subtext

“Congealed Mental Labor”

I agree that the essay as it is taught in the school system is clotted kind of thought pattern. I think it does not have to be that way. A friend of mine went through the writing program at the University of Iowa with her focus on the essay. To differentiate the essay from what is taught they call it creative non-fiction. She claims that all essays are or perhaps more accurately should be personal narrative. I think that if we taught essayistic writing modeled on “literate” essays like Montainge, V. Woolf, or any volume of The Best American Essay series, then not only would the writing be better, but the students would discover their voices faster and see themselves as creators of knowledge rather than future clone-worker-bees to fill the line at Dell. I suppose I am still stuck in the idea of the liberating nature of education; the idea from the middle ages that the Liberal Arts were the essentials to being a Free human, thus Liber as in Liberty in the name. I have always thought it ironic that we spend a lot of time in the classroom telling the students that they should be themselves, to think for themselves, while at the same time telling them to be like everyone else. A bumper sticker (another exposure of the low level of my thinking) I have posted in my room: Always remember You are unique, just like everyone else. While on the other side of the overhead screen: You non-conformists are all alike. It made me sad to think that I, as a participant in the public school system, am just another turn of the mortar and pestle grinding out the individuality of my students. Even sadder to think that perhaps the same is happening to me as I sit in my grad classes. Sigh. A Ziggy cartoon I cut out in high school and stuck in my binder had the perpetual loser Ziggy sitting at a desk writing, behind him was a sign that read: Think, but not too much.