Stealing the Chickens

The National Report Card, a survey sponsored by the prestigious Educational Testing Service, the organization responsible for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, has failed our schools in the teaching of writing.

The schools have failed because the students have failed; they can't write. There are two reasons: The most obvious is that a surprising number, many of whom are our most promising students, are ashamed to write; the most startling is that we don't want them to.

Let's begin with the obvious. Most elementary schools don't teach writing. They teach penmanship, spelling, and grammar, all of which are important for the purpose of making one's writing neat and clear, none of which, however, is writing. Many writers, in the tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, have been notoriously weak spellers; none have received poor reviews for a bad hand; and few of our greats have ever pondered whether a direct object as opposed to a subject complement might give fire and substance to an otherwise barren sentence.

Penmanship, spelling, and grammar must be taught, and taught effectively, but call them what they are — penmanship, spelling, and grammar — and evaluate them separately. Do not call them writing. Every year, sensitive, intelligent kids who verbally display wit, grace, and imagination cover their writing with their forearms and obsessively lose their stories because in primary grades they had an atrocious hand, or they can't spell, or they stumble over grammatical terms. They feel stupid. They talk beautifully. They won't write. The irony is that your most sensitive, thoughtful kids are your most promising writers, but they are also most susceptible to embarrassment and humiliation.

Tell them they're poor spellers, but don't tell them they're poor writers. It's difficult for a kid to express his thoughts and feelings in an inspired synthesis, with the heart and mind churning as one, if he distrusts his heart and doubts his intellect. He becomes ashamed and inhibited, despite displays of nonchalance or bravado. Despite excuses. A kid who is ashamed and inhibited, who doubts himself whever he puts pen to paper — and, again this is often your more promising student — is not likely to risk expressing himself on paper, and that is exactly what writing is: an act of expression.

Which brings me back to my most important point. Let me put it bluntly: Johnny can't write because we don't want him to.

How do I know? Because topics all across America are teacher-assigned — perhaps they're a bit cuter than what you and I had, but they're basically unrelated to kids' interests. And think about it: It is hard to talk about what you're not interested in, much less write about it.

What are kids interested in?

The same themes adults are interested in: family issues, friendship, romance, racism, sexism, abuse, ambition, sex, drugs, alcohol, theft, suicide, death illness, divorce, abandonment ... they love no less than we do. They will write about these issues differently from adults: ambition might be a story about cheating, losing an election, getting placed in the slower track classes; sex might range from a first kiss to a first abortion, romance from the first phone call to the first date to going together, as it is still referred to. Friendship is still about betrayal, many kids still want their little brother eliminated, and abused kids can turn stories into sheets of flame. Let a black child tell you about the moment when he first discovered that he is black, or let a girl who could outwrestle and outrun any guy on the block reveal the day she discovers she's a girl.

Walk into any high school class in America; and if you are sensitive or talented or properly trained, in less than an hour you will hear from the kids about what pushes, bothers, intrigues or amuses them. You will hear Inspiration, the muse of all writers, amateur or professional. They will tell you about what is going on in their lives, about what interests them, the very topics about which they should be writing: cancer, the death of a grandparent, a racist slur, loneliless, suicide, problems with friends, with members of the opposite sex, all the topics I've already mentioned and a thousand more.

Essays: Let a ninth-grader writer a persuasive essay on why he should be permitted to see R-rated movies; let an eighth-grader writer about why she should be permitted to eat lunch off campus; let a seventh-grader write about why she should get paid for baby-sitting her younger brother.

Themes don't change.

Why can't Johnny write?

We don't want him to.

We'll do anything to prevent it: grammar, spelling, penmanship, mounds upon mounds of busywork and abstract, unnecessary content, courses in "critical thinking" (about what?)....

A kid's ideas are personal; they're frightening; they're original. And as is true of all artists, they come from him.

But let's face it: they're unnecessary. His ideas, the truth, grace, wisdom, beauty — certainly originality — all, for the purpose of conventional education, are unnecessary. The sad, inescapable fact is that you can make straight A's, a perfect score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, go to Harvard, and never once, not once, mind you, have an idea of your own, much less express it.

And that is why I find it ironical that the Educational Testing Service, the very organization which sponsors the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a test purporting to measure the aptitude and intelligence of every college applicant in America without asking any of them for a single idea, is the same organization that has failed the schools in the teaching of writing.

It's a bit like the fox running up to the farmer's door screaming, "Somebody stole the chickens! Somebody stole the chickens!"