So says Terry Eagleton in an article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. This what he says about American students:
"Generally speaking, American students are a delight to
teach. Yet they are not always able to voice a coherent English sentence, even
at the graduate level. Some of them are easy to mistake for Turks or Albanians
who have only just arrived in America and are still struggling with the
language. Only later does one realize that they grew up in Boston. They tend to
tie themselves up in great chains of unwieldy syntax, overlain with a liberal
layer of jargon. Disheveled syntax is true of both genders, but jargon is
confined largely to the men. This is part of the painful demise of the spoken
word in the United States.
Perhaps the real threat to freedom of speech in the
United States is not to freedom but to speech. Perhaps the nation will end up
free to say anything it likes while being incapable of saying it. Nor is logical
precision a strength of American students. Many of them have had their brains
severely addled by an overdose of media. Perhaps they should all have a
compulsory first year in which they learn nothing but how to think and speak
straight, ridding themselves of the language of texting as a clinic purges its
patients of cocaine.
Despite all this, no more generous,
open-minded, and enthusiastic group of students can be found in the world.
American students tend to be courteous, responsive, cooperative, eager to
acquire ideas and ready to criticize anything whatsoever, not least themselves.
They are also the last group of students on the planet who are prepared to speak
up in class."
"No Self-Mockery, Please, We're American" by Terry Eagleton
The Chronicle of Higher Educatin
July 5, 2013 Volume 59, Number 4
B11-B13
The Chronicle is in the library periodical section, but it is also full text in the MasterFILE Premier database.
Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at Lancaster University in England, the National University of Ireland, and the University of Notre Dame.
