hat is un-thinkable in such pronouncements about the centrality of academic work is the possibility that the vast majority of the reading and writing that teachers and their students do about literature and culture more gener-ally might not be all that important. It could all just be a rather labored way of passing the time. I have these doubts, you see. doubts silently shared by many who spend their days teaching others the literate arts. Aside from gathering and organizing information, aside from generating critiques and analyses that forever fall on deaf ears, what might the literate arts be said to be good for? How -and in what limited ways -might reading and writing be made

eading, writing, talking, meditating, speculating, arguing: these are the only resources available to those of us who teach the humanities and they are, obviously, resources that can be bent to serve any purpose.

we've reached the point where suburban kids are becoming mass murderers because we've created domestic spaces that isolate indi-viduals in a technological sea of entertainment -the Tv; the VCR, the computer, the entertainment center, the Internet, a different toy for every-one.

ublic and private soul-searching in the community about the killings, after all the media coverage and analysis, after an enormous pep rally replete with bouncing cheerleaders, enthusiastic athletes, and all the mandatory school spirit one could ever hope for, swastikas were found scratched in a stall in one of the high school's newly painted bathrooms.

t's reassuring to think that either the work of the legal system or the educational system can reduce or eliminate altogether the threat of the unpredictable and the unforeseen.

In February 1997, a sixteen-year-old in Bethel, Alaska, entered his high school and murdered the principal and another student. In October 1997, another sixteen-year-old, this one living in Pearl, Mississippi, killed his mother, then went to school and killed two more students. In December 1997, a fourteen-yea~old took aim at a prayer circle in West Paducah, Kentucky; killing three. In March 1998, two boys,

there were calls both for increased external controls -new laws, regulations, supervisory agencies -and for increased internal controls -educational interventions, moral training, prayer. Surely; more laws, more education, and more religious instruction would bring these violent stu-dents back into line.

9, the events at Columbine High School mesmerized the nation. There was the live footage of students fleeing in terror across the green, the boy with the bleeding head being dropped from the window, the SWAT teams moving in. There was the discovery of what lay beyond the eye of the camera: fifteen dead, a cache of weapons, a large homemade bomb made with two propane tanks and a gasoline canister, the eventual disclosure of an even more sinister fantasy that involved hijacking a plane and crash-ing it in New York City.1

The law drives everyone into the schoolhouse; the educational system then sifts and sorts its way through the masses, raising expecta-tions and crushing dreams as it goes. Eventually, something has to give.

The practice of the humanities, so defined. is not about admiration or greatness or appreciation o:-depth of knowledge or scholarly achievement; it's about the movement between worlds, arms out, balancing; it's abou: making the connections that count. (p. 198)

When I am back in the classroom. I work at getting the students to use their writing not just as a tool for making arguments, but also as a lens for exploring complexity and a vehicle for arriving at nuanced under­standings of a lived reality that is inescapably characterized by ambi­guities, shades of meaning. contradictions, and gaps.

He received his BA from St. John's Univer­sity, his MA from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (1998), Writing at the End of the World (2005; from which the following selection Is drawn), and, with Kurt Spellmeyer, a textbook, The New Humanities Reader (fifth edition, 2015).