The premise behind the English composition class is that it will equip the student entering it to read and write at the level they need to in order to successfully cope with the course work they must perform to complete their college studies.
As someone who taught composition courses for two decades, and eventually decided to write a book for composition students, it was clear to me that--if I think the classes did at least some students some good, giving them some exposure to new ways of approaching and working with text, a measure of practice and polish--they fell far, far short of that goal of reliably and consistently producing a high minimum standard of competence that is their mission. It also seems to me that the classes could hardly have been expected to do otherwise, for several reasons.
Perhaps the most fundamental is that the gap between the actual skill level of the students who came in and where the composition class was supposed to bring them up to tended to be wider than it ought to have been--a matter of bringing up students who graduated high school but are actually working at a middle school or even elementary school level to a college one. Such a feat would take more than a couple of 15-week courses in even the best of circumstances, and all involved are
not working in the best of circumstances. As a practical matter, English departments, in line with the reality that the seniors handing the boring and dirty jobs to juniors is all in the spirit of
"Can't someone else do it?" rather than edifying them, tend to leave the work of teaching a composition class--which is, frankly, more grinding and tedious for most than teaching literature--to the instructors who are least experienced and trained (graduate "teaching assistants"), or most insecure, underpaid and overworked (adjunct professors), as the people with secure jobs and seniority opt for any and every other task.
Meanwhile, even where one has the (relatively) most able and willing instructors, there is the weakness of the curriculum all too evident in the way the textbooks are written--a lack of clear priorities that produces a great deal of clutter, a stress on niceties of form over essentials of content and structure, and a tendency to haziness and roundaboutness rather than precision and straightforwardness in explanation. Some instructors may well try to correct for this. (I know I did;
there is a reason that the subtitle of my book, which derived from my experiences in the classroom, was What Your Textbook Isn't Teaching You.) But many do not, for lack of opportunity or incentive to think seriously about what they are doing. (Graduate students, of course, are just beginning to learn the job, such that it is all they can do to emulate their instructors, while having a lot else on their minds, like finishing their degrees and trying to land a full-time job in a disastrous market. Meanwhile adjuncts are likely too harried to think too much about "professional development," and even where they do manage just that "professionally develop" by giving up being adjuncts altogether before too long,
because even in this era of lousy prospects for working people many will get fed up enough with their lot to seek out, and often manage to find, something that at least promises to be less insecure, stressful and penurious.)
However, many of those who do have a chance to think about what they are undoing unfortunately embrace those weaknesses of the curriculum I am talking about and take them to extremes in what can seem like pseudo-Zen master routines (they're the kind of "Zen Master" whose whole knowledge of Zen comes from a long-ago viewing of the "wax on, wax off" scene from
The Karate Kid) that, of course, flatter the vanity of a certain kind of person but, I suspect, only frustrate and annoy students, while imparting to them very little of what they need in the way of practical skills. (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating need only read Stanley Fish's
New York Times essay "Devoid of Content," in which he was actually advocating such an approach.)
Making this all the harder is the fact that students simply have no enthusiasm for
a mandatory subject which manages to be dry and grinding for them too all as they have little respect for it, such that little can be expected from their end, even when they are not stuck with a pretentious wannabe Zen master.
The result is that, again, much in the curriculum simply does not work as well as it would were more students at least willing to live up to their end of the bargain--to, for example, seriously try and respond to verbal and written feedback on their papers by making a serious effort at the revision required of them, or to take "peer review" sessions seriously. (Moreover, should anyone be under the illusion that this is a matter of "These kids today!"
William Whyte all the way back in 1956's The Organization Man quipped that "anyone who has ever tried to teach composition knows . . . the student who has yet to master it would give anything to be done with the chore." One should note, too, that the
humanities-bashing STEM fetishists do not exactly make them more open-minded about it.)
Still, if the classes were very far from perfect as tools for teaching those skills, the skills at issue here--reading and writing at a collegiate level, with this obviously including the capacity for close and critical reading of texts, the generation of theses, the presentation of complex material in a manner that the reader can follow with ease--are not just worthwhile, but essential. And for all their flaws in the manner in which they tried to impart those skills there is the reality that something like them seems indispensable to achieving their goal--specifically having students write papers, and get feedback on them, and revise them until they acquire the level of mastery desired. However, in an age in which even scholars intent on academic publication are handing the task of writing their papers over to chatbots the prospect of getting students to do this, weak before, seems to me weaker still now, so much so as to eliminate what meaningfulness still attached to the activity, at least in anything like the form we knew. Indeed, I think that we are going to see the traditional composition class decline in one form or another--with talk of a "return to handwritten essays" and a greater reliance on in-class work striking me as futile attempts to swim against the tide, the more in as alongside the technological changes we are looking at broader changes, not least
the decline of the English major that did so much to supply English departments with the cheap labor that made composition classes a paying proposition for budget- and staff-minded administrators fighting for their piece of the action in an age in which
higher education has become a near-trillion dollar operation.
