Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Gerald Graff says the great crime of modern academe is not that we deal with tough subjects in dense prose. Our crime is that we withhold the keys to our subjects and prose from students who so desperately want in on what we offer. Reading this book offers new insights into teaching, and reminds me what my students most need to succeed. Graff describes what students need to know to flourish in current academia, and contrasts that with the content of typical high school and university classes. We who teach have a specialized academic vocabulary, which we expect students to gain through osmosis. Teachers are so immersed in our subjects that we forget which ideas we take for granted are obscure to our students, so we come across as opaque blowhards. The problem, Graff says, is that the most significant education themes are those of debate and argument. Yet because we teachers don't state this in student language, students see our questions and criticisms as condemnations. We need to teach them how to argue in respectful, productive terms on issues that are not self-evidently true, if we want students to succeed. This book is not meant exclusively for teachers. Students will find useful chapters on how to create admission essays, negotiate writing intensive classes, and craft class papers without tears. Graff's explication of rhetoric and controversy covers every major theme you should have gotten in ninth grade English, and does so in clear language. Though Graff comes from a composition background, he stresses how his ideas apply to all disciplines and can be addressed across fields. He uses multiple sources, and diverse educational traditions, to create a synthesis that proposes new options in teaching and studying. This book offers ideas for teachers, students, administrators, and anyone who cares whether students have the skills they need in school and in life.

In his early books, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs PROFESSING LITERATURE continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books -- Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) -- to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy. In LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF Graff analyzes the premises, conclusions, and implications of various literary theories and contemporary schools of criticism in terms of their validity and effectiveness for pedagogy and criticism. And in PROFESSING LITERATURE Graff shows how the various teaching methods and choices of texts in departments of literature from the nineteenth though the early twentieth century suggest that new methods and new canons of study-worthy texts will continue to appear. In the more recent Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), Graff foregrounds the conclusions and pedagogical injunctions proffered in his earlier books. In the decade following the publication of Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff himself decided to put the pedagogical injunctions based on his conclusions into practice, coediting, with James Phelan, two "critical controversy" textbooks: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Case Studies in Critical Controversy) and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (Case Studies in Critical Controversy). Both of these textbooks are in their second editions. In his most recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Graff continues to explore the pedagogical implications of what he discovered in researching and writing his earlier books on theory and the institutional history of literature departments. Teaching the controversies or conflicts has ironically even been taken up by a group which eschews rational argument -- a sine qua non of Graff's critical pedagogy: religious fundamentalists. I would agree to a certain extent with anyone who thinks it unfortunate that some religious fundamentalists -- in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school sci

Summary statement This book offers a critique of academic culture--in particular, a critique of the role of argumentation within academic culture. Graff believes that a battle has been raging for the soul of academia between a view that sees academic culture as inherently esoteric and specialized and a view that aspires to "outreach" and greater influence within wider society. He sees university students losing in this battle as opportunities to be introduced into the conversations through which they might learn the life of the mind are increasingly few and far between. Graff's solution to the crisis he pinpoints is in part the work of university administrators (he has some quarrels with the structure of academic departments and with the ways academics communicate with one another). However, he does offer some practical advice for teachers of composition. His primary argument is that students need to be invited into academic discourse, and that it is incumbent on those that teach composition to invite them in--using language they can understand and offering help with the strange structures that academic arguments can take. Graff's practical advice goes beyond the strategic level--he does offer some tactical ideas (e.g., creating argument templates to help students learn the rhythm of argumentation). Here's a quote from the book that should give you a sense of Graff's style and convictions: "`Criticism' is just a fancy word for what any of us do when we respond to any text. Therefore, students are already producing a form of criticism as soon as they begin to talk about a text in class or write a paper about it. Now, it just makes no sense to ask students to produce a kind of discourse that they rarely see an example of. It makes no sense to withhold from students the discourse that we expect them to produce--and punish them for not producing well" (p. 175).

"Clueless in Academe" is a discussion on how to make the academic intellectual life more accessible and desirable for incoming college students. The underlying premise of the book is that "becoming educated has more to do with thinking and talking about subjects or texts in analytical ways than with the subjects or texts you study." While this premise breaks down rapidly as students progress in their major course of study, it is a useful assumption for teaching beginning college students.Graff's focus is on how English departments should go about their business, and in doing so recommends making connections with popular culture -- since he assumes the subject of study is secondary to learning how to argue. Graff goes on to criticize how different disciplines send different messages about what kind of composition is expected, mentioning not just the humanities and social sciences, but also the sciences and mathematics. While using popular culture as a means of imparting analytical thinking skills is clearly inappropriate for these subjects, Graff does discuss an alternative means that I found interesting: a particular way of intertwining of natural language explanations along with the technical discourse. His use of templates for writing essays also has analogs in the analysis that goes on in other disciplines.Other topics touched upon in the book include the value of analytical thinking and a discussion of progressive versus traditional models of education. Overall, "Clueless in Academe" is useful reading for any teacher trying to get their students to think.

This is the book on learning in the classroom that I've been waiting for. So often, even interested students don't get what their teacher wants. When this happens, they can lose confidence in their native abilities and teachers become frustrated in themselves and their students. With Gerald Graff's guidance, teachers can now demistify their expectations while validating their students' intelligence. While this book is directed to teachers, parents will appreciate it as well and may want to pass it on to their child's teachers. (Indeed, some goal-oriented parents may find the chapter on writing an admission essay worth the price of the book alone.)Graff is an English professor, formerly of the University of Chicago and now at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He gained some fame in the early 1990s for arguing against his then-U. Chicago colleague Allan Bloom's understanding of Western culture. In this book, Graff looks into the great chasm between students and teachers and finds on one side Arguespeak, the language of teachers, and, on the other side, Studentspeak, the language of everyone else. Arguespeak consists of looking at particular aspects of a subject matter critically, in light of what one knows about the whole field. Studentspeak makes itself heard whenever people talk about everyday things: friends, food, movies, work, video games, t.v. shows, and so on. Problems arise when teachers want to hear Arguespeak from their students but only get Studentspeak. Graff's book offers concrete ways to help teachers teach their language to students. The main obstacle to understanding Arguespeak is that every critical comment uttered by a teacher is made within a larger conversation about a topic or subject. Teachers make their judgements about, say, the historical significance of the Magna Carta, or Twain's sense of irony, based on their knowledge of what others in their field have to say about these issues. Students rarely know how to formulate such judgements because they are unaware of the conversation their teacher is participating in. They are clueless. But, their teachers are just as clueless about helping them. Graff draws on the work of several education theorists and compositionists (writing instructors) to offer a commonsense way to align the expectations of students and teachers without sacrificing achievement. First, teachers must not feel compelled to teach everything--better to teach a fewer number of topics in depth rather than treat the whole range of a subject like a giant slalom course. Graff would rather see teachers spend more time teaching their students to think. Second, teachers must show students how to enter the critical conversation of their subject by having them practice with the conversations they participate in all the time. Everyone has an opinion about something; everyone has a topic they can think critically about. Graff recommends using what kids already know, especially with regard to pop