Needle's Eye Gates

This is the kind of book--more accurately, a number of anthologies and a teacher's manual-that university professors of English (and, I dare say, of philosophy and history) by and large either never see or hope does not exist. T h e following remarks are in no way to be considered as a review in the usual literary sense: like a scientific model, the only respectful response to a teaching plan is to test it and to suggest emendations based on the testing. T h e remarks are directed, instead, to the curious failure of communication and lapses of understanding that frequently arise between university and elementary educators these days--particularly when questions about methodology are in the air. "How one teaches what" and where the italicizations ought to occur, are certainly among these questions. But there are others as well; and in considering this new curriculum-coursetextbook or whatever, I shall try to talk across the barriers that the very topics for discourse themselves appear to erect. The Gateway English program is an ambitious and elaborate project specifically devoted to the needs of urban, nonwhite students who up until now have seemed doomed to some kind of verbal failure. Presumably for use in inner-city junior high schools, it is aimed at integrating the various elements of what today are rather Germanically called "language arts"-the apprehension and product ion of texts and discourseinto a single curriculum. Th e curriculum is organized around four collections of illustrated texts: A Family Is a Way of Feeling, Stories In Song and Verse, Who Am I?; and Coping. Th e texts are accompanied by a teacher's manual covering all four of the collections. Although the manual moves in a stepwise fashion from selection to selection and from book to book, it should be made clear at the outset that this is by no means a unit or series of units of programmed learning-notwithstanding the subtitle. T h e teacher's manual contains approximately one hundred and twenty lesson plans that propose an astonishing array of materials and exercises: conventional writing assignments; exploratory questions; exercises in grammar and syntax; exercises in the perception of structural form in verse and prose, and so forth. Much use is made of recordings and sophisticated diagrammatic devices (transparency overlays for various sorts of parsing, etc.). There are even what I take to be botched Venn diagrams in an appalling section (Lesson 19 of Coping) on "Fact, Fancy and Falsehood" which purports to introduce the concept of t ruth without daring to name it, and which thoroughly confuses notions of certainty, inference, mistake and imprecision--notions that seem to be perfectly clear in most seventh-grade natural languages to begin with. The manual is marked throughout by a puzzling mixture of the reasonable, the banal, the occasionally inspired, and the almost unbelievably idiotic. For example, one wonders for whose benefit it is that one lesson on the ballad of Captain Kidd reads in part: " T E A C H E R ' S AIMS: 1. T o introduce students to a ballad about a legendary badman. 2. T o have pupils figure ou t the setting of the ballad. 3. T o help children note that some ballads contain a moral. S T U D E N T S ' AIM: T o read a ballad about a famous badman." All this, by the way, in a tabular form. Moreover the material itself is not always aptly chosen. Especially in view of Gateway English's announced purpose of "involving disadvantaged urban adolescents in meaningful reading experiences" and its subsequent criterion (as if it were a mat ter of inevitable entailment) that the material have relevance to the immediate experience of the young readers and to "truths . . . which they recognize as valid," one can only marvel at, for example, the choice of the Robert Kidd song just mentioned. Further, with a ballad that is, strophe by strophe, 60 per cent refrain and repetit ion one would expect that the lesson plan might cope with this problem of repetition (beyond the suggestion, in an earlier lesson, that repetitions in songs make them "more interesting to hear"). There are also some deep irrelevancies. Why, for example, include the well-known Negro Sunday School song "These Bones Gonna Rise Again" without saying anything in the discussion about what must otherwise be the puzzling refrain--evidently the children are to be given no knowledge of the relevant text from Ezekiel? Or again, with Edward Arlington Robinson's The House on the Hill, the choice in the first place seems strange. But once included, something about the patterning of the repetitions of the villanelle form should be pointed out, and the growing significance through the repetitions of the alternate refrain, "There is nothing more to say" would seem to lie at the heart of any kind of response to the poem. Another poem of the same form (Dylan Thomas ' "Do not go gentle" would be perfect), if used for comparison, might yield results in all sorts of dimensions of relevance. Certainly it is neither too advanced nor too trivial to bring up for young adolescents questions like: "Does repeating something regularly make it more or less important? And when? And how?" There is a good deal to be said critically about all of the choices and all of the strategies in these volumes. But even from the frenzy of nitpicking into which projects like the Gateway English seem to precipitate one, a few fundamental problems arise. These problems seem to be so basic, and the hope for resolving them so slight, that the college teacher usually shrinks away in despair, concluding that dialogue with the perpetrators and users of such materials is really impossible. I should like to outline in a few informal notes some of these difficulties; in so doing, I shall try to give full vent to the prejudices which usually prevail among those who take what might be called a strategic, rather than a tactical, view of primary and secondary education. Perhaps we might begin just at this point--with the matter of teaching. Certainly there is a tremendous task of eliciting fruitful attention, joyful seriousness, concentration, and play in the dialectical processes that, even with very small children, go to make up the teacher-pupil relationships. Certainly, too, a consideration of methodologies, of heuristic devices, of ways of reordering the material to be taught is important--even to the extent of revising if necessary the basic notions of what constitutes both the simple and the complex. Methodology is, after all, essential to the loftiest concerns of any student of even the most tiny, intense corner of the field of language, literature, and life. Thus while many college teachers would be appalled at the gimmickery of the manual, they would realize the ne-