Randall Popken approaches his essay with a very similar view of the individual as that of Bishop. In choosing Edwin Hopkins as a historical archetype of the composition teacher, he has choose a man who was devoutly Christian, who believed he had a “calling” to teach—definitely a man who believed he had a choice in life. As a Christian, Hopkins equated the self with a soul. The self like the soul was an autonomous entity that wasn’t fundamentally changed by secular forces like psychology or politics. Moreover, the soul/self is set in opposition to these forces. No wonder then that Hopkins had such a tough time administering his duty in the profane world of the university.
Hopkins believed in a pedagogy in which “each student (. . .) should receive as an individual the attention of the instructor” (621). He believed that teaching comp wasn’t a process of lecturing to large numbers of students, but a process of reading large numbers of student-written papers. The time consuming nature of such a process wasn’t appreciated by an administration that was more attuned to the philistine world of science and commerce.
Popken details Hopkins’ attempts at labor organizing. Like Bishop’s longing for a “Burkean parlor” (325), Hopkins wants an environment where he and his colleagues feel a little more appreciated. But that doesn’t happen and—again paralleling Bishop’s article and her concern with “burnout”—Hopkins suffers a physical and emotional debility.
In choosing a man whose fundamental conception of self as entity forever separate from the world around it, Popken has almost guaranteed an unhappy ending to a story in which one seeks to be appreciated by that world. But then, the godless Marxists didn’t have much more success in the endeavor. Popken doesn’t formulate any suggestions to change the situation. Like a religious view of man’s fate, he seems to suggest that world is forever the same as it always was and will be and you just better get used to suffering.
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It occurs to me, too, that Hopkins would have a difficult time justifying why his dreams never came true. If he was truly doing god's work, wouldn't there have been some sort of payoff in the end, and if he was being blocked by Phillistines, or demons or whatnot, and he was truly devout, then he (according to his philosophy) should have been able to overcome it, but there has not been much change to how crowded classrooms are in the last hundred years, nor is there likely to be in the future, and with the population being what it is, it is possible that it might get worse.
ReplyDeleteI feel that a lot of these writers were having a difficult time offering up solutions as well, because it is easier to find a problem and label it than it is to find a solution and spread it. I think that once we all accept that school is a business like any other we will be better off. Businesses do not favor people, they favor a bottom line. They may pay well and offer stellar benefits (like my job does right now), but they are not going to buddy-up or do favors for anyone unless it will benefit the whole in a pecuniary way. Sad but true. At least in the World According to Emily.
Let me just point out that no one knows if Hopkins got his "just reward" or not. An awful lot of the work that gets done on our planet gets done by people who don't get rewarded for it - not financially, not in acclaim, and not in leisure. Maybe it's the nature of this physical world in which we exist - as Buddha said,life is suffering.
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