The Schools We Need
When public education fails, democracy fails with it
BY ERIK REECE
Published in the September/October 2011 issue of Orion magazine
IT’S A COLD DECEMBER EVENING in Lexington, Kentucky, and I’m sitting by the fire with a teetering stack of final essays from ENG 104: Freshman Comp. I know what I’m in for. All semester I’ve been hectoring my fifty-odd students to insert commas after introductory phrases, to improve paragraph development, and to remember that the phrase for granted (as in “take for granted”) means “to accept,” whereas for granite, the phrase they often use instead, could only suggest homage to that igneous rock, something akin to W. H. Auden’s poem “In Praise of Limestone.”
It’s been a tough three months. I had been away from full-time teaching for a few years, and away from eighteen-year-olds for longer. From 1995 to 2005, I taught four, sometimes five, sections of Freshman Comp each semester. I read roughly 8,000 essays during that decade—200,000 pages, 50,000,000 words. After all