Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary"

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.