This Week in Freshman Composition: My students are preparing to write argumentative essays by reading a series of articles on the subject of "The Millennial Generation." I've assigned articles from a variety of perspectives. Some of them claim that this is the most narcissistic, "entitled" generation ever to walk the face of this doomed planet, while others state that this is not necessarily so. 

The "no-need-to-panic" folks argue from a variety of angles: Haven't teenagers always been more self-absorbed than adults? Isn't that just the nature of being young and inexperienced?  Is some of the "evidence" of self-absorption really a reflection of attitudes found among the most economically and racially privileged Millennials, rather than in a broader cross-section of society? Haven't older folks asserted the "inferiority" of the up-and-coming younger generation for as long as humans have walked on planet earth? Can our generation really claim to be "better" people on the basis that we didn't take "selfies" or use social media--considering the only reason we didn't is that those things hadn't been invented yet?  

"Evidence" of Millennial self-absorption likewise draws on multiple factors, many of which relate to technology--social media, cell phones, reality TV. But some discussion focuses on other issues, such as "helicopter parenting" or changes in the way we conduct youth sports. One of the most prevalent mantras I notice whenever I read articles on this topic?  "Nowadays, everyone gets a trophy," sigh the adults of my generation, wringing their hands and shaking their heads. And then someone adds, "Yeah, and just for showing up!"    

Quelle desastre! Here endeth civilization as we know it!  Thank God that, as a result of clever detective work on the part of us intrepid Boomers/Gen X-ers, we have finally located the source of all evil in our degenerate society: Some of the kids whose bedroom shelves contain an array of cheap plastic trophies are not actual winners!  Some of those trophies don't point to any accomplishments! Those dorky little statues acknowledge nothing more than showing up!  

Let's take another look at this, shall we?

My son, now a teenager, has a bunch of trophies in his room for playing soccer and basketball in elementary and middle school. And no, he wasn't what you'd call a "winner." Many of the teams he played on had winning seasons, but he wasn't one of the superstars. He had his moments: he once drained a bucket at the buzzer to lead his team to basketball victory, he scored a few soccer goals, and as goalie, he made a lot of saves (and broke a couple of wrists). But unlike a few of his teammates, he didn't stand out in either sport--though he wasn't "bottom of the pack" either.

What were those trophies for, then? What could he possibly have been rewarded for if he wasn't a standout superstar? I mean besides showing up (although "showing up" isn't necessarily the worst thing to commend someone for doing--sometimes that turns out to be the hardest part). If our son wasn't the one-and-only superstar, what did he learn that could possibly be worth acknowledging?

Well, for starters, there were these minor little character traits like sportsmanship, teamwork, cooperation, persistence, regular practice, commitment--all kinds of stupid little qualities that we certainly wouldn't want to foster in our children by "rewarding" them.  

He learned to accept defeat graciously, high-fiving the opposing team after the game and congratulating them on the win. Because we all have to learn how to do that, and sometimes it's not easy, even now.  

He also learned to accept winning graciously, high-fiving the opposing team and telling them, "Great game--you'll get it next time, dudes." Because, despite the antics of some of our high-paid professional athletes--"winners" who apparently "deserve" their accolades, even though some of them are also known for beating people up--kindness, especially when you're in a power-up position, might actually be more beneficial to society than a winning touchdown. (Blasphemy!)  

He learned how to get back in the game after a disappointment like getting scored on--rather than wallowing in momentary disappointment.  (His parents learned that too.  On our team we had a joke: The worst position to play? Goalie. Second worst? Goalie's mother.)  

He learned to encourage rather than demean teammates when they made mistakes. Because,  apocalyptic discourse about the dangers of "niceness" aside," people actually do learn more effectively from encouragement than they do from being disheartened.  (News flash.)

He learned that collaborative endeavors require commitment (i.e., showing up), and that he owes it to his teammates to be there for games and practice.  He also learned that the only way to improve any skill is to practice regularly,

He learned to see things through to the end, even when things don't go as planned. In one memorable season, a Series of Unfortunate Events culminated in our son wearing casts on both arms, at the same time. Pulled by his doctor from playing for the rest of the season, he still ran on the field during practice, resembling the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  He still came to games, cheering on his teammates in victory and encouraging them in defeat, joining in the communal celebrations afterward, and high-fiving the opposing teams with his casted arms. 

Surely we shouldn't have rewarded any of that.

Oh, yeah, and he was getting physical exercise.  And since his inclusive soccer and basketball leagues promoted encouragement over verbal abuse (and didn't allow the kind of bullying to which some of my own P.E. teachers turned a blind eye back in the day), perhaps when he hits adulthood he won't harbor the kind of antipathy toward physical activity that often plagues those of us who took heaps of verbal and even physical abuse on the field, back when it was believed that only "winners" deserve accolades.  For all the hand-wringing about video games, childhood obesity and lack of physical activity, you'd think more people would support giving incentives for all kids, not just athletic superstars, to participate in sports.  But I digress.

Guess what? My son--and the many teammates I met during the sports years--did not emerge from childhood inclusive sports leagues with delusions of athletic, or any other, grandeur. Amazingly, despite their supposedly video-game-addled brains, kids today can tell the difference between being acknowledged for qualities like teamwork, sportsmanship and persistence, and being acknowledged as a star athlete. They know the difference, and they are cool with it. 

Most kids are not superstar athletes, and most of them don't aspire to be (even if their parents are clinging to hare-brained fantasies). The kids who do want that, and who might have it in them to be that, are usually tapped by scouts from the more competitive leagues. Those kinds of higher-performance opportunities are also out there, for the kids who want that--as they should be. We need both inclusive and competitive leagues, to meet the needs of many different kinds of children. And guess what? We've got them. If your kid wants, and can handle, a sports experience where trophies only go to the champs, he or she can still find that. 

To the superstar athletes among us? Power to you! You can do something most of us can't, and I salute you. (But please do the rest of us a favor: If you do make it big, please try to role-model some of the other qualities that we're trying to instill in our own kids, not just "winning" at all costs. Because some costs are too high.)

As for the rest of us? Everyone needs physical activity, and everyone needs a place to belong. Everyone needs an opportunity to achieve and accomplish in some area--but let's face it, no one can excel in everything, and everyone also needs opportunities just to participate, whether we are super-achievers or not. Participation helps us to develop qualities beyond just "achieving"--qualities that are too often in short supply. When we participate in a team endeavor, when we grow and develop stronger character as a result, what's wrong with acknowledging it?

Nowadays my son is more interested in music than in sports. The trophies are still in his room, and for him, they are not inappropriate ego-boosters but nostalgic reminders of his childhood. Sometimes when we look at the trophies and team pictures, we get to talking: about time spent with friends, Friday nights on the basketball court and Saturday mornings on the soccer field, snack time afterwards with his buddies and their parents and bratty little siblings, horseplay after the game to expend pent-up energy, camaraderie on team picture day, and yeah, those occasional great days where he did something memorable, even if he won't go on to play in the World Cup.   

Though I haven't noticed my own son doing this, I suppose I should allow for the possibility that somewhere out there, there are kids who wake up each morning and spend several minutes contemplating the array of trophies on their shelves while thinking, "Look! I'm all that!"--without realizing they are not. Perhaps these miniature egotists then strut off to school thinking they should rule the world, all because they got trophies that they mistakenly thought they deserved when really, the trophies were "just for showing up." Perhaps these kids emerge as entitled brats with the capacity to destroy society.  (If so, imagine the magical superpowers they must have--still in their teens, lacking any kind of real-world power, and somehow they have managed to destroy our social order.)

Or today's many problems could, I suppose, actually be the fault of the people who have tons of power and tons of money, who are spending billions to hold governments captive to their interests and weasel their way out of environmental and workplace regulations, who are going through elaborate machinations to avoid contributing to the tax coffers and while slashing the safety net, generating a bunch of "jobs" that pay poorly and have no benefits and are pretty much guaranteed to keep the poor in poverty and ...

Nah, that couldn't be it.  Let's blame teenagers. Especially the ones who've gotten a trophy "just for showing up."

My writing students do a lot of in-class focused freewriting, and I always write along with them, I've got a number of rationales for doing so. It fits well with my teaching philosophy: I'm modeling the writing process, saying "do as I do" rather than "do as I say." It makes me a better teacher: when I put myself through the same process as my students, I understand the blocks and pitfalls they might encounter because I experience them too. (Funnily enough, finishing dissertations, publishing articles, and writing books don't eradicate those challenges.) Last but not least is the purely practical rationale: Some weeks, my schedule is so tight that in-class writing time is the only writing time I get.

Such was the case last week, when I felt like I was in one of those circus juggling acts where some dude keeps throwing the juggler an extra item to add into the mix--and then lights one of them on fire. My students are in the process of writing a piece that uses reflection on place as a starting point, so during those ten sane minutes of freewriting, I joined them in responding to the prompt, "X is a place that only I could appreciate, because..." 

As I wrote, I found myself--mentally, anyway--thousands of miles away, on the south coast of England, in a walk-up flat on the second level of a boxy brick building on one of southeast England's largest postwar council housing "estates."  This flat was once occupied by my father's bibliophile brother, Uncle R, who died nine years ago, and I still can't believe it's been that long. (When we think about those we love who have died, it's always hard to believe "it's been that long," no matter how long "that long" is. My hypothesis is that in our minds--the place where most of us actually live--they have never left us, and therefore it really hasn't been "that long.")  

Though small and plain, Uncle R's flat was also occupied by no less than several thousand flatmates: fictional characters, who lived in his countless books. 

Now these were not orderly stacks of books, catalogued and placed alphabetically upon attractive designer shelves. These books, almost all of them used before Uncle R even owned them, overflowed the shelves, crawling over couches and chairs, sneaking into nooks and crannies, trembling in precarious towers that climbed the walls. I never went there without taking meds for my dust allergies, and whenever I arrived, my first order of business–assuming I wanted to sit down–was excavation. Dig deep enough and  I could sometimes find furniture buried beneath the books. 

Uncle R would always apologize, blaming our predicament on the books themselves.  "Those ridiculous books," he'd complain, "they're getting completely out of hand,” as if they were reproducing themselves in furtive after-dark encounters, unassisted by him. As we drank the requisite "nice cup of tea," Uncle R would shake his head and say, "Ah, well. Something must be done about these silly books.”  Occasionally something was done about the silly books–-usually, moving them around in order to make room for . . . more books. He never stopped shopping for them. If you were out with Uncle R, there was always a moment where he would disappear. One minute you'd be walking down the street with him, the next minute he had vanished. I learned not to worry that I was in some kind of sci-fi novel and instead, to scan my surroundings for the used bookshop that must be nearby. There always was one, and he was always there. 

If my uncle were alive today, he might have ended up on reality TV. But I didn't think of him as a hoarder, because he clung to nothing else: only his books. And he didn't collect just to have things; he read them, and he remembered them. To him, books were not objects but doors to other worlds, occupied by characters who were in some respects real.

For two decades my husband and I traveled frequently to England, even living there briefly. Our experiences were always far different than the usual American tourist itinerary, not only because we slept in book-infested council flats but because we enjoyed customized tours that can’t be sold or purchased.  A pub would look like any other until Uncle R pointed out, “Dickens mentions that pub in Great Expectations, doesn’t he.” Endless green hills dotted with sheep would blur together until Uncle R announced, "Ah, this hill--it plays a key role in an Austen plot."

One of R's younger brothers, Uncle M, taught O- and A-level literature and died tragically young (fittingly, while in the library). Back when both uncles and my father were still with us, they would discuss literary characters and their authors so casually that in my pre-university days, I'd eavesdrop on their analysis of a character's motives and mistakenly think they were gossiping about a distant relative. The same phenomenon worked in reverse, with literary quotes often brought in while discussing family members. "You know what old T.S. Eliot would say about [so-and-so]," one of them would say, and back before I learned otherwise, I thought T.S. must be an old friend of the family.

Some might say this isn't the greatest way introduction to literature--too colloquial, insufficiently analytical, even slightly juvenile. (And that's before we analyze the underlying psychology of the messy apartment).  Some might criticize the canonical bent of the literature I was introduced to. (Here I'd add that in later years, Uncle R happily added contemporary authors from a variety of cultures to his never-ending collection--female authors too--but since England was where he lived, the English literary locations were the ones I got to see.) 

Quibbling aside, nowadays I consider my less-than-conventional introduction to the British literary canon to be a remarkable gift. Think of what world we might live in if more people had been fortunate enough to receive a similar gift.

Of course personal experience is not a place for literary study to stop. If you want to pursue its study seriously, you need to stretch beyond having an uncle who knows where to find a genuine Dickensian pub and do more than revel in the eccentric chaos of a bibliophile's flat. But feeling a personal connection to some of the most resonant stories that have been committed to writing; deepening your understanding life through the prism of fictional characters who have been rendered real through the skillful use of language; learning a love for literature through osmosis from an enthusiastic mentor--all this is a great place to start, whether you end up pursuing the study of English professionally as Uncle M and I did, or keeping it personal as Uncle R did. 

Too many at the helm of education today have imbibed the same ethos as the censorious characters in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories who ask, "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" Unable to devise a quantitative answer to a question calling for a qualitative response, such people assume there must be no use; that literary study is superfluous; and that if it doesn't lead to directly measurable "outcomes" or a straight line to lucrative employment, literary study is a disposable budgetary line item.  What if such people had had their own Uncle R, or a book-infested flat somewhere in their psychic pasts? Would they already understand the "use of stories that aren't even true"? Would such an understanding foster a different set of priorities and decisions, even for those who pursue other lines of work? (In his working days, by the way, Uncle R was an accountant.)

I miss my uncles, as well as my father--also a book lover, though he worked as an engineer and, accordingly, kept his own books in an orderly fashion.  (My husband and I used to refer to the two of them as "Felix and Oscar.")  I wish I could clone those who influenced my own affinity for books and stories, sending them out as supernatural emissaries to the technocrats and bureaucrats of the world to whisper like miniature angels in their ears, counter-voices to the miniature devils who whisper in the opposite ear saying that storytelling is frivolous. 

Perhaps it's too easy for those of us who "profess English" to dismiss the love of books that started it all. I like to believe that if more of us had been fortunate enough to grow up loving books and stories, we might not be in as many of the collective messes that we find ourselves in today.

Yesterday I ran into a friend and asked her, as one does, "How are things going?" She replied, "Oh, about how you'd expect things to be going right now, you know?"  

I did know.  We shared a grim chuckle and moved away from small talk. We had plenty to discuss; at the moment so many things seem confusing. Semester start-up, always chaotic, has been especially so this year, for multiple reasons--among them, a massive office move that now renders my nom de plume, "Underground Professor," metaphorical rather than literal. (I'm still going to keep the name, though.) And it's not just the move; it's been a year of intense upheaval, not just for me but, it seems, for nearly everyone I know. Everyone seems tired. 

Some of this, of course, stems from the life phase that I and my cohort find ourselves in. When you hit your fifties, you're well advised to begin stockpiling sympathy cards. When I prepare my taxes, I notice that most of my charitable donations are now in memory of somebody, and my subgenre of specialty is rapidly becoming the eulogy. At this age, much of that can't be helped. But some of our current instability is less inevitable than taxes and death.  Much of it doesn't need to be this way.

Take the management buzz term of the moment: "disruptive innovation." (Read Jill Lepore's provocative New Yorker critique HERE.) If you've ever been ticked off about a technology "upgrade" that rendered obsolete something you found perfectly serviceable; if you're tired of constantly being retrained because "they" seem to change how things are done as soon as you learn how to do things; if your budget is constantly screwed up because items you'd already checked off your wish list have broken down when you thought they should last longer--you know all about disruptive innovation. And, as Lepore points out, it's spread from the tech world to everything else--like education--and those who have the power to make changes ought to change this. Disruption may have its place, but it doesn't belong everywhere, all the time. In the field of education particularly, more disruption is the last thing we need.

My teaching philosophy holds that learners, of all ages, benefit from an environment that is stable. The most effective schools, at all levels, offer faculty who stay for the long haul, who are professionally and emotionally invested in and committed to a particular place. Quality teaching, as David Kirp points out HERE, necessitates the building of relationships--and quality relationships require commitment, patience, and time. There are no shortcuts. Learning isn't something to be disrupted. Technology cannot replace human connection. The relationships we build--students with teacher, students with other students--enable a conversation regarding our course content, guided by me in my role as teacher, and it is through that dialogical process that information is transformed into knowledge, perhaps even wisdom. Technology can facilitate some of this, but if all gadgets disappeared tomorrow, learning could still happen, since the foundations--relationships and content--would still exist.  Keep technology and remove one of those other factors? That's not education, it's just people playing with fancy toys.

I'm no Luddite (if I were, I couldn't have a blog), and I've found many technological innovations to be professionally useful. I can post links to articles on our course web page, keep my grade records electronically (eliminating my fear of accidentally leaving them at Starbucks), show relevant You Tube videos and Ted Talks in class, and use group chat to plan activities with our student creative writing club--a motley crew whose assorted schedules make it nearly impossible to meet in person. All good stuff, and that's just for starters. Believe it or not, I've even taught online, and from time to time I've even done it well (though doing it well poses challenges).

So it's not innovation that disturbs me. In fact, I like to think of myself as fairly cutting-edge on most fronts. But disruption? That's just one of the many problems inherent in applying a corporate business model to a field like education where profit was never the point. The push-back against that, along with soaring college costs and consequent student debt, has led many to revisit the question of what higher education should be for.  One of those at the forefront, William Deresiewicz, fans a firestorm in his new book, Excellent Sheep. (Read his provocative and controversial critique of Ivy League education HERE, and one of the kinder counter-arguments--Nathan Heller's "Poison Ivy"--HERE.) 

Deresiewicz claims, "College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance." Heller points out the class bias inherent in assuming that someone has that luxury: "When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of 'moral imagination' may be at play." Yet even Heller, though he takes an ostensibly more populist view, can't seem to get out of making elitist assumptions: What if an impoverished first-generation student at a no-name state university wants to study English or history and is fine with five figures? Must we always be focused on the biggest names, the most prestigious? And must we assume that those with less economic privilege are only interested in earning more money?

Meanwhile, The Economist couldn't care less about the "mind-expanding, soul-enriching" paradigm of Deresiewicz: "For most students the 'graduate premium' of better-paid jobs still repays the costs of getting a degree. But not all courses pay for themselves," complain the "numbers guys"--as if the pointlessness of meaning-seeking and reflection has already been established and we've all concluded that university education and vocational training are really the same thing. If a course doesn't "pay for itself," The Economist suggests, it's not worth taking. And yet I can't totally bash the "numbers guys" either. You can't do the college thing, however you conceptualize it, if you don't have money. (And the college debt crisis is a subject unto itself.)

This I know from experience. I also know that Heller's point is valid; when I was eighteen, I didn't have the luxury of "standing outside the world" for a few years, or even one year, or even a week. (Maybe a day, if I stayed home with a bad enough cold.) To anyone who knew me as a child, I appeared to be on the college-bound trajectory: I earned high grades, I played piano and violin, my dad worked in the aerospace industry--well, there's your first glitch. The 1971 recession nearly killed that industry and nearly bankrupted our family. Add in my father's serious health challenges, in a country with for-profit health care that cares not for unemployed people with "pre-existing conditions" (one dire consequence of prioritizing numbers over human needs), and without scholarships I wouldn't go anywhere. I should have been able to get some--but then my dad, uninsured, was seriously injured in a freak accident a week after I graduated from high school, and I was distraught. People in Stryker frames resemble pigs being roasted over a spit, turned every two hours. The screws in their heads create rivulets of dried blood that can't be washed away without risk of further spinal cord injury. Stand outside the world?  I wouldn't know what that's like. 

When the time came, I chose a vocational path, studying at night while working at my full-time secretarial job. I married my boyfriend, who was serving his apprenticeship in the local carpenters' union: hard physical labor all day, apprenticeship classes at night. (Yes, construction workers go to school--at least the properly trained ones do.) We were young. We worked. We worked hard. And I don't regret it. The Ivy League world described by Deresiewicz was (and, though I am now an academic, remains) as foreign to my daily reality as a distant solar system. We needed to survive. That's why, as much as I love what I do, I don't knock students who choose clear career paths.

And yet much of what Deresiewicz says still resonates with me: "It is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become a unique individual--a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that." I know just what he means: College did help me make those connections. The experience was invaluable in ways that are not always easy to articulate.

Yet I find myself resisting some of what he says. College is certainly not the only way to do become "unique," and I would hope he's not suggesting that less educated people don't have souls. (I don't think that's what he means, but if one headed down a slippery enough slope, one could draw that conclusion.) 

What about those who don't go to college--either because they can't, or because they don't want to? What about those who financially need to be in college for job training purposes, who might have loved to "stand apart from the world" but will never have that luxury? What about older people who didn't go to college at the usual time but want to do so now? (In all my web surfing of "crisis in the humanities" articles, I have yet to discover one that considers the perspective of non-traditional students.) And if we recognize all that, how do we hold on to our idealism? For those who want the kind of life-expanding educational experience that Deresiewicz promotes, how do they pay the ever-soaring price if they're not already well situated?  

If answers were easy, we'd probably have them already. But maybe we can start by trying to unravel that nagging, confusing issue of class. Deresiewicz points out the elitism of the Ivy Leagues and the sometimes single-minded achievement orientation among those who aspire to it--yet the  preferable alternatives he suggests are places like Reed and Kenyon, still out of most people's reach. And The Economist, for all its touting of MOOCs and technology as the answer to everything, seems to assume that we've already abandoned as economically unfeasible any notion of a more personalized, meaningful education. If you want a job, apparently you're required to abandon the search for meaning. Many who argue for the humanities from an idealized point of view assume that anyone seeking practical skills is somehow lacking in "moral imagination," while many who argue from a job-training perspective neglect to consider the "soul" altogether, as if--as Adam Gopnik put it--our sole purpose in life is to "produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die." 

Amidst all this chaos, perhaps what we need to question are the binaries as well as the hierarchies--the whole notion of "class," along with its implicit suggestion that some lives are more valuable and/or meaningful than others. There are more things in heaven and earth than the "excellent sheep" that Deresiewicz criticizes, or the cash-strapped "social climbers" for whom Heller claims to advocate. There are more places where we can disseminate and foster all that we found valuable in the humanities disciplines than the usual elite academic enclaves. And there are more purposes to formal higher education than future employability alone. Yet the majority of us--however idealistic we may be--also need to make economic ends meet. 

It is high time for innovation in higher education. The goal of innovation, however, should not be to disrupt. The language and strategies of the corporate world should not be applied where they do not belong. What we need to do instead is build a new kind of institution--one that is accessible to all, and that is structured to meet both our material and our non-material needs.