Assume for a moment that you are back in seventh grade and that you have been given a textbook reading assignment by your science teacher in preparation for the next day's class. More than likely you will come across passages like the following:
I select this text not because I consider it to be inferior to the average text but because it is so typical.2 The majority of grade-school textbooks in whatever discipline use the reductionist style so apparent in these passages.3 When I read these texts, no matter how hard I try to concentrate, the idea generally escapes me. Why? Because the style is overly simplistic. Attempting to make sure that no single statement is unclear, the textbook utilizes sentences that are simple in structure, that is, they contain only one main clause. Of necessity, sentence after sentence begins with the same subject. Ideas, in effect, are placed next to each other without their relationships being signaled by normal sentence connectives. What is absurd about such writing is that the attempt to make the writing simple actually makes it much harder to comprehend. Grade school texts are, for the most part, unreadable.
There are simple solutions to cure this type of bad writing. When I taught freshman composition courses, such writing was common among the students, probably because they had seen it so often. I called the problem "parallel, repetitive, simple sentence structure." To cure students of writing such halting prose, I would counsel them to write a paragraph rather than a sentence at a time, thinking out the relationship of their ideas before putting anything down on paper. The results were nearly miraculous. Once any reasonably intelligent college freshman is aware of the danger of writing over simplistic, repetitive prose and of the importance of conveying an organized, unified, properly subordinated concept, the problem disappears.
Now, think of yourself as the teacher of that seventh-grade class, frustrated that students are not reading their assignments. Can you blame the students? Probably not. The attitude of students I have talked with is this: I am not going to read my textbook until I find out which specific facts the teacher will include on the objective tests that determine my grade. This brings us to a second issue: the way we test and its ramifications for learning.
Just as our textbooks are reductionist, so are our teaching methods. Allow an anecdote to convey my point. A number of years ago, newly appointed as a professor at a state university, I was teaching a course in the history of the English language, a requirement for English majors. For several weeks, I assigned reading and lectured at length about three qualities of language: it is (1) dynamic (it changes; Old and modern English are mutually unintelligible), (2) arbitrary (there is no necessary relationship between words and their meanings; head is kopf in German and tete in French), and (3) conventional (to convey meaning, speakers must utilize consistent, unspoken rules of language). Then I gave a straightforward test, asking that students define these three qualities, utilizing specific examples to illustrate them. Known for the clarity of my class presentations, I was stunned to find that the students' papers were abysmal and that few, if any, were able to write meaningful statements about the three defined qualities. During a long discussion with the class, I was informed that I should have offered a matching test, at which time, my students averred, they would have earned A's because they understood the concepts. I did not make this concession. Although I offered the class a chance to be tested again, I argued that no matter how well they understood my words, they could not master the subject until they too could actively verbalize the concepts. It goes without saying that although I was teaching in a humanities department, none of those students--college juniors and seniors--had ever before been exposed to an all-essay test. Most, in fact, admitted that they never were called on to give more than one sentence answers to test questions--in whatever discipline.
This pattern dominates the teaching in the majority of the country's primary and secondary schools (and in many universities). In the interests of proving that students are learning and "know" the material, instructors give true-false, matching, and fill-in-the-blank tests covering information that has to be stored only in short.
The truly sad aspect of this approach to learning--in addition to its utter failure--is that it runs counter to everything we have learned about the human mind. As any number of theorists have pointed out, the brain readily learns the most complicated things we ever need to learn. Language, for example, is so complex that it is all but a miracle that we can speak; yet any child who is not brain-damaged develops the facility to speak intelligibly about the things he or she normally experiences.
What I am proposing is that the human mind is a synthetic instrument, capable of understanding complicated ideas with facility provided they are articulated clearly and provided a teacher is willing to stop and explain those issues that do, at times, need to be explained as a series of intelligible step processes. The more we condescend to students and stoop below their levels to make sure that they don't miss anything, the more we bore them and destroy their motivation to learn. It is time we stopped writing textbooks as if every student were a moron who could not take in more than one piece of information per sentence. Why? Because the method does not work. The condescension to students' abilities and the lowering of expectations leads to high scores and confirms "success," but few graduates are competent, as employers readily know.
So what can be done?
For starters, textbook companies need to stop using utterly reductionist, simplistic prose. Texts should be well written and use a complete range of normal syntactic structures. When an idea needs to be subordinated to another idea, I guarantee that students will be able to see the relationship and understand the concept if the proper sentence connectives are used. This is certain: the more interesting the material is, the more eager students will be to read it. The bane of teaching is the unread assignment. Given the human propensity to be lazy and avoid responsibility, students will resist reading assignments in unreadable texts.
A second quality indispensable to readable texts is that they not be totally derivative and thus mere compilations of data. Stephen Jay Gould, in his insightful essay "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone," demonstrates how pervasive "endless, thoughtless copying" is in our biology textbooks by tracing the common use of the fox-terrier analogy to define the size of eohippus (the dawn horse) in describing the evolutionary lineage of horses. Few people, he suggests, really know what a fox terrier looks like and, therefore, probably few authors who borrowed the analogy for their textbooks knew either. They reproduced it mindlessly--as Gould himself almost did once. Gould asserts: "Good teaching requires fresh thought and genuine excitement, and . . . rote copying can only indicate boredom and slipshod practice . "4 From a lifetime of reading, I am certain that any junior or senior high school science text would benefit from the use of at least intermittent sections of excerpts from the primary writings of scientists, be they original research scientists or science"popularizers." The reason is simple, of course: a detailed, original selection reveals something about the process of a human mind at work, struggling with a problem or concept. Provided that teachers are capable of explicating such a text, students will be exposed to the excitement of ideas treated as intellectual challenges.
A final recommendation: as early as possible, examinations should include essay-type questions. The resistance to this idea will be great, for botched and confused student papers themselves become a constant proof that students are not ready to write essays. Of course bad writing is the inevitable consequence of bad models and rote teaching. As long as true understanding and intelligence depend upon an individual's ability to turn an idea around in the brain and verbalize (or write) it clearly, then essay questions are an indispensable way of knowing whether students are, in fact, mastering subject matter or merely memorizing detached, uncontextualized pieces of information.
The human mind is a synthetic instrument. To educate it, challenges must be real and they must be exciting. We will do our best for the generations that succeed us if we stop treating students as intellectual cripples. I dearly pray that when my children have children, they won't bring home for my perusal texts that make me pity them their homework assignments.
2. In defense of the text, it includes detailed references to evolution and Charles Darwin. And like many recent texts, it is amply and beautifully illustrated.
3. My awareness of these problems has grown over the years as I have studied my children's textbooks. I will not bore the reader with endless examples for which there is insufficient room, but the reductionist style is almost universal, no matter what the discipline. If you are a parent and don't look at your children's textbooks, this is a good time to start.
4. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone," in Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 166.