Textual Innuendoe, v1.0

Ooh, OOH, OOOH! Aside from making great sandals and related products, Dr. Scholes is really easy to read, even while his material is simply jam-packed with content. And for all you LFS fans out there (don't be shy, tell us how you really feel), there's even a handy Graphic Organizer on page 7 to show the hierarchical production and consumption of texts in the English Apparatus. I really got into it, perhaps more than the good doctor intended. Here's the point that jumped up and slapped me like a badly trained massage therapist: Consumption of texts is privileged over production of texts in our "academic subculture." This just takes me all the way back to Mike Rose's experience with his graduate schooling. Reading, interpretation, and the overly broad practice of literary scholarship are all manners in which texts are seen as being consumed. Yet teaching a composition course to non-majors or aiding a writing workshop is looked at as the sanitation engineering of the educational institution (it's called hyperbole, back off).

Is this really any surprise? I, at least, in my phenomenal social insight, would expect the values of a society to be at least commonly, if not always, reflected in its ideological state apparatuses, of which the university definitely is one. Western First World society, exemplified by the U.S., is a consumer society. We seek gluttony and attempt to satiate our lack by acquiring, using, disposing. We recognize that production is a necessary thing--but only as a step towards consumption. We eat at McDonald's or Noma, drink Cristal and Thunderbird, audiovisually ingest a range of entertainment from Survivor to Broadway and only lack the Roman vomitoriums to complete our status as a cultural black hole of devouring wastefulness.

But I've apparently gone off on a rant, somewhere.

Interestingly, Scholes's (yes, that is proper use of the apostrophe. Look it up if you disagree) solution of three textual skills which can slip this cultural noose was something I was actually taught in 9th grade Civics. Of course, I remember very little content from Mr. Weeks's (it's still right, leave me be!) Civics course, at least consciously. It was the teaching/learning method of the course which has made an impressive impression upon my mental mind (put your rods and reels away; there'll be no more Engfish here).

LFS, take two:
3 areas of learning:
In Civics it was Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom.
For Scholes it's Reading, Interpreting, and Criticizing.
They are the same sets of activities, and they need to go in that order.

2 practices for those areas:
Reading and Writing.

1 (hoped for) result:
Students who are capable of critical thought instead of being passively, unrefectively subordinated by the texts they are presented with. (61)