanlon almost wholeheartedly. There is a fairly even split between teachers of composition as to how one can approach it. The first and the oldest and perhaps the most widely adhered to school is that an idea can exist in the abstract, and that there are many different ways that the idea can be embodied; that the writer has a choice of a lot of different ways to express his idea. And the other approach is -- that first approach I suppose could be called rhetorical dualism. The second approach is sort of a psychological monism that an idea is inseparable from the way it`s expressed.

LEHRER: I think you are going to have to explain that for me. What . . .

NEEL: Pardon?

LEHRER: Those two terms. I`m sorry. You lost me there. NEEL: What I mean by dualism is that an idea can be expressed in more than one way.

LEHRER: Okay.

NEEL: Monism, that it can only be expressed one way; that the idea itself is inseparable from the language.

LEHRER: The way it`s expressed. I see.

NEEL: Right. That the writer as he writes is refining and clarifying the idea. And there is another thing. You seemed to be a little bit incredulous when Dr. Scanlon said you could teach writing without having taught grammar first. That shouldn`t be so surprising because the words themselves should tip you off. Composition is really the process of composing, and the fine point of grammar is an analysis. And so you`re asking the student to do two different, mental processes, the first one first. You want him to analyze before he has composed. It`s sort of like dissecting a cadaver before it exists. The two of them are rather different processes.

LEHRER: Well, right. Sale were talking about the teaching of it, but my basic exclamation was to the point that you had to have these tools before you could actually use the language. I mean, to express an idea you got to know what the words are, and what order to put them in; some basic things.

NEEL: Right. Everyone has an idea of how to use the language when he goes to college. In fact everyone who goes to the first grade can already talk, and so we already have a basic grasp of grammar. The point is what do you mean by grammar? Do you mean by grammar that when someone writes he must know never to link two, independent clauses with a comma; always to have a coordinating conjunction? Do you mean that when in the objective case one should always use whom? For example, you wouldn`t say to your wife, "With whom are we eating tonight?" She`d look at you like you were crazy. You`d say, "Who are we going to eat with?"

LEHRER: Right. Let`s go to Robert MacNeil who is probably even more incredulous than I am. Robin?

MacNEIL: Churchill said, "That is the kind of pendantry up with which I will not put." Some argue that with so much electronic communication these days, the telephone, television and everything else, that writing may be becoming an obsolete skill for the average person to perform or function in this society. Do you believe that is happening at all?

GRAY: I wouldn`t be running this project if I thought that. Writing is a way of knowing, and writing is as close as we can get to teaching students how to think. We have a potential in the American school system of almost all students possibly being able to go onto college. Certainly going onto college you need to write to be able to survive. The junior colleges are filled with students who are some of them drop-outs from high school up to 16 years of age. We`ve got people coming to college now that we couldn`t predict when they were in the schools. They don`t have to now. To make it in the job world, business in this country still, I`m sure, is taken care of with the essay. We are processing more paper than ever before. We hire people on the Berkeley campus in affirmative action programs, and they are locked into certain low paying positions or bottom paying positions unless they can write. The day will never come as long as we have minds and as long as we have education that writing will not be paramount. It hasn`t been.

I mean it`s given short shrift. For the first time we have an emphasis on the need for composition in this country. In my 25 years of experience we haven`t trained teachers to do it, and we are just beginning to do it. There`s a crisis. No wonder there is a crisis. We have never really attacked the problem before.

MacNEIL: Do you sense at all, Dr. Scanlon, the need for language among many people, the need for literary skill, the ability to write clearly, is actually declining or degenerating, because they can make do with other modes of communication?

SCANLON: Not at all. In fact, there is increasing evidence that quite the contrary is true. What we find from the business and professional worlds is an increasing demand that the people they hire be able to express themselves clearly and concisely. I do a lot of teaching of engineers, and the engineer who graduates from the University of Illinois is likely, in fact, to move from the field position into a management position in fairly short order. When he moves, or she moves into a management position, somewhere between 30 and 70% of the time, and the higher you rise in the structure the more writing you`ll do, so that even in the highly technical field where sometimes I think we assume the computer has largely replaced the written word, that we find that those people who are going to be professionals in that field are going to have to write. All over the country, in fact, we see law schools, their great concern for writing and their students; medical and dental schools, I`ve seen some evidence recently which indicates that they have begun to increase the amount of writing which they expect from a student when he comes to medical or dental school. It`s almost ten hours. These are new movements and new directions in the field. I don`t have the kind of experience that Dr. Gray has, but I certainly have been able to see in the nine or ten years that I have been involved in composition an increasing awareness of the importance of the written word and that people be able to write reasonably well even in technical fields.

MaCNEIL: Yes, but Dr. Neel, don`t you peel -- if you can answer this briefly -- that the electronic media of communication are making it easier to avoid using writing?

NEEL: There`s no question about that now. Now I would agree that people do need to know how to write, but you`ve got three English teachers here, and that`s sort of like asking Carter if the world needs little pills. Of course we`re going to say people need to know how to write. That`s what we do for a living. And I think that the process of writing is good for people, and it helps one learn how language is used, and it makes one not likely to be taken advantage of by our corrupt politician or the mass media. But nevertheless . . .

MacNEIL: I have to ask you to leave it there. I`m afraid this mass medium is out of time. Thank you very much in Washington. Good night, Jim. Thank you here. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow evening. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.