ENG101: In-Class Writing: Analysis: Ed Schools vs. Education

My second paper for my ENG101 class. This was an in-class essay analyzing an editorial by George Will, “Ed Schools vs. Education“. We’d been given the article the week prior, so we’d be able to prepare and bring along anything we needed (short of an already-written essay) to prepare.

Final grade: 100% (plus a smiley face and the notation, “Couldn’t have said it better myself!”).

Michael Hanscom
JC Clapp
English 101
January 31, 2006

Conservative columnist George Will, in his January 16, 2006 Newsweek column “Ed Schools vs. Education” (Will) proposes a bold and somewhat startling method of improving the quality of education in America. The best way to save our schools, he says, would be to “close all the schools of education.”

Of course, such a suggestion, while an excellent way to grab the reader’s attention, is not Will’s true claim — rather, it is hyperbole in the same style as Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Will’s actual claim is that today’s teachers are trained to teach politically correct pablum rather than any actual, useable knowledge. This theme is implicit throughout Will’s column only approaching an explicit statement in the context of a quote. Will appropriates Heather Mac Donald’s claim that today’s teaching “dogma…is about ‘self-actualization’ or ‘finding one’s joy’…. But is never about anything as banal as mere knowledge.” This approach, Will emphasizes, is to blame for the poor performance of American students today.

While the article was printed in the widely-read news magazine Newsweek and thus aimed to at least some extent at anyone concerned with the state of US education, his primary audience is collegiate-level teachers and education students. The language he uses is very dense, peppered with statements similar to the beginning of his fifth paragraph: “The permeation of ed schools by politics is a consequence of the vacuity of their curricula.” His prose is a far cry from the sixth grade reading level often used as a baseline in popular news and media sources, and is likely to exclude many less educated readers from his argument.

His overall tone is extremely snide and sarcastic, especially when he deigns to address his opposition. Will carefully picks excerpts from school websites and mission statements in order to make them look as ridiculous as possible. When he lambasts the University of Alabama College of Education’s stated goals to “promote social justice” instead of teaching students to “read, write and reason,” he is ignoring their primary mission statement, and instead excerpting sections of their ‘Conceptual Framework’ under a heading titled, ‘Diversity, Difference, and Social Justice.’ This cherry-picking of information to prove a point shows an obvious slant to his argument.

Ethos is not used in Will’s argument, although his often sarcastic use of Pathos can make this distinction easy to miss. Logos is used sparsely, and almost exclusively as a springboard into Pathos: an excerpt from a school’s mission statement or a set of statistics become the basis for another sarcastic attack. When “only 31 percent of college graduates [are] able to read…complex material,” it is because “their teachers were too busy…’breaking silences’ as ‘change agents.'”

Will neither qualifies his arguments nor proposes any sort of solution. In the end, this makes his argument ineffectual — while he presents a good case for their being problems, his sarcastic tone and lack of any sort of solution leave his column little more than an erudite rant. Will’s own education works against him as he comes across as an intelligent blowhard who bludgeons a good point into incoherence.

Works Cited:

Will, George. “Ed Schools vs. Education.” Newsweek 16 Jan. 2006. “