Published in The Tecumseh Herald, February 5, 2025
Good English is fundamental.
That was the headline of an Adrian Daily Telegram article written by Dr. Mary Louise Hall, O.P., an Adrian Dominican Sister who taught English at Siena Heights from 1970 until the mid-1980s, when she suffered a debilitating stroke and no longer could speak.
Mary was my advisor and mentor through my college career, recommended me for grad school, supported me through a host of crises as a graduate student and then hired me as an adjunct professor in the English Department when I finished my master’s degree. She always believed I was destined to teach college–although it would be more than 20 years before I actually had a full-time position in higher education.
I found the yellowed clipping in a box of keepsakes I had last examined in 1997, wedged in with a stack of term papers and bad poetry from my undergraduate years. Mary died in 1994, but her words are even more relevant to education today than when she penned them nearly 50 years ago. Even then, she saw the ripple effect of a lack of what she called “high skills in English.” It’s not just knowing the difference between “to” and “too,” or “their,” “they’re,” and “there,” she wrote. English skills are central to intellectual activity and critical to participating in society. Much broader than grammar and punctuation, English skills include the rational, emotional, creative and sensory processes of the individual. In this sense, we are all writers because we are all required to think things through in a critical way, to be rational, emotional, and creative and to be good listeners able to engage in discussion and debate. High skills in English provide the ability to be empathetic, reflective and logical, to synthesize ideas and observe the world in which we live, to be thoughtful and deliberate in our communications with each other.
English is a measurement of intellectual ability.
“Since no one writes or speaks well out of an empty heart or head, it has never surprised me that proficiency in English is an accurate barometer of general intellectual ability, social awareness, and mental discipline,” she said.
Fifty years ago, these skills were not uncommon in the academic curricula, but as technology advanced and we entered our “Age of Information,” the desire to study the liberal arts–defined as History, Literature, Religion, Philosophy, Art, Social Sciences and Languages–was subsumed by curricula devoted to getting a degree so you could get a job. As college tuition shot up, parents began to worry that their children wouldn’t be able to repay student loans or that they somehow would fail to earn enough money to fund the kind of lifestyle their parents hoped for them.
As schools discovered sports programs were a greater attraction than academic programs, the focus on expanding these worked to the detriment of crucial skills like reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Small, private 4-year schools once devoted to a curriculum that applied English and similar disciplines to the education of the “whole” student became a place for students to play their sport, join fraternities and sororities, and earn a degree in career-oriented programs like supply-chain management, athletic training and sports marketing. The small schools are most vulnerable to closure due to low enrollments and it is understandable that these would seek out ways to attract students. Sadly, the first programs to be axed are those in low-enrolling majors–English, History, Philosophy, Art, and the like. Students end up with little in the way of acquiring the skill set they truly need in this ever-shifting, chaotic society and so lack the ability to make decisions based on facts and research. Instead, they rely on capricious social media to understand the world around them.
What is most prescient about the article Mary wrote in the late 1970s is the outcome she feared has now firmly established itself in our society in 2025: “It is distressing to me as an educator and a citizen to see how poorly prepared the majority of students in American schools are in their own language. How can semi-illiterate people participate in a democracy? Maybe some of our political and social problems are inherently related to people’s inability to analyze issues, to resist easy promises, to fear false enemies.”
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