'English Composition as a Happening' reflection

Charles Deemer's main point in this piece is the education that the English composition course provides is insufficiant and should be redesigned to be modeled after The Happening.

Examples of support for this are:

"The 'teacher' speaks from his place in the front of the classroom, sheltered more than likely by the wall of his podium, while the class in the rear listens or pretends to."

"Let me be more explicit in the delineation of my goals. English Composition is a proper introduction to the possibilities of the university, a preview of what the university is about. This is actually the unadmitted, and ineffective, tradition of the course, since the written medium has been the essential vehicle of scholarly communication between members of the university, student and "teacher" alike. English Composition is what the university is about. Or should be what it should be about."

"Neither should English Composition instruct in the pleasant phrasing of nonsense. It should actually instruct in nothing, in the sense that a "teacher" reveals and a class digests. What does a "teacher" know? He is merely human."

"The goal is a class of students actively aware and participant, a class that does not swallow the "teacher's" remarks but considers them."

"To remove the "teacher's" authority. To engage the student's active participation. Fortunately, a recent art form provides a model upon which to base a reconstruction of English Composition that will attain these ends. I refer to the happening"

"students have been compulsorily miseducated for years prior to their university enrollment."

"But such a drama in the classroom happening should never take the form in which a student changes an opinion because the "teacher" disagrees with him."

"But there is yet another, and I think more important, advantage to modeling English Composition after the happening. Western education has long suffered under the delusion that scientific abstraction is the unique way to knowledge. This, unfortunately, to the neglect of the poem"

"The happening is a first step toward such a revitalizing experience. And so English Composition as a happening properly previews all that a university should be. Witness the reengagement of the heart, a new tuning of all the senses Taking the first step toward poetry"