On the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Instruments of Torture

I.

(This is the first part of what will be at least a two-part essay. Part II will be posted next week.)

I should put my academic background and prejudices on the table from the get-go. Although I now refer to myself in official documents as a “homemaker,” and otherwise I'm homeschooling my eleven-year old son at the end of a cul-de-sac in Miami, I have, in decades past, done my share of hard labor, teaching freshmen composition at colleges in the Boston area. I say “hard labor” for a reason: for the most part, I hated it.

I hated it because every two weeks I went home with a stack of essays I was supposed to read, correct, and grade, praising what had been done well, suggesting ways to make the writing better. Reading them, I would be overwhelmed by a flood of feelings: endless boredom, frustration, rage, utter indifference, utter helplessness. How was I going got get these students to write essays that I, or anyone else, might want to read?

The papers were plagued by grammar, spelling, punctuation, logic, and attribution problems, as well as a predilection for passive verbs (boring) and abstract nouns (even more boring), but those were minor issues compared to the fact that at least half of what came my way--no matter what the instructions were--were five paragraph essays.

Sometimes each paragraph had been bloated to the length of a page; sometimes the structure had been expanded to absorb ten paragraphs; but the rhetorical tool at the core of so many of these essays, whether discussing a story, a poem, or presenting a research topic was almost invariably the same—that dreadful thing taught in American schools: the five-paragraph essay.

This is what the five-paragraph essay written by too many hard-working, well indoctrinated, eager to please college freshmen reads like:

Paragraph I: Abraham Lincoln was a great president for three reasons.
Paragraph II: Reason 1 expanded
Paragraph III: Reason 2 expanded
Paragraph IV: Reason 3 expanded
Paragraph V: In conclusion, Abraham Lincoln was a great president.

The five-paragraph essay is first presented in the fourth grade. After eight years of steady practice and brainwashing, the above is what most freshmen produce: a padded, puffed-up, and self-satisfied tautology. In case you haven't reviewed your terms of logic this week, a tautology is the repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words to say the same thing twice. In brief: A equals A. Lincoln was a great president. Here are three reasons why. Therefore, Lincoln was a great president. The essay unsurprisingly ends exactly where it began.

The best of these essays would get a B-. Invariably, the recipient would make his way to my office and either livid or in tears let me know that he had been at the top of his high school class in Cleveland or Atlanta or Buffalo. He had never gotten a B-. Ever. And, Professor Franklin, Abraham Lincoln was a great president, wasn't he?

Where to begin?

When Galileo was about to be tried for heresy in Rome in 1633, he was first taken down to a dungeon and shown the instruments of torture that he would get to know better if he did not recant. So what did he do? Being a smart fellow, he gave the powers that be what they wanted.

I think of Galileo when I think of kids learning to write in an American school. By fourth grade, every one of them has been shown the instruments of torture; all of them know the price of not doing what they are told—they will be held back. Teachers “teach the test” and the five-paragraph essay, and kids learn the test and master the art of writing tautologies.

Galileo comes to mind not only because, like him, students clearly come to know the price of disobedience, but also because the five-paragraph essay has more in common with a confession induced by torture, than with the essay as it was envisioned by Cicero, Plutarch, Bacon, and Montaigne. In the five-paragraph essay, the student demonstrates (under duress) that she has been a good girl, that she has learned her lessons, that she has done her research and knows three reasons why Lincoln was a good president.

But the essay is not an instrument that is meant to perform and perpetuate indoctrination. It is, first and foremost, an instrument of inquiry. (The word “essay” actually means “attempt.”) Its present day format is very much the product of the Renaissance, a rhetorical tool that attempts to move knowledge forward in ways radical and disobedient, celebrating the individual and all that he or she is capable of. The essay might rely on what is known already, as the Renaissance painters and scholars relied enthusiastically on classical antiquity, but the thrust of the essay is into the unexplored, into new knowledge, into radical new ways of thinking and perceiving.

So what does that mean when it comes to writing and teaching the essay? For starters, forget a five-paragraph format. Forget the cookie-cutter formulations bequeathed by No Child Left Behind. If you're a homeschooling parent reading this, if you're homeschooling because you do not want your child to only “learn the test,” have the courage to also let go of the five-paragraph essay. It's not a writing instrument used by an educated and inquiring mind.

If you think that a liberal arts college might be in your child's future, realize that the first thing that will happen when he takes Comp. 101 is that some younger version of me will beat the five-paragraph essay out of him with a two-by-four, if he's lucky.

Not only will he be hurt and confused, but he will have wasted time. Instead of spending his school-years proving that he was a good boy who had done the reading, his mind could have been in training, questioning, inquiring, writing.

(To be continued.)