Things to Say, V

I’ll give one example of how bad the situation is in a typical university these days; trust me when I say that this is far from the most entangled problem one could encounter.

I once taught a passage from Pride and Prejudice as part of a rhetoric class—specifically, the scene where Mr. Collins proposes to Lizzy Bennet.  I started with a video clip, had the students read the texts, had discussion and writing assignments tied in.  It was funny, it was grippy, a lot of the students at least enjoyed the assignment, and maybe one or two learned something about rhetoric.

But imagine, for a moment, that I had a student who was convinced that Lizzy refused Mr. Collins because he was a minister, and ministers/priests are not supposed to be married.*  This student is utterly convinced that he has pinpointed Mr. Collins’s rhetorical failure, and utterly, devastatingly wrong.  He was convinced that Lizzy refused Mr. Collins’s proposal because it is grossly immoral to marry a priest.

There are all sorts of problems with this, no?

(a)   The text refers to Mr. Collins not as a (Roman Catholic and hence, presumably, bound to celibacy) priest, but as a clergyman; and the Church of England had married clergy at the time—it was, in fact, the norm.  The student has no concept of the possibility that older texts might use words like “minister” or “clergy” more flexibly than his own experience allows, and assumes that they are mere synonyms for “priest.”

(b)   There are different cultural rules for priestly marriage in any case, in different places and times.  Pagans, Christians, and Jews have all had married priests; and the Roman Church in the west even today grants exceptions for some married priests, for instance in those cases where a man entering from, say, Anglicanism is already married.

(c)   Furthermore, while there are some cultural matters (such as infanticide, spouse-beating, and slavery) which are sufficiently contrary to natural law that they might possibly trigger alarm bells even for those within a culture, there are other cultural matters—like whether religious leaders should marry—which are more obviously about prudence than about right and wrong.  Bottom line, from this and (b), Lizzy can’t be morally outraged by something that is neither absolutely wrong nor considered wrong within her culture.

(d)   And finally, er, well, there’s nothing in the text to indicate that Lizzy is upset because Mr. Collins is a clergyman.  (Her baby sister, on the other hand …)

But all of this assumes a tremendous background of knowledge—not reason, not innate intelligence, but just knowing stuff about human history—that the student doesn’t have.  And I can’t provide it all in one or two or even ten meetings.

The students I taught weren’t badly educated.  Too often, however, they simply were undereducated, and they didn't always know it.  And so that text and just about any other that they were going to encounter were going to be locked to them for the foreseeable future.

*I say “imagine this” because I actually never had a student make this particular error.  I would not out a student, even anonymously, on a blog.  But trust me when I say that I had students who made interpretive mistakes and clung to them tenaciously.