Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994)

Given the extremely decentralized organizational structure of primary and secondary education in the United States, where responsibility for curriculum, promotion and graduation standards, and even significant portions of funding rests with elected or appointed school boards at municipal levels, American higher education has had to rely to a considerable degree on standardized tests in the evaluation of students for university admission. The most famous of these tests (for here too there is no single standard), those devised and administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, New Jersey, have been taken as a sort of index of the level of academic preparation and achievement of the university entry-level population. The median scores of annual test results are widely reported in the media and compared with the scores of previous years. With the notable exception of 1981, when a slight melioration was observed, a significant decline in the in the median scores of the verbal part of the exams has been reported for each year since the mid-sixties, leading to editorial questioning of the state of education in general, and to the formulation of many schemes for the remedying of this situation.

The decline in the scores on the verbal test has inevitably drawn university departments of English into these discussions. American students, it was argued, do not possess the necessary verbal skills to perform well in their studies, and they must receive remedial training in the universities if they are to be successful in their field of study, whether it be in the business, engineering, pre-medicine, pre-law, social sciences, or humanities areas of the university curriculum. Many English department faculty members have argued in return that the situation, deplorable as it may be, is certainly not of their own making; they have pointed out that the blame lies with the bast expansion of higher education to racial and ethnic minorities originating from poor neighborhoods or localities where there was inadequate elementary and secondary schooling, as a result of either insufficient financial means or discrimination. Nonetheless, it has been argued in return, primarily by university administrators and those in the liberal sector of the political spectrum, that if universities are to remain open to these new students, it is incumbent upon them to provide the corrective training in this area. In the changed economic, political, and fiscal environment of the seventies and eighties, marked by cutbacks in the allocations for higher education, a significant diversion of monies had to take place in order to expand or to establish programs in composition, rhetoric, or writing, as they are variously known around the country. Of course, this diversion has taken place at the expense of the regular English curriculum, which has had to stagnate at best, if not to suffer an outright reduction in the money allocated to it. …

Given the near-universal opposition of traditional English faculties to the new writing programs, an opposition generally perceived in territorial terms, and formulated as a defense of standard humanistic values, the writing programs have asserted their autonomy by focusing upon what they perceive as societal demand or the requirements of their clientele. The professional schools that are part of American universities (schools of engineering, business, medicine, law, forestry, agriculture, hotel management, and so forth), which were the beneficiaries of a major student enrollment shift away from the humanities and social sciences as a result of the "New Vocationalism" of the seventies and early eighties, have played a determining role in this situation: what they want are students who can write in their fields, and thus, not surprisingly, the writing programs have set up different tracks for students on the basis of their future vocational orientation: writing for business, for law, for science, for medicine, for technology, and so on. The notion of literacy operative in the programs that have evolved in this way – the vast bulk of them – is very much that of a restricted literacy: it provides for competence in a specific code, with little, if any but the most rudimentary, awareness of the general problematics of codes and codification in language. To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a crisis of literacy would have called for a greater appreciation of the multiplicity of functions that language performs, the foremost of which is the ability to code and to transcode experiences and to provide cultural directions for its interpretation, handling, and the elaboration, one finds a further instrumentalization of language, where the latter is shattered into a multiplicity of autonomous, unrelated languages, with the competence to be acquired restricted to just one of them. It should be noted that, in this process, any pretense of addressing the needs of so-called disadvantaged student populations has quietly evaporated. (3-5)

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Carl Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California, Santa Barbara
e-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu