stan fish is so curmudeonly that he's growing an exoskeleton

[dhex]

and it's made out of frowns!

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/

he's certainly not wrong, but dammit these kids ain't gonna brainwash themselves.

[loopback]

my senior high school college-prep english teacher would look him dead in the eye and say,

"this is what they should have learned in grammar school. We failed then. We should've made up for it in high school. we failed then. You should fight this battle earlier."

And he'd be 100% right. Grammar, usage, and writing structure should be known and second-nature to college students when they arrive, and all grammar classes (excepting the ones for the nutbars who want to delve into English and Grammar as a major) should be considered remedial.

This guy is dangerously liberal.

[dhex]

yeah, i don't know what's going on with writing education in primary and secondary school these days. liz can give us the ground-floor view for incoming college freshmen. (outlook: dismal)

joe?

the funny thing is that fish's insistence to keep some of the overtly political stuff out of the classroom is what gets him labeled a conservative reactionary. it's a sad, sad world where david horowitz isn't 100% wrong about everything, but there is quite a bit of ideological indoctrination going on at the undergraduate level.

[scratchmonkey]

Yeah, I'll tell for the billionth time my anectode about how I brought up Christian imagery and metaphors in relation to Blake and how the rest of the class stared at me like I'd just shit on the floor and then unanimously agreed that the poem in question was about the Industrial Revolution and the changing life of the worker. Granted, that was in a Linguistics of Poetry class and not an actual Lit course; it was still pretty boggling.

Also, when I did take a Lit course, I was astounded by the number of times that people asked if they had to read the whole book.