Public Intellectuals from a new Zip Code

I've been thinking about why kids at school seem to be so blatantly bored with literature. As a department chair, I watch as teachers fret about the students who don't seem to care... and about students who pronounce their not caring more and more vocally. One response is to create bigger and bigger projects that go along with the reading. Another response is to spell out (usually in 12 point font on power point slides) what's most important about last night's novel reading. Yet another response is to blame the X (kids, TV, cell phones, parents, mercury in innoculations....) I don't think that any of these responses will get to the heart of the boredom.

Instead, I think that English departments need to change: our goal should be to help kids become better consumers of text. And by text I only barely mean "novels and short stories," I really mean documentaries and informational web sites and online newspapers and blogs, etc.

I love novels myself. And I think that reading, say, The Scarlet Letter, is a pleasantly rewarding intellectual and artistic puzzle that helps me think about big ideas like idenity and social norming. But I don't think that literature has any monopoly on helping kids become better readers, thinkers, or citizens. It's ONE WAY, and a way that is probably going out of style faster than you can say "D'oh!".

Today I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (not usually associated with flouting tradition!) which helps me make my claim in a sideways sort of way. The author, Daniel Drezner, in the article "Public Intellectual 2.0," found here, writes that public intellectuals have not died, but have migrated to the blogosphere. Drozner writes:

"To be sure, some important differences exist between the current generation of public intellectuals and the Partisan Review generation extolled by so many. In the current era, many more public intellectuals possess social-science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner's infamous list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors. In a recent ranking published by Foreign Policy magazine, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the "universal methodology" of most public intellectuals."

Drezner says, "That fact in particular might explain the strong belief in literary circles that the public intellectual is dead or dying." But for me, it also might explain why kids see, but English teachers don't, that our primary focus on literary criticism is outdated and, um, boring. English departments, even in high school, existed in their heyday after the New Critics (and New York Intellectuals) reign in the 50s and 60s.

Meanwhile, back in high school, teachers still hold novels up as holy relics. The answer, to many teachers, is to force kids to look more closely at the holy relics, and try to encourage kids to see how the old messages might still fit today. My response is that we should help kids see the holy is not just in relics!