In my previous post, I discussed Macrorie’s book Uptaught and how, in the chapter “Discipline,” the student essays didn’t have the criticism (or analysis) that I would like: they were enjoyable to read, but that’s it. I just read a few more chapters, and when the students are writing about school, there is the analysis and subtle criticism that I like. Their essays are founded in personal experience and write against the educational system that is built against them.
Macrorie’s analysis in these two chapters take into account race, class and age, starting with a discussion of dialect:
Engfish professors call students who write “He don’t” or “We was” illiterate. Frequently black students write that dialect of American-English. The professors call it an error.
Few black students major in English or take courses in literature or writing. They’re not prepared for them. They don’t know Enfish.
…
I remember now that when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, the white, college-educated mayor of Memphis spoke hypocrisies in Engfish and the black garbage workers spoke truths eloquently. (51)
Macrorie also points out the pointlessness of Engfish (who reads it outside of universities?):
The grade school student is told by his teacher that he must learn English because the high school teacher will expect mastery of it. The high school student is told by his teacher that he must learn it because the college professor will expect mastery of it. The college undergraduate is told by his professor that he must learn it so he can go to graduate school and write his Ph.D. thesis in it.
Almost no one reads Ph.D. theses. (52)
His students, on school:
There are thriteen hours of credibt marked dwn by my name somewhere in an overloaded file. It’s a fact, but it means nothing. Thirteen hours, thirteen words, thirteen particles of dust, blown and not remembered….I’d rather break windows. Windows are real. (55)
Up in her office after flunking a test, I sit down and clear my throat and she says, “Tom, what are we going to do with you?”
We ain’t going to do nothing with me, Baby. She started to explain all the groovy things I do not know, that she loves, and my mind and eye go out the slit of a window from which she fires arrows on illiterates below. I come inside again and look at her and wonder when the games will end. (67)
Macrorie realizes his students are treated like slaves (a chapter is titled “Slavery”). He knows that Frederick Douglass’s words ring true of students sitting in desks today:
My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died out… (qtd. in 60)
A colleague through “Student Lover!” at him like a slur, and it quickly reminded him of a time earlier in his life when a bus driver had called him a “Nigger Lover!” for riding next to a black woman on a bus. Students are like slaves: they even ask “the master,
“Is it Doctor? or Professor?” (65).
He also understands that the system drives students to plagiarize, “to cheat the system that is robbing him of his humanity” (61), and understands that sometimes, when ideas are not new and are improvements upon originals, like Shakespeare had done, that the student’s work should be applauded for that improvement (63).
I’m enjoying Macrorie’s book quite a bit – and it’s great because it’s really quick and easy to read, which is nice compared to some of the….the, well, more Engfish books I’ve had to read.
Macrorie, Ken. Uptaught. New York: Hayden, 1970.
