Dumbed-Down Education Is The Real Problem

Of all the hills upon which to die, fighting to “eradicate” a handful of graphic novels from a community college English course would seem a terrifically small one.

Still, it’s difficult not to admire the stubborn determination of Tara Shultz and her parents in making a First Amendment mountain out of a molehill.

Miss Shultz, a 20-year-old student at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, was horrified to discover that her English 250 course this past spring semester included among its required readings several award-winning graphic novels, including Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” and Brian Vaughan’s “Y: The Last Man.”

Do you know what separates a serious “graphic novel” from a garden-variety comic book? Sex, nudity, coarse language and a bit of the old ultraviolence, for the most part. Also: critical acclaim. (For the record, I’ve read the graphic novels in question and I didn’t find them nearly as objectionable.)

Shultz and her parents complained to the college about the content of the course. Her father, Greg, said he objected to a fraction of his tax dollars paying for such smut. “If they put a disclaimer on this, we wouldn’t have taken the course,” he said.

His daughter was a bit more strident, as young people tend to be. “At most I would like the books eradicated from the system,” she told the Redlands Daily Facts. “I don’t want them taught anymore. I don’t want anyone else to have to read this garbage.”

“I didn’t expect to open the book and see that graphic material within,” she said. “I expected Batman and Robin, not pornography.”

Naturally, the Shultzes have taken a beating online from self-proclaimed paladins of free expression. Not that she ever had a prayer of the administration acquiescing to her demands – it’s a public community college, after all.

This isn’t a censorship story. The problem here isn’t the allegedly pornographic content of the reading. No, this is an educational malpractice story. Why was Ms. Shultz looking for Batman and Robin in the first place? For an easy A? Where’s the rigor?

It’s no secret that a shockingly large segment of students can neither read nor write at a college level. An English course that treats books with pictures on par with the novel or narrative poem is just one symptom of the disease.

As more students seek higher education, the pressure to dumb down the curriculum is insurmountable. And so colleges (and the high schools that feed into them) struggle to making literature “accessible” to a largely indifferent, post-literate, “TL;DR” (that’s “too long; didn’t read” for the unhip) generation.

Think I’m exaggerating? Penguin Books – a major publishing house – just launched a line of Shakespeare plays written entirely in “txtspeak” and emojis. If you don’t know what that means, count this as an instance where ignorance truly is bliss.

Crafton Hills’ muckety mucks last week countered the Shultzes complaint with assurances that the controversial English course had been fully vetted. The college has a curriculum committee consisting of 10 to 15 faculty members that regularly reviews course outlines and materials. Somehow that doesn’t make it any better.

True, it isn’t the role of professors to coddle their students’ beliefs or values. Often the best teachers are the ones who challenge students to broaden their intellectual horizons. But what if the “broader horizon” in this instance remains a blinkered view?

I perused a few years’ worth of Crafton Hills’ English course offerings. As you might expect of a community college, it’s a mixed bag. Predictably, gender and identity politics are well represented, along with surveys of American and British literature. So is the sort of stuff that stretches the standard definition of “English lit” to its outer limits – film classes, kids’ books and, of course, comics.

I understand Tara Shultz’s desire to speak out against a frivolous and often perverse culture. Nihilism is in the very air we breathe. But hers is a narrow and ultimately futile crusade.

If Ms. Shultz is serious, then she should redirect her attention and youthful energy toward studying serious things: Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Twain – not Batman and Robin.

This piece originally appeared in The Press Enterprise.

This piece originally appeared in The Press Enterprise