The latest Stanley Fish blog at the New York Times is outstanding. Fish makes the rather straightforward (and obvious, really) argument that college courses should actually teach the basic skills they’re supposed to teach. His initial example, college writing courses, are generally egregious offenders in this area.

I know this as well as anyone simply because I shared office space with the instructors for the introductory writing and composition courses at Florida State for a full year, getting the opportunity to hear firsthand what they were teaching. I was privy to the numerous teacher-student consultations (three required consultations per student, per semester, if I recall correctly) while also hearing about the curriculum from conversations with the instructors themselves. I was struck by the fact that the actual mechanics of writing—you know, unimportant things like grammar—received no place in the instruction. The teachers were even told by their higher-ups not to concern themselves with too much attention to grammar in the students’ papers, to focus more on things like creativity and content.

Suddenly the lack of quality in the essays I was receiving as a TA (and eventually instructor) in religious studies classes made a great deal of sense. My classes actually focused more on grammar and mechanics than the intro writing course taken by every freshman student (well, the ones who hadn’t passed out of it through AP English or some other pathway)!

To top it off, not only was there no attention to grammar (again, only this could explain how I once received an essay for an Introduction to the Hebrew Bible class that contained eleven sentence fragments in just over three pages ), there was no training in basic rhetorical concepts. All the students received was an opportunity to “think creatively” about hot-button issues in pop culture, politics, or whatever fit into the confines of their assignments.

This is precisely the problem Fish addresses:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

What makes Fish’s piece so effective, however, is not simply its lament over the neglect of teaching basic skills in classes ostensibly on those core skills. Fish also makes a necessary and critical distinction between two arguments often conflated when these discussions of core curricula arise:

One argument (with which I agree) says teach the subject matter and don’t adulterate it with substitutes. The other argument says teach the subject matter so that it points in a particular ideological direction, the direction of traditional values and a stable canon. The first argument is methodological and implies no particular politics; the other is political through and through, and it is the argument the authors are finally committed to because they see themselves as warriors in the culture wars. The battle they are fighting in the report is over the core curriculum, the defense of which is for them a moral as well as an educational imperative as it is for those who oppose it.

Fish rightly observes that there are numerous ways or paths to teach history (or writing, for that matter), so making suggestions (as some groups do) that specific subjects should be taught a certain way in order for it to be creditable (the example in the article is that history should only be taught through a broad survey) is incorrect. It is, however, correct to suggest that the course should focus on what it claims to teach. That is, if it’s a composition course, it should teach writing mechanics and rhetoric, not everything but those things.

But if I have no problem with alternative ways of teaching literature or history, how can I maintain (with ACTA) that there is only one way to teach writing? Easy. It can’t be an alternative way of teaching writing to teach something else (like multiculturalism or social justice). It can, however, be an alternative way of teaching history to forgo a broad chronological narrative and confine yourself to a single period or even to a single world-changing event. It is the difference between not doing the job and getting the job done by another route.

Fish concludes with the observation that core curriculum should function as a central hub of communication such that students, regardless of their majors or emphases, can communicate with one another. He is absolutely right that writing courses—since they teach a skill essential to communication—should be the cornerstone of that core curriculum.