English 111 - Week 8

The Politics of Remediation

Mike Rose

1 The counselor's office was always dusky, the sun blocked by thick trees out​side the windows. There was an oversize easy chair by his desk. In it sat Marita, thin, head down, hands in her lap, her shiny hair covering her face. The coun​selor spoke her name, and she looked up, her eyes red in the half-light. The counselor explained that the graduate student who taught her English had ac​cused Marita of plagiarism and had turned her paper over to the director of Freshman English. He asked her to continue, to tell me the story herself.

2 Marita had been at UCLA for about three weeks. This was her first writ​ing assignment. The class had read a discussion of creativity by Jacob Bronowski and were supposed to write papers agreeing or disagreeing with his discussion. What, Marita wondered, would she say? "What is the insight with which the scientist tries to see into nature?" asked Bronowski. Marita wasn't a scientist, and she didn't consider herself to be a particularly creative person, like an artist or an actress. Her father had always been absolute about the expression of opinion, especially with his daughters: "Don't talk unless you know." "All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses," asserted Bronowski. "The world is full of fools who speak in ignorance," Marita's fa​ther would say, and Marita grew up cautious and reticent. Her thoughts on creativity seemed obvious or, worse yet, silly next to this man Bronowski. What did it mean anyway when he said: "We remake nature by the act of dis​covery, in the poem or in the theorem"? She wanted to do well on the assign​ment, so she went to the little library by her house and looked in the encyclopedia. She found an entry on creativity and used some selections from it that had to do with mathematicians and scientists. On the bottom of the last page of her paper, she listed the encyclopedia and her English com​position textbook as her references. What had she done wrong? "They're say​ing I cheated. I didn't cheat." She paused and thought. "You're supposed to use other people, and I did, and I put the name of the book I used on the back of my paper."

3 The counselor handed me the paper. It was clear by the third Sentence that the writing was not all hers. She had incorporated stretches of old ency​clopedia prose into her paper and had quoted only some of it. I couldn't know if she had lifted directly or paraphrased the rest, but it was formal and dated and sprinkled with high-cultural references, just not what you'd find in fresh​man writing. I imagined that it had pleased her previous teachers that she cared enough about her work to go find sources, to rely on experts. Marita had come from a tough school in Compton-an area to the southeast of where I'd grown up-and her conscientiousness and diligence, her commitment to the academic way, must have been a great joy to those who taught her. She shifted, hoisting herself back up from the recesses of the counselor's chair. "Are they going to dismiss me? Are they going to kick me out of school?"

4 Marita was adrift in a set of conventions she didn't fully understand; she offended without knowing why. Virtually all the writing academics do is built on the writing of others. Every argument proceeds from the texts of others. Marita was only partially initiated to how this works: She was still unsure as to how to weave quotations in with her own prose, how to mark the difference, how to cite whom she used, how to strike the proper balance between her writing and someone else's-how, in short, to position herself in an academic discussion.

5 I told Marita that I would talk with her teacher and that I was sure we could work something out, maybe another chance to write the paper. I excused myself and walked slowly back to my office, half lost in thought, reading here and there in the Bronowski excerpt. It was typical fare for Freshman English anthologies, the sort of essay you'd originally find in places like The New Yorker. Bronowski, the eminent scientist, looking back on his career, weaving poetry in with cybernetics, quoting Faust in Ger​man, allusive, learned, reflective.

6 The people who put together those freshman anthologies are drawn to this sort of thing: It's in the tradition of the English essay and reflects rich learning and polished style. But it's easy to forget how difficult these essays can be and how developed a taste they require. When I was at Loyola, some​one recommended I buy Jacques Barzun's The Energies of Art, a collection of "fifteen striking essays on art and culture." I remember starting one essay and stopping, adrift, two or three pages later. Then another, but no go. The words arose from a depth of knowledge and a developed perception and a wealth of received ways to talk about art and a seemingly endless reserve of allusions. I felt like a janitor at a gallery opening, silent, intimidated, little flecks of knowledge-Bagehot, Stendhal, baroque ideology-sticking to the fiber of my broom.

7 Marita's assignment assumed a number of things: an ability to slip into Bronowski's discussion, a reserve of personal experiences that ~ the writer herself would perceive as creative, a knowledge of and facility with-confi​dence with, really-the kinds of stylistic moves you'd find in those New Yorker essays. And it did not assume that someone, by family culture, by gen​der, would be reluctant to engage the reading on its own terms. Marita was being asked to write in a cognitive and social vacuum. I'm sure the other stu​dents in her class had a rough time of it as well. Many competent adult writ​ers would too. But the solution Marita used marked her as an outsider and almost tripped the legal switches of the university.

8 At twenty-eight, Lucia was beginning her second quarter at UCLA. There weren't many people here like her. She was older, had a family, had transferred in from a community college. She represented a population that historically hadn't gained much entrance to places like this: the return​ing student, the single, working mother. She had a network of neighbors and relatives that provided child care. On this day, though, the cousin on tap had an appointment at Immigration, so Lucia brought her baby with her to her psychology tutorial. Her tutor had taken ill that morning, so rather than turn her away, the receptionist brought her in to me, for I had spoken with her before. Lucia held her baby through most of our session, the baby facing her, Lucia's leg moving rhythmically, continually-a soothing movement that rocked him into sleep.

9 Upon entrance to UCLA, Lucia declared a psychology major. She had completed all her preliminary requirements at her community college and now faced that same series of upper-division courses that I took when I aban​doned graduate study in English some years before: Physiological Psychol​ogy, Learning, Perception. . . all that. She was currently enrolled in Abnormal Psychology, "the' study of the dynamics and prevention of abnor​mal behavior." Her professor had begun the course with an intellectual curve ball. He required the class to read excerpts from Thomas Szasz's con​troversial The Myth of Mental Illness, a book that debunks the very notions underlying the traditional psychological study of abnormal behavior, a book that was proving very difficult for Lucia.

10 My previous encounter with Lucia had convinced me that she was an able student. She was conscientious about her studies-recopied notes, vis​ited professors-and she enjoyed writing: she wrote poems in an old copy book and read popular novels, both in Spanish and English. But Szasz-Szasz was throwing her. She couldn't get through the twelve-and-a-half pages of in​troduction. I asked her to read some passages out loud and explain them to me as best she could. And as Lucia read and talked, it became clear to me that while she could, with some doing, pick her way through Szasz's sophis​ticated prose, certain elements of his argument, particular assumptions and allusions, were foreign to her-or, more precisely, a frame of mind or tradi​tion or set of assumptions that was represented by a single word, phrase, or allusion was either unknown to her or clashed dramatically with frames of mind and traditions of her own.

11 Here are the first few lines of Szasz's introduction:

Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases. I submit that this def​inition, which is still widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company of alchemy and astrology and commits it to the category of pseudoscience. The reason for this is that there is no such thing as "mental illness."

One powerful reason Lucia had decided to major in psychology was that she wanted to help people like her brother, who had a psychotic break in his teens and had been in and out of hospitals since. She had lived with mental illness, had seen that look in her brother's eyes, felt drawn to help people whose mind had betrayed them. The assertion that there was no such thing as mental illness, that it was a myth, seemed incomprehensible to her. She had trouble even entertaining it as a hypothesis, and thus couldn't play out its resonances and implications in the pages that followed. Szasz's bold claim was a bone sticking in her assumptive craw.

12 Here's another passage alongside which she had placed a question mark:

The conceptual scaffolding of medicine, however, rests on the principles of physics and chemistry, as indeed it should, for it has been, and contin​ues to be, the task of medicine to study and if necessary to alter, the phys​iochemical structure and function of the human body. Yet the fact remains that human sign-using behavior does not lend itself to exploration and un​derstanding in these terms. We thus remain shackled to the wrong concep​tual framework and terminology.

To understand this passage, you need to have some orientation to the "semi​otic" tenet that every human action potentially carries some kind of mes​sage, that everything we do can be read as a sign of more than itself. This has become an accepted notion in high-powered liberal studies, an inclination to see every action and object as a kind of language that requires interpreta​tion. The notion and its implications-the conversation within which the phrase "sign-using" situates you-was foreign to Lucia. So it was difficult for her to see why Szasz was claiming that medicine was the "wrong conceptual framework" with which to study abnormal behavior.

13 Here's a third passage:

Man thus creates a heavenly father and an imaginary replica of the pro​tected childhood situation to replace the real or longed-for father and fam​ily. The differences between traditional religious doctrine, modern political historicism, and psychoanalytic orthodoxy thus lie mainly in the character of the "protectors": they are, respectively, God and the priests, the totalitarian leader and his apologists, and Freud and the psychoanalysts.

While Freud criticized revealed religion for the patent infantilism that it is, he ignored the social characteristics of closed societies and the psy​chological characteristics of their loyal supporters. He thus failed to see the religious character of the movement he himself was creating.

14 Lucia's working-class Catholicism made it difficult for her to go along with, to intellectually toy with, the comparison of Freud to God, but there was another problem here too, not unlike the problem she had with the "sign-using" passage. It is a standard move in liberal studies to find religious analogues to nonreligious behaviors, structures, and institutions. Lucia could certainly "decode" and rephrase a sentence like: "He thus failed to see the religious character of the movement he himself was creating," but she didn't have the background to appreciate what happens to Freud and psy​choanalysis the moment Szasz makes his comparison, wasn't familiar with the wealth of conclusions that would follow from the analogy.

15 And so it went with other key passages. Students like Lucia are often thought to be poor readers or to have impoverished vocabularies (though Lucia speaks two languages); I've even heard students like her referred to as culturally illiterate (though she has absorbed two cultural heritages). It's true there were words Lucia didn't know (alchemy, orthodoxy) and sentences that took us two or three passes to untangle. But it seemed more fruitful to see Lucia's difficulties in understanding Szasz as having to do with her belief sys​tem and with her lack of familiarity with certain ongoing discussions in hu​manities and social science-with frames of mind, predispositions, and background knowledge. To help Lucia with her reading, then, I explained five or six central discussions that go on in liberal studies: the semiotic discus​sion, the sacred-profane discussion, the medical vs. social model discussion. While I did this, I was encouraging her to talk through opinions of her own that ran counter to these discussions. That was how she improved her reading of Szasz. The material the professor assigned that followed the introduction built systematically off it, so once Lucia was situated in that introduction, she had a framework to guide her through the long passages that followed, all of which elaborated those first twelve pages.

16 The baby pulled his face out of his mother's chest, yawned, squirmed, and turned to fix on me, wide-eyed. Lucia started packing up her books with a free hand. I had missed lunch. "Let's go," I said. "I'll walk out with you." Her movement distressed the baby, so Lucia soothed him with soft coos and clicks, stood up, and shifted him to her hip. We left Campbell Hall and headed southeast, me toward a sandwich, Lucia toward the buses that ran up and down Hilgard on UCLA's east boundary. It was a beautiful California day, and the jacarandas were in full purple bloom. Lucia talked about her baby's little discoveries, about a cousin who worried her, about her growing familiarity with this sprawling campus. "I'm beginning to know where things are," she said, pursing her lips. "You know, the other day some guy stopped me and asked me where Murphy Hall was. . . and I could tell him." She looked straight at me: "It felt pretty good!" We walked on like this, her dress hiked up where the baby rode her hip, her books in a bag slung over her shoulder, and I began to think about how many pieces had to fall into place each day in order for her to be a student: The baby couldn't wake up sick, no colic or rashes, the cousin or a neighbor had to be available to watch him, the three buses she took from East L.A. had to be on time-no accidents or breakdowns or strikes- for travel alone took up almost three hours of her school day. Only if all these pieces dropped in smooth alignment could her full attention shift to the complex and allusive prose of Thomas Szasz. "Man thus creates a heavenly father and an imaginary replica of the protected childhood situation to replace the real or longed-for father and family."

17 James had a different reaction to failure.

18 He sat in my office and repeated that he was doing okay, that he'd been studying hard and would pull his grades up on his finals. "I've got my study skills perfected, and I am punctual about visiting the library." He paused and looked at his legs, placed his two hands palms down on his thighs, and then he pressed. "I will make it. My confidence was down before." James was on academic probation; he needed to pass all his courses or he would be what they called STD: subject to dismissal. "I've got the right attitude now. I took a motivation course over the break, and that helped me improve my study skills and get my priorities straight." He was looking right at me as he said all this: handsome, muscular, preppy. Dressed for success. Mechanical successfulness. I'm okay, you're okay. Jay Gatsby would have noted his poise and elocution. I sat there quietly listening, trying to decide what to do with his forced jock talk. I drifted a little, trying to conjure up the leader of James' "motivation seminar," the person delivering to him a few techniques and big promises: a way to skim a page or manage his time. James listened desperately and paid his money and went off with a positive attitude and his study skills perfected, emboldened with a set of gimmicks, holding a dream together with gum and string.

19 James's tutor suggested that he come see me because he was getting somewhere between a C and a D in his composition course and seemed in​creasingly unable to concentrate. His responses to the tutor's questions were getting vague and distracted. I asked James for his paper and could quickly see that he had spent time on it; it was typed and had been proof​read. I read further and understood the C-; his essay missed the mark of the assignment, which required James to critically analyze a passage from John Berger's Ways of Seeing. What he did instead was summarize. This was something I had seen with students who lacked experience writing papers that required them to take an idea carefully apart. They approach the task in terms they can handle, retell the material to you, summarize it, demonstrate that, yes, they can understand the stuff, and here it is. Sometimes it is very hard to get them to see 'that summary is not adequate, for it had been ade​quate so many times before. What you have to do, then, is model step by step the kind of critical approach the paper requires. And that was what I started to do with James.

20 I asked him what he thought Berger's reason was for writing Ways of Seeing, and he gave me a pretty good answer. I asked another question, and for a brief while it seemed that he was with me. But then he stopped and said, "I should have gotten better than a C-. I think I deserve way higher than that." There is was. A brand. I said that I knew the grade was a disap​pointment, but if he'd stick with me he'd do better. He didn't say much more. He looked away. I had tacitly agreed with his teacher, so we were past discussing the paper: We were discussing his identity and his future. I work hard, he's really saying to me. I go to class. I read the book. I write the paper. Can't you see. I'm not a C-. Don't tell me I'm a C-. He was looking straight ahead past me at the wall. His hands were still on his legs.

21 Students were coming to college with limited exposure to certain kinds of writing and reading and with conceptions and beliefs that were dissonant with those in the lower-division curriculum they encountered. And that curriculum wasn't doing a lot to address their weaknesses or nurture their strengths. They needed practice writing academic essays; they needed op​portunities to talk about their writing-and their reading; they needed peo​ple who could quickly determine what necessary background knowledge they lacked and supply it in comprehensible ways. What began troubling me about the policy documents and the crisis reports was that they focused too narrowly on test scores and tallies of error and other such measures. They lacked careful analysis of the students' histories and lacked, as well, analysis of the cognitive and social demands of the academic culture the students now faced. The work I was doing in the Tutorial Center, in the Writing Re​search Project, and in the Summer Program was guiding me toward a richer understanding of what it meant to be underprepared in the American re​search university. It seemed to me there were five overlapping problem areas-both cognitive and social-that could be used to explain the difficul​ties experienced by students like Marita and James and Lucia. These by no means applied equally to all the students whom I came to know, but taken together they represent, better than pie charts and histograms, what it means to be underprepared at a place like UCLA. Many young people come to the university able to summarize the events in a news story or write a per​sonal response to a play or a movie or give back what a teacher said in a straightforward lecture. But they have considerable trouble with what has come to be called critical literacy: framing an argument or taking someone else's argument apart, systematically inspecting a document, an issue, or an event, synthesizing different points of view, applying a theory to disparate phenomena, and so on. The authors of the crisis reports got tremendously distressed about students' difficulty with such tasks, but it's important to remember that, traditionally, such abilities have only been developed in an elite: in priests, scholars, or a leisure class. Ours is the first society in history to expect so many of its people to be able to perform these very so​phisticated literacy activities. And we fail to keep in mind how extraordi​nary it is to ask all our schools to conduct this kind of education-not just those schools with lots of money and exceptional teachers and small classes-but massive, sprawling schools, beleaguered schools, inner-city schools, overcrowded schools. It is a charge most of them simply are not equipped to fulfill, for our educational ideals far outstrip our economic and political priorities.

22 We forget, then, that by most historical-and current-standards, the vast majority of a research university's underprepared students would be considered competently literate. Though they fail to meet the demands made of them in their classes, they fail from a literate base. They are literate people straining at the boundaries of their ability, trying to move into the unfamiliar, to approximate a kind of writing they can't yet command. And as they try, they'll make all the blunders in word choice and sentence struc​ture and discourse strategy that regularly get held up for ridicule, that I made when I was trying to write for my teachers at Loyola. There's a related phenomenon, and we have research evidence of this: As writers move fur​ther away from familiar ways of expressing themselves, the strains on their cognitive and linguistic resources increase, and the number of mechanical and grammatical errors they make shoots up. Before we shake our heads at these errors, we should also consider the possibility that many such linguis​tic bungles are signs of growth, a stretching beyond what college freshmen can comfortably do with written language. In fact, we should welcome cer​tain kinds of errors, make allowance for them in the curricula we develop, analyze rather than simply criticize them. Error marks the place where edu​cation begins.

23 Asked to produce something that is beyond them, writers might also fall back on strategies they already know. Asked to take a passage critically apart, they'll summarize it. We saw this with James, the young man dis​tressed with his C-, but as with so much else in this book, the principle ap​plies to more than just those labeled underprepared. I was personally reminded of it when I was writing my dissertation. My chairman was an ed​ucational research methodologist and statistician; my background straddled humanities and social science, but what I knew about writing tended to be shaped by literary models. When it came time to report on the procedures I was using in my study-the methods section of the dissertation-I wrote a detailed chronology of what I did and how I did it. I wanted to relay all the twists and turns of my investigation. About a week later I got it back covered with criticism. My chairman didn't want the vagaries of my investigative life; he wanted a compressed and systematic account. "What do you think this is," he wrote alongside one long, dancing stretch of narrative, "Travels with Charley?"

24 Associated with these difficulties with critical literacy are students' diverse orientations toward inquiry. It is a source of exasperation to many freshmen that the university is so predisposed to question past solutions, to seek coun​terexplanations-to continually turn something nice and clean and clear into a problem. English professor David Bartholomae recalls a teacher of his sug​gesting that, when stuck, student writers should try the following "machine": "While most readers of - have said -, a close and careful reading shows that _." The teacher's machine perfectly expresses the ethos of the university, a fundamental orientation toward inquiry. University profes​sors have for so long been socialized into this critical stance, that they don't realize how unsettling it can be to students who don't share their unusual background.

25 There is Scott sitting in an Astronomy tutorial, his jaw set, responding to another student's question about a finite versus an infinite universe: "This is the kind of question," he says, "that you'll argue and argue about. It's stupid. No one wins. So why do it?" And there is Rene who 'can't get beyond the first few sentences of her essay for Speech. She has to write a critical response to an address of Ronald Reagan's. "You can't criticize the president," she explains. "You've gotta support your president even if you don't agree with him." When students come from other cultures, this discordance can be even more pronounced. Our tutors continually encouraged their students to read actively, to ask why authors say what they say, what their claims are, what assumptions they make, where you, the reader, agree or disagree. Hun's tutor is explaining this to him, then has him try it, has him read aloud so she can guide him. He reads a few lines and stops short. After two more abortive trials, she pulls out of Hun the explanation that what gets written in books is set in tradition, and he is not learned enough to question the au​thority of the book.

26 Remember Andrea? She was the distressed young woman who was failing chemistry. Andrea could memorize facts and formulas but not use them to solve problems-and her inability was representative of a whole class of dif​ficulties experienced by freshmen. What young people come to define as in​tellectual competence-what it means to know things and use them-is shaped by their schooling. And what many students experience year after year is the exchange of one body of facts for another-an inert transmission, the delivery and redelivery of segmented and self-contained dates and for​mulas-and thus it is no surprise that they develop a restricted sense of how intellectual work is conducted. They are given Ancient History one year and American History the next, and once they've displayed knowledge of the Fer​tile Crescent and cuneiform and Assyrian military campaigns, there is little need for them to remember the material, little further opportunity to incor​porate it, little reason to use these textbook facts to engage historical prob​lems. Next year it will be American History: a new textbook, new dates and documents and campaigns, new tests-but the same rewards, and the same reasons to forget. John Dewey saw the difficulty long ago: "Only in educa​tion, never in the life of the farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or labora​tory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing."

27 Students like Andrea are caught in a terrible bind. They come to the university with limited experience in applying knowledge, puzzling over solutions, solving problems. Many of the lower-division courses they en​counter-their "general education" or "breadth" requirements-will involve little writing or speaking or application, will rely on so-called objective tests that, with limited exception, stress the recall of material rather than the rea​soned elaboration of it. But the gatekeeper courses-the courses that deter​mine entrance to a major-they up the intellectual ante. Courses like Andrea's bete noire, Chemistry II-A, are placed like land mines in the uneven terrain of the freshman year. The special nature of their demands is not made the focus of attention that it should be; that is, the courses are not taught explicitly and self-consciously as courses on how to think as a chemist or a psychologist or a literary critic. And there are few opportunities for students to develop such ability before they enroll in those courses. The faculty, for the most part, do not provide freshmen with instruction on how to use knowledge creatively ​and then penalize them when they cannot do so.

28 It is not unusual for students to come to the university with conceptualiza​tions of disciplines that are out of sync with academic reality. Like the note taker in the lecture hall who opened this chapter, a lot of entering fresh​men assume that sociology is something akin to social work, an applied study of social problems rather than an attempt to abstract a theory about social interaction and organization. Likewise, some think psychology will be a discussion of human motivation and counseling, what it is that makes people do what they do-and some coverage of ways to change what they do. It comes as a surprise that their textbook has only one chapter on per​sonality and psychotherapy-and a half dozen pages on Freud. The rest is animal studies, computer models of thought, lots of neurophysiology. If they like to read novels, and they elect a literature course, they'll expect to talk about characters and motive and plot, but instead they're asked to sit​uate the novel amid the historical forces that shaped it, to examine rhetori​cal and stylistic devices and search the prose for things that mean more than they seem to mean. Political science should be politics and govern​ment and current events-nuclear treaties, trade sanctions, and Iran-Contra scandal-but instead it's Marx and Weber and political economy and orga​nizational and decision-making models. And so goes the litany of misdirec​tion. This dissonance between the academy's and the students' definitions of disciplines makes it hard for students to get their bearings with material: to know what's important, to see how the pieces fit together, to follow an argument, to have a sense of what can be passed over lightly. Thus I would see notebooks that were filled-in frantic script-with everything the pro​fessor said or that were scant and fragmented, records of information with​out coherence.

29 The discourse of academics is marked by terms and expressions that represent an elaborate set of shared concepts and orientations: alienation, authoritarian personality, the social construction of the self, determinism, hegemony, equilibrium, intentionality, recursion, reinforcement, and so on. This language weaves through so many lectures and textbooks, is integral to so many learned discussions, that it's easy to forget what a foreign language it can be. Freshmen are often puzzled by the talk they hear in their classrooms, but what's important to note here is that their problem is not simply one of limited vocabulary. If we see the problem as knowing or not knowing a list or words, as some quick-fix remedies suggest2 then we'll force glossaries on stu​dents and miss the complexity of the issue. Take, for example, authoritarian personality. The average university freshman will know what personality means and can figure out authoritarian; the difficulty will come from a lack of familiarity with the conceptual resonances that authoritarian personality has acquired in the discussions of sociologists and psychologists and political scientists. Discussion. . . you could almost define a university education as an initiation into a variety of powerful ongoing discussions, an initiation that can occur only through the repeated use of a new language in the company of others. More than anything, this was the opportunity people like Father Al​bertson, my Shakespeare teacher at Loyola, provided to me. The more com​fortable and skillful students become with this kind of influential talk, the more they will be included in further conversations and given access to fur​ther conceptual tools and resources-the acquisition of which virtually de​fines them as members of an intellectual community.

30 All students require such an opportunity. But those coming to the uni​versity with less-than-privileged educations, especially those from the lower classes, are particularly in need. They are less likely to have participated, in any extended way, in such discussions in the past. They won't have the con​fidence or the moves to enter it, and can begin to feel excluded, out of place, put off by a language they can't command. Their social marginality, then, is reinforced by discourse and, as happened to me during my first year at Loyola, they might well withdraw, retreat to silence.

31 This sense of linguistic exclusion can be complicated by various cultural differences. When I was growing up, I absorbed an entire belief system ​with its own characteristic terms and expressions-from the worried conver​sations of my parents, from the things I heard and saw on South Vermont, from the priest's fiery tales. I thought that what happened to people was pre​ordained, that ability was a fixed thing, that there was one true religion. I had rigid notions about social roles, about the structure of society, about gender, about politics. There used to be a rickety vending machine at Man​chester and Vermont that held a Socialist Workers newspaper. I'd walk by it and feel something alive and injurious: The paper was malevolent and should be destroyed. Imagine, then, the difficulty I had when, at the beginning of my senior year at Mercy High, Jack MacFarland tried to explain Marxism to us. How could I absorb the language of atheistic materialism and class strug​gle when it seemed so strange and pernicious? It wasn't just that Marxist terms-of-art were unfamiliar; they felt assaultive. What I did was revert to def​initions of the social order more familiar to me, and Mr. MacFarland had to draw them out of me and have me talk about them and consider them along​side Marx's vision and terminology, examining points of conflict and points of possible convergence. It was only then that I could appropriate Marx's strange idiom.

32 Once you start to think about underprepared students in terms of these over​lapping problem areas, all sorts of solutions present themselves. Students need more opportunities to write about what they're learning and guidance in the techniques and conventions of that writing-what I got from my men​tors at Loyola. They need more opportunities to develop the writing strate​gies that are an intimate part of academic inquiry and what has come to be called critical literacy-comparing, synthesizing, analyzing-the sort of thing I gave the veterans. They need opportunities to talk about what they’re learning: to test their ideas, reveal their assumptions, talk through the places where new knowledge clashes with ingrained belief. They need a chance, too, to talk about the ways they may have felt excluded from all this in the past and may feel threatened by it in the present. They need the occasion to rise above the fragmented learning the lower-division curricu​lum encourages, a place within a course or outside it to hear about and re​flect on the way a particular discipline conducts its inquiry: Why, for example, do so many psychologists who study thinking rely on computer modeling? Why is mathematics so much a part of economics? And they need to be let in on the secret talk, on the shared concepts and catch​phrases of Western liberal learning.

33 There is nothing magical about this list of solutions. In fact, in many

ways, it reflects the kind of education a privileged small number of American students have received for some time. The basic question our society must ask, then, is: How many or how few do we want to have this education? If stu​dents didn't get it before coming to college-and most have not-then what are we willing to do to give it to them now? Chip and I used to talk about our special programs as attempts to create an Honors College for the underpre​pared. People would smile as we spoke, but, as our students would have said, we were serious as a heart attack. The remedial programs we knew about did a disservice to their students by thinking of them as remedial. We wanted to tryout another perspective and see what kind of program it would yield. What would happen if we thought of our students' needs and goals in light of the comprehensive and ambitious program structures more often reserved for the elite?

34 Not too long ago I was speaking about curriculum at another university. It

was a lunchtime speech, preceded by murmurs and clinking glassware, and I was about to leave my chair for the podium when a young woman walked up to me and asked me if I remembered her. She was vaguely familiar, a little lighter or a little heavier than someone I once knew, hair longer, shorter maybe-something. "I'm Concepcion Baca," she said, extending her hand. "I was in the first summer program. I'm in graduate school here. I'm in Compar​ative Literature." She paused. "You're surprised, aren't you? I bet I'm the last person you expected to see here," Well, not the last. But I was surprised.

35 After my talk, Concepcion and I sat down together. She had come, it turned out, because the director of Freshman Writing at this school had asked his teaching assistants to attend. He came over and joined us. Concep​cion, he said, was one of his best writing teachers. She was also doing excel​lent work in her graduate studies. Comparative Literature is a backbreaking degree-you must be proficient in the literature of three languages-and Concepcion was getting close to the dissertation stage. "So, how'd you end up here?," I asked. "Well," she shrugged, "it's a long story. Did you know that I dropped out of UCLA?" I didn't, and as she spoke, I heard an interesting and not unfamiliar story.

36 Concepcion stayed at UCLA for almost two years, taking a range of courses, from history and psychology to English and linguistics. Her record was spotty: some A's, some C's, two incompletes that turned to F's because she failed to make them up. That put her on academic probation. In the middle of her sophomore year, she quit. "I never really got used to living away from home," she explained. "I never felt right about it." She had trou​ble deciding on a major. Her best grades were in Latin American Studies, American Immigrant History, and English. She had liked English in the summer program and elected three or four other English courses along the way. Her teachers said her writing was okay, told her she should work on it. But what would she do with an English major? Her parents were spending a lot of money on her. She missed them. What would she major in? How could she keep going to school when their money was so tight? She with​drew and went to work. Two years later, she entered a different University of California campus. She had made some money herself and had a lot of time to think about those two years at UCLA. She liked cultural history and English, and those interests led her to comparative literature. She blos​somed. She graduated with very good grades and went on to graduate school.

37 People who work in tutoring centers and preparatory programs get used to spending intense bursts of time with their students. You get closely involved for a few weeks or a few months, and then you send them off. And you wonder. You know some won't make it. There's too much working against their success. They'll drift in and out of academic probation, their transcripts a listing of C's, C-minuses, a D or two, and then the fatal F that exits them. That was what happened to Andrea, the young woman who was having such a miserable time with chemistry, who I was afraid might hurt herself just to escape. She was longing to be premed when General Chem​istry was insurmountable. There are some, though, who do make it. Even those you thought were doomed. There was Vincent, whose summer pro​gram teacher commented that his writing was "very poor," who was on aca​demic probation for part of his freshman year, who kept showing up at the Tutorial Center to work on his writing, who finally had to withdraw but came back and cleared his record as a sophomore-and by the time he was a junior was getting B's, who earned an A-minus in Advanced Composition during his senior year. Vincent's parents were migrant workers in South Fresno. Neither had gone to high school. Vincent was now thinking about graduate school in urban planning. It can happen.

38 As I was driving home, I thought about Concepcion. I thought about how long it sometimes takes to achieve a balance, how much of myself I saw in her, how easy it would have been to misperceive her as a freshman: scattershot course selection, incompletes, C's in introductory courses, probation-and fi​nally withdrawal. She was listed, I'm sure, as one of the summer program's failures. An attrition statistic. Concepcion eventually found her way; many like her aren't as fortunate. Research universities are awful places for fresh​man to be adrift, to be searching, to be in need. Attrition may be a blessing, as many contend, for it naturally purges the university of those who don't be​long, those who never should have come. There's a kind of harsh institutional truth to that, I suppose, but to embrace it, you'll have to limit your definition of achievement-blunt your sense of wonder. What you'll have to do, finally, is narrow your vision of the society you want to foster.

Works cited information for this article:

Rose, Mike . "The Politics of Remediation." Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge, and

College Writing. Ed. K Fitzgerald et al. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College

Publishers, 1998. 32-45.