446
PARTISAN REVIEW
sought and seemingly endlessly delayed reform of public schools. The new
emphasis on rhetoric will require colleges to replace such vague gestures
as grading "classroom participation" with weekly recitations rigorously
graded for presentation as well as content. We will have to teach many of
our faculty members the forgotten art of administering effective oral
examinations. We will have to instruct ourselves as well as our students in
the languishing art of close listening.
These are tasks not just for English departments but for whole univer–
sities, and not merely for departments or colleges that specialize in
communication, but for every field. Indeed, rhetoric cannot be taught well
in the absence of a real subject. To teach students empty form or rhetoric
for the sake of rhetoric is to poison the subject, and was one of the root
causes of rhetoric's fall from educational and cultural fashion. Students
rightly distrust the hypocrisy in the idea of training people to argue effec–
tively on any side of any issue. Rhetoric rightly conceived is skill at joining
language to thought, and the way to teach it is to make it, as much as pos–
sible, part of the fabric of instruction throughout the liberal and applied
arts.
Not many of our students will make a career out of being an orator,
but every career can be enhanced by the command of clear, thoughtful, and
literate expression. As one Goethean Society oration titled "Who Are
College Students" began, "We are the embryo of stars, in the process of
development, which are to illuminate the dark world when those before us
have disappeared."
As
you are all well aware, the world eventually did beat a path to Sir Philip
Sidney's door. His
Difense
if
Poesy
still illuminates part of the dark world. And
it offers a splendid inducement to pursue his art: " ...you shall. ..be most faire,
most rich, most wise, most all: you shall dwel upon Superlatives:'
But Sir Philip also had a word for poor Perplexified Penelope: those
who reject the art of poesy will suffer a terrible fate: "when you die, your
memorie die from the earth for want of an Epitaphe."
We stand on the edge of that fate, an age so sunk
in
vanity that it feels
confident that its talk-show hosts and screenwriters will take care of the
flattering epitaph.
It
is up to universities to help redeem this time, and
restoring rhetoric is an indispensable part of the task.
Robert Brustein:
I've been asked to talk to you about arts education, a
broad topic with a wide spectrum of possibilities. I'm bound to make hasty
generalizations, to be superficial. And I will restrict my comments primar–
ily to the university with which I am most familiar, Harvard. Harvard is
hardly typical of arts education in the American university. Indeed it may
be extremely atypical. But its very idiosyncrasies might help to illuminate
the knotty issues of university education in the arts.
