Week 2: Reading Responses

·         Berlin’s Chapter 2: The Nineteenth-Century Background

o   Berlin writes, “Since the language of learning at the new university was to be English, it seemed appropriate that entering students be tested in this language.  Furthermore, the test in English ensured that the new open university would not become too open, allowing the new immigrants, for example, to earn degrees in science or mathematics without demonstrating by their use of language that they belonged in the middle class” (23).

§  When I read this statement, I could not help but think about the current conversation taking place in today’s Educational system: What says American schools have to teach their curriculum in English?  I can see how the new universities saw how making immigrants and non-English speaking students take tests in English—that would eventually mean that their educational experience would be completely in English—would be beneficial to the student. However, while the new universities were hoping to further the student’s rhetoric (in English), little to nothing was being done to protect the student’s personal, first-language rhetoric… Something I feel the current educational system is struggling with even today.

·         Berlin’s Chapter 3: The Growth of the Discipline: 1900-1920

o   Berlin writes, “The fact that current-traditional rhetoric was a product of the new, elective university is crucial.  This university, a uniquely American phenomenon at the time, was at once committed to the scientific method and to the creation of a professional meritocracy consisting of an emerging middle class.  The old American college had been aristocratic in its clientele and classical in its curriculum” (36).

§  I guess being educated when I was, I take for granted the educational system hasn’t always been the machine it is today.  Knowing better, I appreciate how Berlin talks in this chapter about the shift in education from a “aristocratic” endeavor to a “professional meritocracy”.  Just as the who is education is changing, so too, is the how they are educated.  As Berlin mentions in this chapter, this is one of the first times that the middle class is being educated, and therefore, becoming literate. 

·         Berlin’s Chapter 4: The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-1940

o   Berlin writes, “The proponents of liberal culture, on the other hand, looked upon the university as the preparatory school for an elite, aristocratic group of individualists.  Rather than being trained in the ways of a profession, students were to be immersed in the traditional learning of literature, language, and art. For the proponents of liberal culture, the purpose of the English teacher was to cultivate the exceptional students, the geniuses, and at the most, to tolerate all others” (72).

§  This selection and the selection from Chapter 3 tie-in well together for me.  As a future teacher of English, I cannot imagine looking at education in the way Berlin writes about. What does it mean to “tolerate all others”?  Were they not literate at all? Were they not as literate or advanced as the “exceptional students, the geniuses”? While labels are still a very real and relevant occurrence in today’s educational system,  I can see where a great deal of teachers today would even look at education the same way as they did 80 years ago.

·         Arnove and Graff’s "National Literacy Campaigns"

o   Arnove and Graff write, “Literacy is almost never itself an isolated or absolute goal.  It is rather one part of a larger process and a vehicle for that process.  Literacy is invested with a special significance, but seldom in and of itself.  Learning to read, possibly to write, involves the acquisition or conferral of a new status.  Literacy often carries tremendous symbolic weight, quite apart from any power and new capabilities it may bring.  The attainment of literacy per se operates as a badge, a sign of initiation into a select group and/or a larger community” (596).

§  I feel like we’ve read so much already in the three weeks we’ve been in the class that, for me at least, state that literacy is the final goal—that we should all strive for the ability to read and write mostly to say we can.  It wasn’t until this article that it made me realize that while the previous articles/chapters may have not explicitly said so, literacy is not a means to an end, but rather the a way of getting there.  Arnove and Graff make it clear that the ability to read and write mean nothing if there is nothing to read and write about.