As I waited in my office at the university for students to begin arriving, the ones who wished to complain about the grade they’d earned on the papers I’d just returned to them in class, there was a tentative knock on my open door, and a face peered in at me from the hallway. He was indeed from my class, a young man with impeccable manners, always on time and neat, attentive, well groomed. In fact, as I’d learned the first week, he was a Marine, and he’d recently returned from a deployment in the Middle East.
He asked if I had time to see him, and I invited him in.
As I’d suspected, he was there to see me about his grade. He wanted to know what he could do to improve his writing, and he clearly meant it, wasn’t just humoring me the way other students did.
I told him the best thing he could do would be to forget everything he’d been taught about writing in high school, middle school, and even elementary school.
I still remember the look of shock on his face. But he’d gotten all A’s in high school English, he explained, and he’d taken advanced classes, too.
He wasn’t the first student to tell me that, and I knew he wouldn’t be the last; I’d been seeing the same shell-shocked expression for years. I told him what I told them all, that he could rewrite the assignment for a better grade. It was the least I could do to help him overcome the handicap he’d been saddled with by an educational system that believed every subject could and must be quantified to fit into a standardized test.
I was teaching in Florida, but from what I’d heard from both colleagues and students it could have been any place in America. Any place where kids were let out of high school confident in the knowledge that they had the skills they needed to survive college, or the real world, only to find they’d been lied to.
Confident, that’s the key word. They trusted the system, were sure that it wouldn’t suddenly turn on them and declare them unfit for further education, or for the workplace.
So, there in my office that day, I launched into my explanation of how college writing differed from high school writing, a speech I’d recited many times before. I told him the real world didn’t look at his writing through the lens of a standardized writing test, and that he needed to forget all the numbers he’d been taught were so important.
Numbers of paragraphs. Numbers of sentences in each paragraph. Numbers of words in each sentence. Even the number of times they could use any word, which often was one.
He was silent for a moment, and then he spoke. He looked down, and not at me, as he told me he’d tried not to write that way, he didn’t think it would be appropriate in college, but he couldn’t stop. He’d tried hard, he said, but he just couldn’t write any other way.
I did my best to reassure him that if he kept at it, he’d eventually leave the formulas behind and find his own way. As I spoke, I realized he was crying.
I reached for the box of tissues I kept on my desk for such moments and said I’d be back in a few minutes if he wanted to take some time to compose himself. And I headed for the English department to check my mailbox, chat with the secretary, do anything I could do to avoid sitting in my office as a young man who had been in combat cried because he couldn’t stop writing the way he’d been forced to write by a system that couldn’t see beyond the numbers.
That was the day I knew I had to quit.
***
It hadn’t been his fault, and it isn’t the fault of any of them, the thousands of students I saw over the years who begged me to help them stop writing “that way,” who told me, many in tears, that they were trying to write differently, but they couldn’t.
Brainwashing will do that to you. I’d see it even in third- and fourth-year students, the 15-page research papers with amazingly long paragraphs that, when counted, always totaled five, because the students believed with all their being that they needed exactly five in anything they wrote. Because the students trusted what their teachers, the experts, told them.
The experts, of course, had been forced to teach a form of writing that could be evaluated quickly so as to accommodate the system’s relentless testing. Main idea? Check. Paragraphs? Check. Words? Check. Evidence of critical thinking? Not so much.
The only help I could offer was to coax my students to think beyond the limits they’d been shackled by for years. I encouraged them to write six paragraphs, or ten, or fifty, and showed them I meant it by not penalizing them for having too many sentences in a paragraph, or too many words in a sentence. I let them experiment with one-word sentences, and sentences that went on forever, if they wanted them to.
And I brought in examples from magazines, newspapers, even business reports, everything I could get my hands on that showed them in more concrete terms than I could express that it really was okay to go beyond their limits, that real writers would never have been published if all they’d written were five-paragraph essays.
And still, I could see it in their eyes, semester after semester: They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t believe me, because that would undermine the years of instruction they’d received from people they trusted.
They’d been brainwashed by an educational system that tries to force kids into precise little boxes, that has forgotten that thoughts can’t be quantitatively measured. In their zeal for numbers, for measuring their kids so they can publish reports saying their students really can write because they’ve passed a test, the bureaucrats and bean counters are missing the point.
Writing is thinking on paper; it’s that simple, and it’s that complex. Writing is one of the most important things we can learn to do, putting our ideas on paper, expressing what we think. Putting our ideas on paper can make magic.
But to make students pass one standardized test after another, we’ve forced them to see writing as simply a formula, as anything but what it really is. Writing should be dangerous stuff, and it used to be—before the system killed it.
Now, our system tells students, “Okay, this is how to write. You must have five paragraphs in your essay, and the first paragraph must have a thesis sentence in which you specify the three main points of your paper, and each paragraph must have four to seven sentences, and each sentence must have eight to ten words.”
But the system forgets that students aren’t working only with words and sentences and paragraphs; they’re working with ideas. They’re thinking on paper. And they’re being told by the experts that they must have exactly three ideas in everything they write, and each idea must be exactly such a length. What if they have four good ideas? Toss one out; only three ideas allowed.
It’s ludicrous, of course, because ideas can’t be measured—except in school. Day after day, year after year, students learn to fit their ideas, which should have room to grow, into tiny, precise boxes. By constraining our students’ writing, our system constrains their thinking: Be careful. Don’t have too many thoughts. If you have them, keep them to yourself. I’d seen my own college students fail assignments in other classes because they had the wrong numbers.
On the days I’d dare to discuss what had been done to them by bean counters and bureaucrats, my students, my college students, would look at me with suspicion. Why was I telling them such lies?
And I’d point to a passage in their textbook of essays. Real writers repeat words, I’d tell them. See? And these writers don’t care how long their sentences are.
Their eyes would show their mistrust of what I was telling them. I was denying the validity of their belief system, contradicting everything they’d been told.
I’d keep trying, but as I tried I knew it was useless. Another semester’s worth of young people had had the thinking sucked right out of them by a system that teaches automatic, paint-by-number essays full of, well . . . nothing, really. Because another thing they were taught is that opinions are bad.
Of course, opinions express ideas, and if you follow that thinking through to its logical conclusion, then ideas are bad. I’d have my students read what I thought was a particularly good essay by a writer who’d made his point clearly, arguing elegantly and fearlessly against or in favor of something, anything, and my students would say, “Well, but that’s an opinion.”
“Yes, it is,” I’d respond. “And?”
And, they’d say, full of the certainty that had been drummed into them over the years, “That’s bad. You can’t have opinions, only facts.”
So I’d try another approach. I’d tell them, “You know, it was a crime in most of this country many years ago to teach a slave to read or write. Why do you think we had those laws?” Sometimes, one of the less timid students would cautiously raise a hand and take a stab at it: “Because slaves could get ideas?”
“Right, yes. Slaves could get ideas, and ideas, to those in power, are not only bad, they’re dangerous. The owners, those in power, didn’t want that. Do you see any parallel between that and what’s happening in our schools?”
No, they didn’t. Oh, I might have one occasionally who got it, but the majority had been trained so well they didn’t see any connection. I was just another crazy, ranting professor. I’d watch their eyes blink off, their minds go someplace where they didn’t have to think about what I was saying. The mall. Home. In front of their computers, playing games. Someplace safe.
But I was trying to steer them away from that safety. I was trying to make them dangerous. Trying to get them to think.
They’d have none of that, thank you. Our young people have had the thinking beaten out of them.
And they graduate, eventually, or possibly not, but one way or another they go out into the world, and they’re timid, afraid to have an opinion because, you know, opinions are bad. They become clerks or politicians, doctors or accountants, and they’re incurious and curiously fearful of having an opinion. I struggled one day with a different student, a girl who was simply unable to come up with an idea for the subject of her essay. “Write about what you’re interested in,” I told her.
“I don’t have any interests,” she told me. “Just tell me what to write about and I’ll do that.”
She may as well have said, “Tell me what to think.” The effect is the same. And over time, I realized that that had been the point. In this No Child Left Behind world, the bean counters, the bureaucrats, the business leaders, they’re the ones determining what should be in the curriculum, on the test. They’re the ones who run the businesses that run the country, and they decide exactly what they want our students, their future employees, to learn: Do as you’re told. Ideas are bad. Don’t think too much, don’t have too many ideas. Just shut up and do your job and, for God’s sake, don’t ask questions.
Trust us. We know what’s best for you.
It’s nothing new, of course; public education started as a way to shape a ready workforce, people who could count and maybe read a little, who had basic hygiene and, most important, would respond to bells and orders. My students were being trained for the real world by those who ran it: corporations, businesses, people in and of power—those with money and influence, enough money and influence to buy the politicians who met around the tables and shaped the schools.
Worse, I knew it was about to get much worse, at least in my own state. Unsatisfied with molding the minds of those who can’t really fight back, the corporations and people in power have set their sights on the universities. We now have one seamless educational system, pre-kindergarten through graduate school, with the practices entrenched in our schools becoming entrenched in our colleges.
And there are rumors on the wind of standardized testing at all levels. Of course, if you need to grade thousands of essays quickly, you need a formula—otherwise, the graders may actually have to consider the content, the ideas, rather than just the number of paragraphs, or sentences, or words.
Imagine our future, if you dare: generations of young people taught that opinions are bad, young people taught to count their ideas, lest they have too many. Young people who have learned all too well how to fit their ideas—which should be dangerous, should make magic—into tiny, precise boxes.
A generation afraid to ask questions. Afraid, when told what writing should be, to ask why.
***
When I finally returned to my office, the young man had composed himself. He was sitting there, rereading his essay, and when I sat down he assured me he would do his best to rewrite it differently. He didn’t look at me as he said it.
When I told him I was sure he’d do a great job, and I’d be there to help, he stood up and prepared to leave. Then he hesitated. “Please don’t tell anyone what I did,” he said.
I promised him I wouldn’t tell.
And I haven’t.
Until now. Because that was years ago, and I’m sure he’s gone on to other things, as I have. I stopped teaching and work in the private sector. I no longer have to face wounded students, those who have been betrayed by an educational system that thinks only in numbers. It had become too painful to see their pain, every year, every semester, every day.
Too discouraging to attempt to persuade them that there was a better way to write, to think, only to see quite clearly that they didn’t believe me. Too discouraging to realize the brainwashing was complete. They fully trusted their captors; I was the one they suspected of trying to harm them.
I kept my promise all these years, but the memory of that day stays with me: a young Marine, hardened in combat, trained to be tough and strong, brought to tears by a terrible secret, an insidious form of mind control that too few people know about. A secret that the system doesn’t want us questioning: Brainwashing works. Just look at your kids.
After all these years, it’s more important to me that the secret is brought into the light of day than that I keep a promise made long ago.
So I’m breaking my promise, and I hope the Marine will forgive me.
Because if I don’t do this now, I’ll never forgive myself.
Lynn Stratton taught writing for fifteen years at a large state university in Florida, where she saw firsthand the damage done to her students by a lifetime of high-stakes testing.
