No more essays in schools. Writing yes. Essays not.
From now on kids write letters. Essays too? No. Not.
Letters from blue states to red and red to blue, rich to poor, black to white and back again. And–by fiat–young to old. (Because the old will scrawl back to the young.)
Does the world suffer from a lack of the critical thinking English teachers claim essays teach? Sure. Yes. Affirmativo. You don’t get to Trump and Putin and The Fake News Follies nor to the average car advert or this summer's pre-sequel without catastrophic failure of critical thought.
But? And?
If one-day argumentation, persuasion and rhetoric defeat the forces of untruth, brutality and ill-reason because essays help distinguish the righteous from the all-spin zone, that would be sweet. But Sacarmuci? Gorka? Bannon? DeVos? They all wrote essays. All got promoted.
We've confused essays with "thinking" in exactly the way Robert Frost would have us not do when he says: "Thinking is not to agree or disagree, that's voting."
Essays did not weave together the global village because of the quality of the thought therein, but because they were offered up across lines of divide, the division of secular from believer in particular. And getting into college or getting a good grade from you is not a divide, just a stamp of holy nothing, a way to practice agreeing or disagreeing before casting a vote in anger or ambivalence.
So please, my dear Teachers of Writing, claim not that Montaigne’s art thrives in the prose of our students. It just ain't so. Yes, for many kids words matter. Some challenge their beliefs in what they write and can register measure with measure. But getting into Yale drains most kids of eloquence, as you well know.
A contest of ideas? The mind in dialogue with itself? The triumph of a sentence well-formed? For that get your students some paper, an envelope, and a stamp.
What did you have for breakfast? What series did you watch last night? How often do you fart on a bad day? Do you like or dislike flatulence jokes?
In the letters Paul Auster and J.M Cotezee write to each other, for instance, they exchange thoughts about politics and economy and sport and family life and tradition and work and fame and sex and some dozen-score other subjects. Isn't that what writing an essay does anyway?
And perhaps the value of writing a letter on a real piece of paper to some other person is something we can sell to students as good for their selfish future.
Write 100 letters in high school English class and develop one or two meaningful correspondents and thus, maybe, a future mentor or business partner.
Learn how to approach a future employer or investor or donor tactfully in the doing of this targeted writing.
Or maybe–here’s some seriously wishful thinking–it will be harder to firebomb people with whom you’ve corresponded. (That dream, however hallucinatory, is not wilder than the idea that some “good essay” will sway Breitbart. )
Besides, such real letters will bring students offline a bit more and perhaps help reset the confusion of “likes” with depth, clickable friends with real ones, and force kids to consider what someone writes to them over the few days of snail-mail back and forth rather than the immediacy of online exchange, the speed of which undermines true contemplation.
And not to worry teachers, you will still have plenty to do. More, in fact. “Is that what you want to say to your future ally? To the person you hope will at least respect you? To someone whose sofa you might sleep on someday? How can you write a cleaner sentence? How might you show yourself more as who you are to this would-be friend?” All the usual questions and advice will be yours to ask and offer.
