Some Modest Proposals (College Remedial Education)

By Nicholas Stix

(I last saved this on August 14, 1998, couldn’t sell it at the time, forgot all about it, and just found it.)

During my summer vacation, I did some reading on education, including remediation strategies. You see, I am a college instructor. I teach remedial and college-level composition and literature. Actually, I will teach anything anyone will pay me to teach. In the past this has included American Women’s History, Government, Chinese Film, Phonetics, Philosophy, and a few other things. One of the themes I build my composition classes around is education.

In six years of teaching, I have never heard a boss talk about how to get better work out of my students. My first boss encouraged me to come to her with my questions, and I made the mistake of taking up her offer. Since then, I have generally minded my own business, which is not hard to do. The veteran faculty who talk all the time about the importance of remediation almost never teach it, and never ask the opinion of those who do. There are occasional conferences either of handwringers who show sympathy for their students, or surreal meetings of people celebrating their “successes.” Tempted as I am to observe such gatherings as a lay anthropologist, I generally forget to run out after my morning class to catch what is left of them. I did once observe a “demonstration” against threatened budget cuts. Some colleagues and students were urging other students to riot, er, demonstrate. Eventually, after throwing enough bottles, they were able to provoke the police into arresting some people. The Village Voice later reported on the “police riot.”

One of the books I read was Errors and Expectations, by Mina Shaughnessy. Unfortunately, she died at cancer at 54 (1924-1978).

[Postscript, November 11, 2015: At some point, Shaughnessy ran the remedial writing (“basic writing”) program at CUNY’s City College of New York campus, but I could not find any reliable sources on the period of her tenure.]

By all accounts an inspiring, heroic teacher, and clearly a gifted prose writer, Shaughnessy developed a theory (though she was too modest to call it that), whereby “basic writers” were beginners, and needed to be treated as such. She argued that writing that might seem nonsensical at first glance had a structure and meaning that needed to be teased out, and that eventually such writers could learn to better tease out their meanings before submitting them to a reader.

Shaughnessy’s theory died with her. Based on my own experience, and on statements by people who worked with her and actually tried to apply her ideas, one might suppose that her ideas fell into disfavor because they didn’t work. Whatever else they might be, adults in remedial writing classes are not beginners. And the beginner idea notwithstanding, though there may be value in some of Shaughnessy’s ideas, her methods are very strenuous. Too strenuous, it seems, for most remedial students and their instructors. While attending celebrations and demonstrations and even hand-wringing sessions seem to be enjoyable pastimes for professors and some students, too, teaching and learning is hard work.

There was one more problem with Shaughnessy’s methods, which I believe was related to the work problem. Shaughnessy, political progressive though she was, was convinced that it was in students’ interest to learn how to communicate in a way that caused the least distress in their readers. In other words, she championed what used to be called proper English.

A new kind of progressivism grew during the 1970s that has since come to dominate remedial English programs. “Progressive” writing theory insists that the students are fine, it’s the language that is all wrong. The new progressives discovered that language is political, and that telling someone that his language is subpar is really a way of saying that he and his culture are subpar. In fact, new progressives such as William Labov countered, it is not the remedial students’ language and culture that are subpar, but the professors.’

This way of thinking was not only very clever, but had great social utility. For if the problem lay in the professors, and the students were alright, all remedial programs, and indeed, all so-called college-level writing programs could be shut down, fortwith. For some inexplicable reason, the new progressives never drew this conclusion.

A further conclusion is that since remedial students come from cultures that are equal to, if not superior to middle-class culture, the requirement that managerial jobs in city agencies and at major firms requiring degrees from expensive, private universities such as NYU and Columbia should be waived in favor of young people from more authentic cultures, the less “educated,” the better. To my knowledge, the new progressives never drew this conclusion, either.

Another book I read last summer was Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching. Though published in 1950, Highet’s book could have appeared this year. He talked about how little most students learn, and the phenomenon of entire classes of students hating everything about education. Highet attributed this hatred to universal, compulsory education.

Highet also recalled some thoughts Montaigne had on students who refused to learn that today seem fresh and progressive.

“He said that if a boy refused to learn or proved quite incapable of it, ‘his tutor should strangle him, if there are no witnesses, or else he should be apprenticed to a pastry-cook in some good town.’” (118)

For those who inexplicably find fault in Montaigne’s suggestions, there are the methods favored by New York’s Board of Education. We could simply lie, and say that failing students passed their classes, and we could give passing percentages based on only the most promising students, having culled tens of thousands of shaky ones from the test sample.

Failing that, we could strangle the professors.


[The missing phrase from the above manuscript is “I.Q.” Mina Shaughnessy was advocating on behalf of dunces with average I.Q.s of 80-85.

That I left out “I.Q.” was not due to political prudence or cowardice, but because I had been duped into believing that the entire science of mental testing, psychometrics, was a racist pseudo-science. In 1990, while researching what would become a 30,000-word manuscript for my magazine, A Different Drummer, I did a quick study of I.Q. I read The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, and a debate book pitting H.J. Eysenck against Leon Kamin.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Gould and Kamin were communist frauds. Eysenck was an empiricist, but his insights were offset by my own culturalist tendencies. It wouldn’t be until 1999 that I would learn of the communist conspiracy to smear psychology giant Cyril Burt (1883-1971), and psychometrics in general.]