These skills are sadly lacking in a lot of upper-division seminars
By Daryn Wright
When surveyed, most undergraduate students claim that the most important thing they’ve gained from university is the ability to think critically. To this I ask: where is this critical thinking in the classroom? Because I’m not seeing much of it.
As an English major, most of what my peers and I do is engage in discussions about this or that text. Can we read Othello as having a homosexual theme? What can we derive from the metrical variation in Paradise Lost? Success as a student of English literature depends wholly on ones ability to pull meaning from text where it is not explicit — or to take what is explicit and explain why it is meaningful. It is a tragic moment when you’re sitting in a fourth-year English course — one where you expect your fellow classmates to have some critical thinking abilities about them — and the only discussion threads are “these lines are cool,” or worse, “I thought this was interesting.”
Well great, I’m glad you thought those lines were cool and interesting, because T.S. Eliot did some cool things and was an interesting guy, but can you tell me why you think so? This is where so many discussions stop: the dead-end alleyway of ignored metaphors and misinterpreted verses.
Constructing meaning from text, or from anything for that matter, is not merely a matching game either, as so many students seem to believe. Finding parallels in literature is not a hard thing to do — in fact, often the text nurtures this kind of engagement — but pairing two objects or concepts together is not enough to constitute an argument. This is one thing we could all learn from philosophy students, who, bless their hearts, are taught to tango in the form of logically sound arguments at an early stage in their education.
They are taught that simply pairing A and B together does not equal C, and no matter how much fluffy rhetoric they pack around that argument, it is not going to arrive in Timbuktu in one piece. If there is anything that English students — and all students in general — could benefit from, it’s a lesson in logic.
Is this problem rooted in the way we’ve been taught, or is it a form of laziness? Perhaps it is a badly-made cocktail of both causes, taking the form of rhetorically inflated discussions and papers that aren’t really arguing anything. Maybe this is my own disappointment speaking, but I thought that by the time we got to upper level courses we were supposed to have left behind the practice of merely matching “interesting” things.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes classroom discussions result in the cracking open of texts in the most unexpected and exciting way, and collectively we are able to tease out revealing analogies and new interpretations. What directly follows from this is that tingly feeling you get in the bottom of your toes, that indication that the discussion has been enlightening in some way.
The opposite of this is the feeling of an exceedingly heavy skull as the class continues to hover around that one line that “sounds so cool.”
Maybe I’m being too harsh, and by no means am I a model academic, but if there’s one thing I can hope for in a university education, it’s that critical thinking will make its way back into our discussions, and that distracted, meaningless claims will make themselves scarce.
