This, I think, is what we call “talent” really is: if you are enthusiastic enough about something that practicing it becomes as regular as a heartbeat, then “practice” becomes invisible.
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I tend to think of this – perhaps grandiosely, perhaps unnecessarily – as a kind of libidinal architecture: creating a structure that encourages those moving through it to move towards a certain set of goals and away from a general set of lose conditions.
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At the very least, since we’ve perceived literacy to be in crisis since the inception of higher education as a more open project, roughly a century ago, it behooves us to be skeptical of the idea that literacy is in decline.
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I think that there’s a very interesting and dangerous game being played with student loans. No, not the fancily-worded indenture agreements that some schools are talking about. This is a game of brinkmanship being played at the highest level.
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This is the point of failure for American writing education: it simply produced bad writers. The reason it does this is because it treats writing as something where requirements are meant to be filled, as if lining up all of the ingredients of a cake on the counter were the same thing as baking. Which, I would like to emphasize, is not the fault of the teachers, but the fault of the administrators and bureaucrats who decided that writing education needed to be standardized.
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