Schools Should Help Students Be Human

"One of the great ironies and great frustrations of my career teaching first-year college writing was having students enter our class armed with a whole host of writing strategies which they had been explicitly told they needed to know "for college," and yet those strategies-primarily the following of prescriptive templates-were entirely unsuited to the experience students were going to have over the next 15 weeks of our course (and beyond)."

"In the intervening years, there's been some progress, but frankly, not enough, primarily because the structural factors that distorted how writing is taught precollege have not been addressed. As long as writing is primarily framed as workforce preparation to be tested through standardization and quantification, students will struggle when invited into a more nuanced conversation that requires them to mine their own thoughts and experiences of the world and put those thoughts and experiences in juxtaposition with the ideas of others."

Many first-year college students arrive equipped with prescriptive templates and strategies presented as necessary for college, yet those strategies often fail to transfer to sustained, inquiry-driven courses. Structural factors in precollege education continue to promote standardized, testable skills rather than practices that support deep intellectual engagement. When composition is framed primarily as workforce preparation and evaluated through quantification, students struggle with assignments that require mining personal thoughts and juxtaposing them with others' ideas. Once students are invited into that struggle and perceive genuine interest in their thinking, many become enthusiastic participants. A concerted alliance between secondary and higher education grounded in free inquiry and self-determination could bridge these divides.

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