Why Johnny Can't Argue
By Alec Solomita

New York Sun Arts & Letters (p. 16) May 27, 2003

In the early 1960s, the duo Jan and Dean recorded a Brian Wilson song about an idyllic spot called "Surf City." The best thing about the song was its refrain: "two girls for every boy," a phrase that brought hope to many a 12- or 13-year-old boy. I recall it when I'm reading some of the more incorrigibly hopeful educators with their talk of paring down the size of the classroom until, one imagines, there are more teachers than students, and young people are finally getting the attention they need to succeed.

It's a Utopia as attractive and unlikely as Surf City. In fact, most of the left's educational theorists are as snugly ensconced in fantasyland as the kids they write about. From Theodore Sizer's suggestion to do away with age-related grades to the demand of some feminist critics that classrooms get rid of the "Western hegemonic" notion of argument to the impossible dream of two teach ers for every student, the "progressive" side of the culture war over education is in denial. On the other side, writers like William Bennett and E.D. Hirsch reside just as happily in their fantasy version of the past - when classes were filled with well-behaved Amuhrcans, when discipline reigned, when students memorized John Greenleaf Whittier like he was going out of style, when Henry Ford was a hero.

For two decades, Gerald Graff has wanted to be the "progressive traditionalist," a voice of reason placed bravely between the fantasy future of one side and the fantasy past of the other. His writings about the history, virtues, and failings of the American academy are learned and insightful. Never shy about his opinions, over the years Mr. Graff has become increasingly more prescriptive than descriptive, injecting good counsel into the ongoing debate about what and how colleges - and high schools - ought to be teaching.

In "Clueless in Academe," the middle course lists more to port than usual, especially in its theory, but when the voluble Mr. Graff talks about specifics to improve high school and college classrooms, his hardheaded advice is invaluable. The thesis is that entering the world of intellectual discourse is, in fact, much easier than it seems. Students, he says, are "clueless" because they don't know some the simple ground rules. Academics - not completely unwittingly - obscure the basic characteristics of their endeavor. Like a secret society, the academy won't let just anybody know the password.

Playing down, but still acknowledging, the much-ridiculed vocabulary and syntax of the obscure-sounding academic, Mr. Graff says it is not only the tangled wordgames of intellectuals that mystify students; it is, more importantly, their project.The famous "canon wars" have nothing to do with it. Whether the author is Shakespeare or Black Elk, what kids need to learn first is how to talk about this stuff - how to summarize, see other points of view, argue, and somehow figure out why all this talking is going on in the first place.

The problem is compounded, Mr. Graff maintains, by a host of factors: The language of argumentation is unavailable to students. Children are resistant to many of the basic premises of academic discourse, such as the notion of "hidden meanings." We live in a get-along kind of society now, where argument per se is considered a weapon of coercion. Educators fail to see the continuity between children's opining about a movie or song and academics grappling over the symbolism of the ducks in "The Catcher in the Rye." And curricula are composed of unrelated elements - courses and teachers who have no relationship with each other.

Some of this is eminently debatable. Mr. Graff sees the thoughtworlds of "streetsmarts" and "schoolsmarts" as two sides of the same coin. He is not persuasive. When he asserts that "there is a continuum between the adolescent's declaration that a book or film 'sucks' and the published reviewer's critique of it," he confuses opinion and argument. The step from "it sucks" to why that is so is a jump into a new discourse, not a step along a continuum.

In a related claim, the hopeful Mr. Graff says, "Adolescents who say 'I'm like ... she goes' and professors who say 'Whereas I contend ... she, by contrast, maintains' often fail to recognize that they speak overlapping dialects of a common language." Not really, though it would be nice if it were so. The difference between the two formulations is the difference between narrative and analysis.

And when it comes to the question of responsibility, Mr. Graff is palpably more "progressive" than "traditionalist." When he talks about an 11 th grader's bafflement and anger at the notion of finding a theme, much less a latent meaning, in a text, he never mentions that the 10 previous grades were supposed to have prepared the child for this shocking experience. Instead, he wants the teachers to extend themselves into the student's own limited discourse, to recognize the power of the dialect of Black English, to keep up with pop culture - productive tactics, to be sure, but by themselves, ineffectual.

More happily and more practically, Mr. Graff supplies numerous strategies for bringing students from an impoverished discourse into the world of ideas and arguments, of thoughtful claims and tough counterclaims. His promotion of formulaic templates for argument is inspired. He cites compositionist David Bartholomae's use of "argument machines" to aid a student's thinking: "While most readers of __________ have said _____________, a close and careful reading shows " __________.

This sort of aid may at first feel mechanical, but mechanics are what most students lack, and the formulaic presentation lures them into new ways of structuring their thought as well as their sentences. In time, the students will abandon the given formulas to create their own. Mr. Graff's wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, has developed an extended version of the argument machine. It is called "A Short Guide to Argument" a sort of "how-to" companion volume for "Clueless in Academe." Together these two books can make a difference.

Mr. Solomita's reviews, fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, among them the Boston Phoenix, the Mississippi Review, and Eclectica.

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