Sunday, October 10, 2010

Teaching Writing at CDE

Padma Devkota
Teaching Writing at CDE
The Central Department of English (CDE) offers a compulsory Writing Course in its first year degree programme to help students conduct independent research and to write creatively and critically. Since students who write well usually score high in all other courses including Thesis, both students and teachers need to take writing seriously.    
CDE, however, has failed to deliver this course with any significant degree of success. Because instructors are not properly trained and monitored, they tend to discuss theories of writing more than actually make students write. Both the academic leadership and the size of the class are responsible for this. But it is simply unfortunate that most of the instructors have never been formally trained to write during their academic career. 
If no student is worth the MA English degree without at least some mastery over English language, anyone is free to examine the quality of MA theses that graduating students produce. With a few exceptions, one can easily demonstrate a general failure of the very basics of writing in many of these research works. I will not delve into cases of collusion, cut-n'-paste, and other malpractices that are growing and will soon swamp many departments.
Most of these problems can be effectively solved if teachers supervise theses properly, and seriously teach students to write. Instead, certain attitudes have intervened in the possibility of team spirit in the department. Besides the attitude of fawning students and each other, already discussed in "Celebration of Mediocrity," the other is one of fancied superiority of theoreticians over those condescendingly accepted as traditional colleagues. This I-know-more-than-thou attitude is unfortunately founded more on vanity than on actual meritorious scholarship. A neologism-spangled speech may dazzle the innocent public's eye, which, for lack of academic discrimination, can only behold an aura of versatile eminence of the speaker. But what of that! While the best literary scholars of the world strive hard to be simple, our students are brainwashed into thinking that the bigger the words they use, the wiser they are. They, therefore, argue that if you praise the fawning blurbs on their book, you are a postcolonialist, and, if you do not praise these blurbs, you are a colonialist. There is your sample postgraduate in English MA educated by theoreticians and groomed by "some higher consciousness" as SB Shrestha rightly perceives in "Strategic Minds" (TKP Dec 4, 2005).
While teachers have only to be honest to themselves and to their students to improve the situation, it is doubtful that some even read exam copies or chapters of a thesis submitted for correction. How can they if they supervise more than a dozen theses at a time? Why should they when the law of least sacrifice is human nature? Therefore, thesis writing has become a mere ritual where, to the utter neglect of desired research competence, some non-academic criteria help promote the student-loving teacher's image as a generous marker. And, in order to justify this, some claim that a good knowledge of postcoloniality and Marxism is enough to be a "nearly eighty-percent" scholar despite any fuzzy, non-academic writing ("Tantra and English," TKP October 16, 2005). Granted that knowledge is knowledge, the ability to express oneself must somewhere feature as a sign of education. However, for the present I will also concede to opposition to my line of argument because many of those who teach writing do not write well themselves.
    For instance, when faced with such criticism, a richly arrogant but poorly composed Letter to the Editor befuddled the public with such jargons as "expressionism" and "elitism" (Abhi Subedi, TKP October 4, 2005). In the name of unfortunate Stony Brook, doctors with neither sense nor sensibility spit personal venom in the form of ad hominems, which are arguments directed against the person rather than against ideas expressed by the person (TKP November 20, 2005). And, one might also ask, "Do columnists of The Kathmandu Post really intend to communicate a message to an audience?"
    What has the center for excellence in charge of English education all over Nepal done to improve the situation? In the past academic year, it offered a Writing Tutorial in the afternoon for its own students and compelled them to pay Rs. 2500 per head.
    The significance of this strategy is simple. The department faces a genuine problem: most students opt for Thesis in which they can indiscriminately score approximately distinction marks although they may have barely passed in the other nine papers. They will, therefore, savagely resist any attempt to restore the original pre-requisite for Thesis, which is the average score raiser. The department, with its insufficient teaching faculty, then adopts a survival strategy. It attempts to prove that students actually deserve high scores by giving them about fifteen percent grace marks, which is against the rules of the university, for the rest of the other nine papers. Otherwise, the all too glaring discrepancy of marks would remain a telltale blotch. It is quite a face-uplift.
    Then, the department decides upon another face-uplift by offering Writing Tutorial classes that turn out to be a grand financial success, but a blatant academic failure. First, the department already offers a compulsory writing course, which, if properly taught, will solve many problems. Second, students have already paid their university dues at the time of registration. Any coaching class that exacts a fee is additional financial burden upon them. Instead, teachers should have been available to them on campus, free of cost, to discuss their difficulties. Third, the head of the department literally intimidates students into registering for the Writing Tutorial by dictatorially turning it into a pre-requisite for the Thesis Paper. He, therefore, coerces them into filling certain coffers, which is shared among teachers who "love" their students.
Intelligent students who understood the importance of research writing at the degree level quietly tolerated this strategy for the benefit of their friends. They paid the dues; but, presaging the quality of the tutorial classes, they did not attend it. It probably was obvious to them that thirty students to a writing tutorial class meant additional lectures on the theories of writing. So, even as the head of the department counted bank notes at his desk and distributed these to selected teachers, students argued that the department should now indiscriminately accept their thesis proposals because they had joined these classes. Consequently, the more conscientious teachers, burning with shame, requested the head to return the money to students for the sake of a more academic line of action.
    Imagine what will happen if other departments, too, start running paid tutorial classes for their students. I hope mature students will realize how their zeal for marks sometimes unnecessarily empties their pockets.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

On Authorial Views

Padma Devkota

On Authorial Views

    On February 24, 2006, The Rising Nepal published my article "Academia and TU" with a parenthetical footer that read: "The views expressed here are those of the author." (As if they could be somebody else's!) This vestige of Panchyat Regime humoured me, but it also set me thinking about the freedom of expression practiced in democratic Nepal. The need for such parenthetical footer as legal protection against possible lawsuits against Gorkhapatra Sansthan (as if my views were detrimental to an institution!) speaks loudly of the absence of exactly such freedom of expression in the media unless, of course, the footer intended to apologize to the authorities of Tribhuvan University mentioned in my article for having had to publish it. The only other reason could be that the editor is pre-appeasing the boss who might chide him for publishing such views.
    Nepal is a country where there are insufficient laws to govern it to the point of civilization. Furthermore, whatever law exists on paper is more often broken than upheld in practice. Despite this sorry reality, frequent instances of fear of being caught up in some legal issues emerge in practices that remain conventional and unquestioned. Surgeons, for example, will not operate even to save life if the patient's kin refuses to sign a legal document saying that, whatever the outcome of surgery may be, no lawsuit will be filed against them. Even if death results out of mere carelessness, they have already, literally been given a licence to kill before they perform the surgery. 
    Both in the case of authorial views and surgery, the need for legal precaution only proves the possibility of errors. However, the shifting of responsibility from the press to the author also suggests something more: it is as if the editor is telling the author, "I do not think what you say is acceptable to my boss or to the government I serve. Therefore, I am not responsible if …."
    As a writer, I have never denied, nor ever will, the responsibility of my words.
    And, this is why I was shocked to find The Kathmandu Post refuse to publish three of my articles in which I am fully responsible for the authorial views and opinions. After three failed attempts to publish it in TKP, "Can the English Teacher Speak?" was published in The Rising Nepal on February 3, 2006. The content is strictly non-political in the conventional sense. The language may be a bit too difficult for the ordinary layman, but powerfully expressive. Was it because I wrote it or because it was about the academic malpractice at Tribhuvan University that the editors refused to publish it?
    This question has haunted me against the backdrop of the larger issue of press freedom, which is a major political campaign these days. Even as mass media raises its voice against government censorship, like a toad in a serpent's mouth that instinctively flicks its tongue out at a fly, it has refused to publish non-party-political views on national higher education for some obscure reason. An "Opinion Page" of a daily newspaper should provide space for dissemination of the public's opinion, not that of the editors' or of the publishers' alone. Yet, like cab drivers who refuse to take passengers to certain destinations, editors refuse to publish certain views that do not tally with their own. Views, like destinations, are then not the public's choice. Yet, these very editors will publish letters that are stupidly defamatory and libelous of someone they do not support. Or, when they do support someone, even a mediocre is immortalized.
    By refusing to publish a critical article such as "Can the English Teacher Speak?" the press has censored an individual's right to self-expression in the same way that the government has curtailed the freedom of the press through severe censorship. Both instances are expressions of power that undermines civilization. If a free society cannot be envisioned in the absence of freedom of the press, a free intellectual cannot exist in the absence of freedom of self-expression. Freedom of the press cannot mean an opportunity for the publishers and editors to advocate their own ideologies at the expense of dissenters who hold other views on issues of national importance. It is common knowledge that TKP does not favour the present government and that TRN will not dare to oppose it. Both being thus positioned at extremities of political ideologies, none is inclined to accept the freedom that is theirs to have. Like a free intellectual, a free press should be able to stand on politically neutral ground to promote critical discussions, however lengthy, on matters of national importance.
    And, higher education is a matter of national importance. Failure of national education is failure of the state. Such a failure can only help maintain a slave's mentality. A slavish subjugation to the boss in any bureaucracy is a vestige of feudalistic fatalism. To pretend that no such thing exists or that, even if it does, it is not worth discussing would be hypocritical, or opportunistic at best. This is what the English (and other) teachers are guilty of at present. Instead of promoting academic standards, leadership in the educational field is uncritically submissive to non-academic and cantankerous encroachment in the oldest university of Nepal. Yet, when someone dares speak against this failure of academic ideals, TKP will not publish it! They deny a critical voice even as they accuse the government of stifling their press freedom.
   Wisdom lies in a disciplined critical stance that is fully aware of the dichotomy between what should convince others and what actually convinces them. The press, considered as the fourth important body part of the government, cannot afford to play a tyrant to free thought. Let it convince the public by its willingness to promote a society of disciplined dissenters rather than seek to promote favoured ideologies.