|
 As published in
The Concord Review
In Peanuts,
when we see Lucy offering Psychiatric Help for a nickel, we know it is a
joke: ("The Psychiatrist is IN"), but when English teachers in the
schools insist that students write about the most intimate details of
their private lives for school assignments, that is not a joke, it is an
unwarranted intrusion.
There are a couple of major problems with the “personal writing” that
has taken over so many of the writing assignments for the English
classes in our schools.
First, the teachers are asking students to share information about their
personal lives that is none of the teachers’ business. The vast majority
of English teachers are not qualified as psychologists, much less as
psychiatrists, and they should not pretend that they are.
Second, the time spent by students writing assignments for their
teachers in their personal diaries is subtracted from time they need to
spend learning how to do the academic expository writing they will need
to be able to do when they leave school, for college and for work.
I will leave it to others to explain why English teachers have gone down
this road in so many of our schools. I have written a number of articles
about Creative Nonfiction and Contentless Writing, and the like, to try
to encourage some attention to the retreat (or flight) from academic
writing in our schools.
But I urge parents and others concerned about the preparation their
children are receiving in reading and writing to find out why so many
students are being assigned this personal writing which does not belong
in the school, and the information in which is, or should be, of no
concern of their English teachers, who need instead to focus on reading,
grammar, literature and academic writing, instead of setting themselves
up as nickel psychiatrists without either the training or the permission
to practice on our children.
Our students are doing poorly in NAEP examinations of reading and
writing, and having their teachers spend time as untrained therapists is
no help with that at all. |
