“Engage is the Rage” by J. Vescovi

James Vescovi’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, the Georgetown Review, Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post, Creative Nonfiction, Artisanal Writer, and other publications. He has also published two books of nonfiction.

Engage Is the Rage

At a time when the formal period before marriage, known as “engagement,” is becoming outmoded, school administrators have embraced a new use for the word—and thereby lowered the standards of education.
In America—where education is deemed more essential for a happy life than happiness itself—it is not enough that students be “taught” or “instructed.” They must be “engaged.”
To administrators—especially at schools where parents pay hefty tuitions—“engagement” provides absolutely indispensable proof that teachers are doing more for their students than any generation of educators ever, Aristotle notwithstanding. “Engagement” means high school teachers are finding new ways to make knowledge more appetizing to finnicky teen palates.
This should raise suspicions, especially considering term “engagement” is on loan from the world of commerce. Today’s consumers, for example, are no longer expected to purchase a product simply because they need it. They must be engaged. A lawnmower salesperson must educate and entertain customers with fancy technology and follow-up emails. Only then can a consumer be expected to lay out $799 for a Lawn-Boy.
Likewise, students (and parents) are considered consumers of education. Teachers must now entice students to tuck in and dig in to English, history, and arithmetic. Unfortunately, this is often accomplished by designing lessons with what are called “buy-ins”—a term also lifted from the business world—designed to convince a teen that there’s something in this lesson for him, satisfaction guaranteed.
There’s nothing wrong with helping youngsters understand why a subject is relevant. No decent educator introduces a William Faulkner novel by saying, “You will read Faulkner and like it!” However, as an English teacher, dreaming up a “buy-in” for Faulkner is not easy. In New York City, where I taught for a decade, students believe most Mississippians wear Confederate-themed pajamas. When—as a buy-in—I attempted to entice them by telling them that Faulkner’s illiterate country bumpkins were truly noble people fighting to make sense of their backward lives, my seniors looked at me as if I were a dentist offering a buy-in for a root canal.
Is it possible—when it comes to teens—that there might be no easy buy-in for Statistics or Shakespeare or Latin or Geography? Faulkner and other great writers have become such a difficult sell that instructors are pushing them off syllabi in favor of simplistic books with protagonists who are the same age as teen readers. It’s as if we no longer believe students can empathize with characters with whom—at first view—they share little in common.
The wrong-headedness of engagement is also manifested in student projects that. Are increasingly permitted in lieu of tests. For example, in an American history class during a unit on the Vietnam War, a student is allowed to make a slide presentation on his grandfather, who came home from Vietnam with PTSD. This personal connection to American history is a terrific buy-in. But the danger is that the student will not be tested foreign policy and stateside politics. Worse, she might judge the conduct of an entire nation and its policies through her grandfather’s personal experience.
In the end, however, the teacher can report to administration that her student was “truly engaged with U.S. history.” The principal presents this as proof of engagement to prospective parents evaluating the school for their own child.
Part of the excitement and joy of teaching is finding ways to make subjects—taught for decades or even centuries—relevant to a new generation of learners. But learning has been and will always be difficult, befuddling, and not always engaging. Administrators have cheated students and gaslighted parents by the use of buzzwords like “engagement,” as if education is easier now that students are engaged. It’s like telling a newly married couple that all their days will be fun and fulfilling.
Learning is like a sea journey. Sometimes it’s calm and pleasant and lusciously warm. Sometimes the water is so rough you can’t see the horizon. But today, “student engagement” in the classroom has deceived parents and cheated students.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.

To view the types of work we typically publish, preview or purchase our past issues.

Please join our community on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at @inparenth.