Upton Sinclair's The Goslings and the Burden of Teaching English Composition

In Upton Sinclair's rather exhaustively researched study of American education, The Goslings, Sinclair refers to the prevailing ideal of the contemporary school system as the "education mill," churning out a standardized product in its students on a "machine" and "quantity production basis."

In discussing this he refers to a survey of conditions in the profession of the National Council of Teachers of English which took into account their "theme" reading--which is to say, how much reading of student papers they had to do. This survey "found that the average teacher had four hours of 'theme' reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours," as a result of being "required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher." Many responded by simply not doing the work. Some went so far as to destroy "the great bulk of them unread and [give] credit without reading."

I do not have knowledge of any English teacher I have ever met, at the high school or college or any other level, doing anything like destroying papers, or even being able to do this, given just how much monitoring they are often subject to. (I remember getting every paper back, remember giving every paper back when I was an instructor.) But I am not shocked by the fact that someone facing five hours a day of student papers--five hours a day of the grading that English teachers do loathe--they have dodged the duty in such an extreme manner, in part because there is so much dodging of the task. Thus do colleges see full-time instructors dump the job of teaching "theme"-intensive composition on student Teaching Assistants, adjuncts, etc. and other lower-ranking, more disposable, personnel who cannot refuse the charge. The Assistants, who are apt to teach just one class a semester, have only so many papers to deal with (and anyway look forward to not teaching comp when they graduate), while the adjuncts' situations often vary, frequently working rather less than full-time, so they are likely to have a lot less than 125 students actually turning in papers regularly. Meanwhile, as Sinclair writes, teachers who did not destroy papers often "skimmed and skipped through every paper"--and it would be harder to prove this never happened, the more in as standards are less clear. (Just what counts as a really satisfactory or unsatisfactory examination of the paper? Where does one draw the line between a fast read and a skim? Etcetera. Besides, going into the job with even the best will in the world someone getting through a mountain of papers is likely to be a bit less thorough as they weary of the task.)

However, what seems to me worth pointing out is that Sinclair concludes from this that the system has put them in a very difficult spot (remember, they had to spend all day teaching, and after that prepare for the next day's courses, the associated paperwork, etc.)--and that here as elsewhere the "overworked, underpaid, underequipped" can only put forth the effort demanded of them by their bosses for so long before something gives.

Very, very, few would be so lucid and so frank as Sinclair about the matter today, either bashing the teachers for their lapses in "convenient social virtue" (in a way they would never bash, for example, people in business or those professions they really did respect as professions)--or vociferously denying that such lapses existed at all, because those who presume to speak for "society" are rather less inclined to cut teachers any slack than they are bankers.