Peter Ho Davies, "What You Know," and:

• Susan Faludi, "The Naked Citadel" and Deborah Tannen, "The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue"

For more assignment ideas involving this essay, visit the Davies link-o-mat.

Davies, Faludi, and Tannen: Violence and Institutions of Learning

In your last assignment, I asked you to consider how a shift in the way that we think about learning might change the way we think about masculinity.  Deborah Tannen showed us our educational system as based on debate and argument, rather than productive discussion.  Susan Faludi presented us with the Citadel, a military institution whose traditions of learning seem based as much on the hazing in the dormitories and the "fourth-class system" as on the books in the classroom.  Peter Ho Davies, in his "What You Know", gives us a fictional story from the point of view of a creative writing teacher contemplating a student's act of murder/suicide, and his attempts to understand the motivations behind it.  In each of these pieces, we see education and violence mingling, sometimes in unexpected ways. 

For your next essay, I would like you to consider the following question:  How and why do acts of violence become connected to structures of learning?  How does power work in each of these situations?  Do you think that questions of what is perceived as masculinity continue to play a role in this problem?  How might we consider these questions outside of a learning institution (the Citadel, the high school, the college), in terms of the larger questions of learning in life? 

(To see the rest of the assignments in this sequence, please visit our sample sequences page.)

Megan Heller

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