Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary portrays the quiet and often hidden merit in
every student and inspires hope that a welcoming and truly democratic
educational system is possible. He shows the way by sharing his personal story,
by recounting the evolution of his philosophy and practice, but also by
exposing the obstacles in the way of a better system.
Two parts of the book struck me the
most. First, I was inspired by the writing curriculum Rose developed for his Veteran
students, nurturing their ability “to think about thinking” (138). In his own experience, Rose had
determined that there were four intellectual strategies that were most important in education and scholarship: summarizing, classifying,
comparing, and analyzing. Over the course of a semester he helped his students build
their skills and their confidence in these successively more complex
tasks.
For summarizing, the easiest skill,
Rose asked his students to find the central argument in a variety of passages.
Next, his classifying activity involved asking the students to examine 20
images of paintings, categorize them in any way they chose, then articulating
their criteria. Comparison exercises included examining one piece of literature
against another, say, a newspaper article against a Hemingway novel, or two
passages on the beginning of the world, one scientific, the other a creation
myth. The students would discuss and eventually write about their own
observations about style, purpose, time and place of authorship, etc. To teach his students how to analyze, Rose felt he had to teach them how to look for
underlying assumptions and points of view. One exercise involved reading a
newspaper account of a senseless murder, then reading a passage about Freud’s
view of violent behavior, and having the students analyze the murder from a
psychoanalytic perspective. Next, he gave them a more existential social
science article and asked them to analyze it from that point of few. I think
every freshman should be guided toward mastery of these four basic intellectual skills if they don't already have them.
My second
takeaway from Lives on the Boundary
is Rose’s strongest observation once he began his work at UCLA’s Tutorial Center: a “richer
understanding of what it means to be underprepared.” (187) Even students who have
some measure of opportunity and even success before arriving at college have
gaps that leave them adrift. In the final two chapters of the book, Rose makes
a plea to institutions and teachers to honor students’ beliefs, stories, enthusiasms,
and apprehensions, and to see the logic in the academic errors they exhibit. And
he issues this gentle lament: “The literacy curriculum is being asked to do what
our politics and our economics have failed to do: diminish differences in achievement,
narrow our gaps, bring us together.” (237) If I were ever in a position to
argue for more attention or funding for programs that give students the often
unspoken tools of the academy, Lives on
the Boundary would be my guide.
