Defective Understandings

I recently came across this bit of wisdom from I.A. Richards: "We are with difficulty persuaded that we have much to learn about language, or that our understanding of it is defective. And this illusion re-forms whenever is is shattered, though any efficient educational procedure ought to have no trouble shattering as often as is needed. The first condition for improvement in the adult's use of language must be to disturb this ludicrous piece of self-deception" (335, Practical Criticism, 1929).

Richards, although discussing poetry, hits on a key problem that teachers of writing confront. Our students usually have been speaking, or at least hearing, English their entire lives. Having learned the basics of reading and writing at 4 or 5, they come to college with experience reading and writing at a sophisticated level--what is there left to learn? No one likes to be told that his or her understanding is is defective--hence the seemingly protective reformation of the illusion. I wonder how often that illusion re-forms over the course of a semester of first-year composition? Is the underlying rationale behind grading and commenting to continue to shatter students' illusions and to break through the self-deception of believing that it is easy to understand texts?

Perhaps, but I am also thinking about the advice given to readers in some eighteenth-century essays and conduct books. We've been reading commentators like John Gregory and Hester Mulso Chapone who were worried about what their audiences--assumed to be young women--were reading and how their reading might affect their characters. The fears they express about novels and sentimental fiction suggest a defective understanding not so far from Richard's. We also read Samuel Johnson's famous Rambler #4, known as "The New Realistic Novel." Johnson certainly believes that reader's understandings are defective! He doesn't even trust them to understand mixed characters.

These eighteenth-century writers have specific concerns--that young readers will be misled by fiction and fall into corrupt or vicious habits. Richards, writing at a time when literature, including novels, was more acknowledge to be edifying than corrupting, wanted educated people to be better interpreters of language, although we can easily see the anachronism of his assumption that many people are interested in discussing literature, much less poetry, at all. My purpose in pointing out certain defective understandings is usually situated in the context of academic inquiry. Students in college must be able to rigorously examine and explain the sources they use as evidence to develop their arguments. But it seems interesting--and maybe not entirely productive?--that the first step in all of these processes must be so aggressive--shattering illusions and pointing out ludicrous self-deceptions.