My studying of writing continues and I once again find myself angry with heartburn at academia. Why am I going to fail out of grad school? Because I seem incapable of pretending to believe what they want me to believe. Obviously if I want to graduate (which I do) I need to get my stuff together (which I haven't). I hate everything.

More to the point--I have been considering No Child Left Behind and I am in need of envisioning some way to take it down. I'm talking covert ops mission here people. I may be about as sneaky as a mac truck, but for this situation I feel I could whip out my hidden ninja. NCLB is such a bad idea that it might have a place alongside such activities as the Spanish Inquisition.

We want to "fix" education we want to "fix" our students. We want to be the best. In my readings I found one sentence that I feel perfectly describes this need. It comes from Mike Rose and his discussion of the teaching of English. The focus of writing instruction was narrowed to grammar and mechanics because they were quantifiable. Rose sums it up when he says, "The narrow focus was made even more narrow by a fetish for 'scientific' tabulation" (553). I love that. "fetish for 'scientific' tabulation." Have you ever heard it described better? I think not.

Dear old Plato divided our heads from our hearts and we've been fighting with ourselves ever sense. I must be logical, I must be rational, I must be quantifiable. Never mind the fact that you are you regardless of how much you ignore yourself. Never mind that your emotions affect you regardless of how much you ignore them. Oh no, suppress them, control them! It began with Plato and was exacerbated by Freud. And now we find ourselves, a culture overridden by its fetish for science, following the scientific method even when not applicable. Forcing activities into quantifiable results that cannot be translated into numbers. Or, perhaps, everything can be translated into numbers, but until it is understood, I would argue, the translation will be flawed. Humans speak first in words, second in numbers (a mathematician might argue with me here) and for the majority (see how I qualify myself?) they must first describe their reality in words before it can be described or predicted or quantified. Composition studies is an excellent example of this. In an effort to improve the teaching of writing (isn't it always in an effort to improve) hypothesis were made and theories put in place that predicted particular outcomes. Thus it was we had quantifiable data and ways to measure it, but we never stopped to consider if it actually applied. Soon it was discovered the writing process was complex, recursive, that people learned differently than we imagined. But how do you measure or account for human thought?

To consider the student, to understand what is driving the student (and in turn to teach more effectively) is emotional, soft, bad science. We need an applicable theory that does not allow for malleability. It must work for everyone in every case and be taught to new teachers in under four years. It never occurred to anyone that a teacher armed with a general, malleable theory who could self-analyze and react to different teaching situations might better stimulate the writing process and help students become better writers. Or maybe that did occur to someone, but they didn't know how to test it. After all, we need a way to gauge students before they hit the workplace. Knowledge exists in a vacuum and, thus, it can be taught and tested that way.

I'm ranting, and perhaps not making any sense. My annoyance derives specifically from the way that we as a culture, in our fetishizing of science cut out the parts of human beings that are messy. We relegate them to teenagers and chick-flicks, alcoholics, and fools. Occasionally someone says something brilliant and we quote it like a fortune cookie, put it up on our wall and cease to reconsider it in new ways. We search for ways to scientifically prove things the common person already knows is true. Male scientists "prove" that hormones affect people (specifically women) or psychologists "prove" suppression of emotion is unhealthy. Well, now that we've proven it I can feel better about myself.

I'm not arguing against science here, I'm arguing against science as religion. Once science becomes a vacuum, a place where all truth resides and neglects to acknowledge the existence, or even the possibility of existence, of truth outside of what it might hypothesize and/or prove it ceases to be useful. It becomes reductive and limiting. It no longer allows us to better understand our world, anticipate and live in it, but tells us what we may or may not do/believe/allow. It tells us what we should or should not feel, what is and is not valid. Why do women get angry when you ask them if they are PMSing? Because you are invalidating their emotions. You are, in effect, saying "if you were rational, non-hormonal, manly, you wouldn't feel this and, thus, I do not have to acknowledge with any seriousness or contemplation on my part what you are saying." This happens because now we know what PMS is; we have proven it. But we never bothered to consider if PMS creates emotion or exacerbates it. If it is actually controllable or not.

I am not suffering from PMS right now. And my problems, while most recently inflamed by composition scholarship, are not about any one thing. They are, rather, an issue with society as a whole. That's not surprising really, but what I ask you is--after you discover how something happens do you ever really consider why?