A Community College Professor Reflects on First Year Composition by John Perkins

John Perkins begins by stating that the purpose of ENC 1101 College Composition (what I presume to be the FYC at the community college where he is employed) is to expose students to the practices of one specific form of writing: academic discourse.  One of the reasons students have a problem learning the form and style of academic discourse, he states, is the general decline in reading which he attributes to a lack of reading among FYC students and the attittude among those that do that reading is boring - which he then connects to the passive/addictive qualities of the television/video medium. He also claims that public school teachers have accepted this general decline in reading and so require less reading that was what required of them at that particular part of thier lives. 

The other reason that students have problems participating in academic discourse is that students have no interest in the "traditional values" of college education; the only reason that they are in college is because of what college can do for them financially and therefore, academic discourse has no value to them. 

Part of the solution, according to John Perkins, is that the profession must take upon itself to identify criteria and methods of evaluation of student writing.  A lot of what follows in his article are suggestions of how it could work and its benefits.  This leads him to also question the point of including the personal experiences and observations of the student if the the purpose of an FYC is academic discourse.  This in turn leads him to indicate that part of the solution is more reading - that to focus solely on writing in a composition course is to ignore half of the process (his analogy is very convincing).   He includes in his sales pitch that stricter standards and criteria might first cause higher failure rates, noting that this change in curriculum would have to begin in the beginnings of public school.