Getting Crabby at Graff

I thought the Gerald Graff article, “Clouding the Issues,” brought up some interesting points, but I found myself taking issue with some of his issues. Maybe it is just because I have the end-of-school crankies, but the more I read, the less impressed I was with his piece.

First, he buried the lead. While the subhead tells us where he is going with the article (“taking advantage of the synergies” between academia and pop culture), he doesn’t get around to it for several paragraphs.

Once he does, I find myself rejecting his premise. For example, he writes about creeping intellectualism (insert literal interpretation vis-à-vis a bad horror film here) and an audience that is “fascinated by the culture of teaching and learning.” I disagree. If that were the case, we would have more and better parental involvement in our schools and with our students. Instead, most parents have abdicated their responsibility in the education of their children and simply turned them over to the schools and the teachers. Their “fascination” is more like a passing interest, partly out of complacency and partly due to the way our public school system is designed to run efficiently (?) without much outside input or assistance.

While popular media does include shows, movies, songs, etc., about education, that is nothing new. People have always written about what they know, and what they are confident their audience can relate to. Since the vast majority of Americans have been to school, these school-related programs are easy fodder for the entertainment machine. And they always have been. From dramatic movies of a generation ago like Up the Down Staircase and The Paper Chase to this decade’s Boston Public and Freedom Writers, people are drawn to shows and movies about school because they are familiar.

Do these pop culture versions of education reflect reality? Not so much. But that is okay. After all, we’re talking about entertainment here, not about creating documentaries that reflect the realities of today’s public schools. Anyway, most people probably think they already know what is what when it comes to education. Their personal experience has made them instant experts in much the same way that after watching one or two nights of Olympic gymnastics, the home viewer considers their own assessment of a performance to be as valid as that of a judge who has dedicated their entire life to the sport.

Graff also mentions Ellen Willis and her observations of how “ideas that matter” move up and down the media food chain. Graff’s interpretation, though, is that these ideas originate within academia, are repurposed for more thoughtful or sophisticated media consumers, but eventually end up at the bottom of the heap (USA TODAY and Roseanne). I think it is more of a two-way street than he is willing to acknowledge. Academics are prone to ask questions leading to scholarly research and discussion of ideas that matter, but these are sometimes prompted by observations of the culture that they see in the mass media.

I strongly disagree with Graff’s statement that “What ‘feeds the heads’…of Times writers and PBS commentators (and perhaps even the audiences of Roseanne and ER) doesn’t necessarily enter the heads of college undergraduates or of high-school teachers and students.” This is precisely the type of elitist thinking that separates people instead of bringing folks together. Perhaps this is an oversimplification, but smart people are inquisitive people. Nobody started life as an op-ed writer for the Times, but I can almost guarantee that they were just as intellectually curious as a kid as their contemporaries who never left Columbia or the University of Chicago. Dorothy Parker said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Teaching pop culture and its touch points as part of a curriculum (be it English Lit, History, or any other) is important because it grabs students where they live and gives them an opportunity to expand their understanding beyond the limitations of what they and their friends like. They can move from what they know (or think they know) to something less familiar, but interesting, and from there curiosity takes over.

Ultimately, by examining popular music and other forms of youth culture, they go on a journey they may not take otherwise, and as Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Once we can get our students to this point, they are more likely to want to join this “club we belong to” and will bring a broader and more valuable way of employing “Arguespeak” than what we see today.