Cheap Teaching at High Prices: Jerome Klinkowitz's Literature Pedagogy

You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature. By Jerome Klinkowitz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.

As a teacher who longs for good work on the pedagogy of literature, I did not expect to be so deeply disappointed with Jerome Klinkowitz's memoir and pedagogical polemic, You've Got to Be Carefully Taught. The opening pages promise a "revolutionary" approach to teaching literature, one built on "a bedrock of practicality" (2). I figured I would love this book. I was ready to hear about his life in school, his criticism of traditional pedagogies (chap. 1), his explanation of the failure of previous reform efforts (chap. 2), and, in particular, his proposed remedy (chap. 3). Sadly, the story and its narrator are annoying, and the pedagogy is hardly revolutionary. Some college lit faculty in pursuit of better teaching practices may forgive or overlook the self-congratulatory and self-justifying narrative. Perhaps the personal memoir form tends to seduce writers into rhetorical miscalculation? The proposed pedagogy, a personal variation on the old-fashioned easy-teacher method, is more difficult to excuse. Although he has no persuasive evidence that this approach enhances student learning, Klinkowitz urges us all to lower the bar.

As a memoir, You've Got to Be Carefully Taught is obnoxious. The protagonist boasts about his large salary and remarkable teaching evaluations. He highlights for us his prolific research career, his friendships with famous writers, his popularity among university administrators, and his cleverly negotiated teaching schedule, which runs each academic year from late October to the end of February ("Thus, April in Paris followed by a summer of baseball climaxing with a September and early October on Dartmoor and in Connemara was a practical schedule" [87]).

Klinkowitz typically follows such self-satisfaction with criticism of his colleagues and their politics—"local to be sure, and petty at the best" (72). He hates the members of his department and disdains their sorry vitas, their support for unionization, their "Alzheimer's or dementia" (75), and so on. His disparaging comments, combined with his obvious success at university politics, eventually undercut his claim to have transcended "the snake pit of academic politics" (1), though the animosity he describes certainly seems genuine and mutual.

Klinkowitz deals with this nasty situation by abandoning his department. He steers clear of faculty meetings, stops teaching majors and graduate students, actively discourages students from entering the English major ("I'd warn them away" [157]), and begins teaching just one course, "Introduction to Literature." A hostile work environment is transformed into an ideal job: "My own solution has been eminently personal. Thanks to my salary, rank, and publication record, I was able to write my own ticket for classes and schedules" (160). Klinkowitz is "the highest paid professor on campus" (6), but his department languishes in terrifically bad shape. He makes the most of it by avoiding school for all but four and a half months a year. It might sound like nice work if you can get it. Yet given his salary, his chumminess with administrators, and his connections in the field of English, it seems clear that Klinkowitz's department could use his help—his constructive assistance and not simply his "outrage" (79).

Perhaps the book should not be judged by its cranky, boastful, less-than-helpful protagonist. Unfortunately, the pedagogy he proposes is not compelling, either. Here is the easy-teacher method as Klinkowitz describes it:

He teaches his one course in "intensive" eight-week classes (91), two sections in the late fall and two in the winter. Each section enrolls thirty-five nonmajors.

Classes meet for two hours three times a week. Because two hours is "too long to sit still" (91), the students do not attend the first forty minutes. Instead, Klinkowitz asks them to meet in small groups outside class to talk about the assigned reading for a half hour or so before coming to class. He also cancels...