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Kenneth Burke

Make America Read Again: Take the Factory Model Out of Education 📚

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
~Albert Camus

In a 2009 interview with Reuters Magazine, Kanye West says, “I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” which he ironically shares while on a tour promoting his own book. This interview takes place five years after he dropped his wildly successful debut album titled The College Dropout.

The anti-intellectual spirit that was creeping into American culture is now a pervasive force that is spreading like wildfire. In this case, a public figure wears the non-reading label proudly, but this attitude is not new.

I’m in my eighth year teaching college-level reading and writing courses, and at the beginning of every semester, I ask students a few icebreaker-type questions in an effort to get to know them. In addition to asking where they are from and what they do for work, I ask them to name their favorite book.

When I first began teaching, maybe one student each semester would reluctantly admit they have never read a book or they don’t like to read. This person wore it like a badge of honor the way Kanye West does — they feel proud they have been able to game the system and even get into college without having read a book.

Each semester, more and more students tell me they don’t read, don’t like to read, and can’t remember the last book they read. This semester I had 21 students say they don’t like reading, they don’t enjoy reading, they don’t have time to read, or that they hardly read.

In his 1933 work, Counter-Statement, Kenneth Burke, a well-known thinker in rhetorical theory, blames the spread of literacy through compulsory education for what he calls “bad readers.”

Leigh Bortins, a contemporary classical educator, describes the factory education model that perpetuates what Burke calls compulsory education:

“Historically, the industrial age coincided with a national mandate to provide public education for the masses. In order to take on this enormous task, school systems replicated some of the efficiencies built into a large factory, as if they could ignore the fact that the “components” coming down the “assembly line” were children.”

I am a product of a mass-produced education, and it is very likely that you are, too. The education system is not the problem – it’s the symptom. Much like Kanye West, I’ve helped perpetuate the anti-intellectual spirit. While I’ve always been passionate about learning, and even reading, I thought the institution was the enemy and academia was a game.

While this posture toward education needs corrected, this MEmorial explores the trauma that undergirds the fear of intelligence that characterizes the anti-intellectual spirit that pervades our culture both within the academic institution and without.

I used to treat books as the magic tool that will save our culture instead of what Gregory Ulmer calls the wishing why in his 2005 book, Electronic Monuments. The wishing why is the art of wonder, the unending curiosity, and the power of attention. Our quest is to learn how to harness our intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to proliferate the wishing why.

We are going to explore what it means to rescue books from oblivion and return them to the center of culture and conversation by asking some tough questions: how do we change the way Americans experience reading? Where does the anti-intellectual spirit come from? How do we teach a love of learning in our contemporary moment?

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The Blue of Education

Jessica S. Manuel

Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.”
James Paul Gee

With brief pockets of cynicism and frequent moments of humor, James Paul Gee describes the anti-intellectual spirit of our times in his 2013 book, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students Through Digital Learning.

It’s a dark, scary, space with truth, goodness, and beauty nowhere to be found.

So how did we get here?

The rhetorical theorist, Kenneth Burke suggests the factory model of compulsory education is to blame.
The contemporary author, Nicholas Carr blames the internet for making us stupid or at the very least, changing the way we think.
The English professor, Mark Edmundson calls the prevalence of the consumer attitude among students the culprit.

Gee points his finger at everything from weak metaphors to faulty memories as he searches for narratives to contextualize the trauma of contemporary education. He looks to the collective “we” and to the systems we’ve constructed, but unlike Nicholas Carr, he doesn’t blame our tools.

Hidden beneath the surface of his message is the same sentiment that Jesper Juuls echoes in The Art of Failure: if we want to change our contemporary cultural moment then we must change our perspective.

In light of that, I suspect our best course of action is to reorient our ship.

Instead of seeing the current state of education as a problem to be solved, we might want to consider how this longing for something more might spur us on to create something new and potentially beautiful.

Perhaps our desire for change and our longing to be surrounded by visionaries is something to treasure.

The American writer, Rebecca Solnit, intuits this exact thing in her eloquent work, A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?
If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?
For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.
Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories.
Something is always far away.

James Paul Gee echoes this sentiment:

Art is about perspectives, how things can be viewed in order to open up new possibilities, cause emotions, or get people committed to new lines of action or ways of living their lives. So, too, is language as we use it in our everyday lives.”

James Paul Gee elaborates,

We paint on the canvas of people’s minds using language as the paint. Like Monet we play with perspective, with “light” and “shadows” (foregrounding some things, and backgrounding others), in order to get others to see things differently, sometimes anew.”

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

To educate, to lead out, is to embrace the blue of distance that so beautifully brings texture to our lives.

Education is not a problem to be solved.

It’s a passion to be pursued.

We can expand our options by expanding our language and our thinking.

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