In the Clarion Call of the Pope Center, a Mr. Thomas Bertonneau has an article entitled “What, Me Read?” The editor of the Clarion says:
This is the first in a three-part series (to be published on Fridays). By analyzing the responses of his Survey of Literature students on their exams, Thomas F. Bertonneau, who teaches at SUNY-Oswego, offers insight into where education is failing today. The first essay sets the stage.
The first essay is a good read. Of course, you’d have to consider while reading it:
Is modern education succeeding? Or is it failing?
Is modern education being falsely accused? Or is it guilty as charged?
Do modern high school graduates have the facts and methods that they should to be considered educated? That they should to be prepared for adult life?
What is the evidence for failure and for success?
What is education supposed to do, anyway? What is the nature and goal of education?
Regarding his credentials, his experience in education, and a sources of evidence for his conclusions, Mr. Bertonneau writes in his article that he has, “since the mid-1980s,…taught a standard survey of literature course to undergraduates in California, Michigan, and most recently upstate New York,” which course “offers a useful occasion for the general observation of undergraduates.”
Mr. Bertonneau observed that when he started teaching in the 1980s “student interest in literature was low.” He found that “when it came to [students] writing a discursive [final] examination,” students would turn in “blue book after blue book of vapid generality, half-remembered lecture phrases, and boilerplate rhetorical devices learned (or half-learned) in high school.” Mr. Bertonneau says that students’ writing was competent/mediocre and the vocabulary was adult.
But the culture and the nature of education continued to change for the worse so that now we have
