Education: Baffling for Britons

• Share

After more than ten years of teaching English literature at Chicago and Cornell, Critic David Daiches of Cambridge University feels sure of one thing: to a Briton, life in the English department of a U.S. university is often a trifle strange. In the Manchester Guardian Weekly, Daiches (rhymes with Hs) describes some of the things that baffle:

> The freshman English course, "which is designed to teach the effective handling of the English language as a means of expression and communication. We would regard this as fourth and fifth form stuff, and indeed it is; but it is necessary because of the defects of American secondary education in this respect."

> The English major, who is "trained in analytic criticism to a greater extent than his English opposite number; but he often lacks background information, and is liable to be much weaker in his awareness of the cultural context of a literary work . . . Further, the American student is often allowed to collect his 'hours' of English courses in a quite arbitrary fashion, and may get his degree on the basis of a course in Donne, a course in Elizabethan stagecraft, a course in Yeats and Eliot, a course in Joyce, a course in the modern American novel, and some courses in 'creative writing' — having read nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats ... It is also true that, as a result of a rather scholastic training in critical methodology, he often finds himself equipped with a technique [and a vocabulary] of analysis which bears no relation at all to the reasons why he in fact enjoys works of literature . . ."

> Graduate students, who must "take a large number of formal courses, not only in such technical subjects as bibliography and textual criticism, but also in the authors and periods of their specialization. The dangers of premature specialization, resulting from the compulsory Ph.D. for everyone going into the academic profession, are increasingly recognized . . . Nevertheless . . . too many students proceed to their Ph.D. without having acquired a rich enough general education in their subject . . . The view that a man can be a great scholar, critic, and teacher without having produced a Ph.D. thesis has often been urged of recent years in America, but ... it has had little or no effect in the organization of studies . . ."

All in all, says Daiches, "the glory and promise of the American system lie in willingness to experiment, a sense of the relevance of the contemporary literary scene, and eagerness to work hard. For it is true . . . that the best American students work far harder than British students; they are more eager and more naive; they will work like beavers if it will enable them in the end to know all the answers. In [England], whether out of wisdom or weariness, we have long since considered this an impossible ideal."