the Humanities – an overview of Essay Engineering; why it is needed; notes on the field’s historical development.

The following topics are discussed on this page:

• What are the major elements of the Essay Engineering curriculum?

• Why a new humanities curriculum? Why a literary studies textbook?

• Is there a historical precedent for this kind of critique of humanities instruction?

• Why is the existing humanities curriculum taught the way it is?

• What is the intellectual lineage of Essay Engineering?

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What are the major elements of the Essay Engineering curriculum?

There are two major elements of the Essay Engineering curriculum: the Western canon of literature as foundational knowledge; and specific Essay Engineering methodologies for grasping the determinate meaning of the literary work and redefining reading and writing.

These two elements are explained in detail in the following:

i) The Western canon is the intellectual foundation of both the Western world tout court and the traditional, non-ideological liberal arts education defined by its impartial pursuit of historical knowledge.

Through careful study of the original literary work and meticulous attention to its semantic content (i.e. the meaning expressed by language), students learn how to develop an independent understanding of the primary source. Students see with their own eyes the historical significance of major literary works as monuments in three millennia of European thought.

Proportionate weight is given to Greek antiquity and each of the major European periods – from Middle Ages and Renaissance, through Enlightenment & Counter-Enlightenment, and up to Literary Modernism of the early 20th century. Literary works do not engage in the speculative thought of philosophy; they are rather works of imaginative literature that convey an intellectual position through a representation of reality. For various reasons, it is not the convention in secondary schools to teach students works dating prior to the 19th century. (With the sometime exception of a very limited selection of works from Ancient Greece.) One reason is the mistaken belief that works from classical antiquity and the middle ages are too difficult for secondary school students. As a result and as a rule, it is 19th and 20th century novels that dominate secondary school syllabi. But these works are typically the most challenging of the Western literary canon because of the allusive and obscure quality of the narrative prose style in the 19th and 20th centuries. By contrast – and contrary to conventional wisdom – certain genres and works from earlier major periods (parable and prose of Greek Antiquity, epic poetry of the Middle Ages, Renaissance prose works, Enlightenment plays) are far more accessible to the beginner and intermediate student, even accounting for the challenge presented by historically distant works.

Essay Engineering is a non-politicized humanities curriculum concerned solely with impartial knowledge, continuing the traditional liberal arts of the 20th century.

The curriculum of Essay Engineering for Humanities is a strictly knowledge-oriented curriculum. In accordance with the secular liberal arts tradition, all classroom instruction must be entirely free of ideology and political agenda. There is no need at all to engage with contemporary society and debates of the day. There is no need to discuss election results during class time, for political analysis is not the business of the humanities. The purpose of the literary studies curriculum is to study major literary works as historical artifacts and cultural phenomena – the study of a literary work being a purely descriptive phenomenon which can have nothing to do with the normative quality of a political agenda that seeks to create some change in society. For example, it is entirely within the purview of historical research to investigate the reasons why European painting was for many centuries dominated by males, such as social conditions and the status of women in society. But to agitate for more women painters in the present – whether an instructor personally agrees with this political position or not, this political position is nothing to do with scholarship or academic study; it is not historical research but a political agenda. Likewise, it is bona fide historical research to investigate the intellectual currents of the peculiarly Russian concept of the intelligentsia and its role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. (This is purely descriptive.) But to call for a “revolution” that seeks “transformation and liberation”, to pursue “social, economic, and political change” – any such political agenda has no place in the classroom. (This is a normative undertaking and is nothing to do with either scholarship or knowledge.) The student who wishes to study Marxism takes this up as a study of economic history and empirical reality, not the posturing of ideology that is contemptuous of empirical reality and impartial, principled understanding.

It is not the scholar’s prerogative to say whether a certain historical event was desirable or not. (Though this might be tacit in the mass murder of citizens or the many casualties of war, in a man-made famine or economic collapse and human hardship; though, oddly enough, there is a tendency in certain quarters to misrepresent empirical reality.) The primary purpose of the historian – whether of literature or philosophy; of politics, economics, religion, society, or the arts – is analysis, which is ultimately and only descriptive in nature; albeit requiring & constituting a description of great sophistication. The study of history by its very nature cannot and must not be normative – it cannot consist in saying “what should be” and “what should not be”. Such normative questions and their answers are the prerogative of the private citizen who votes by secret ballot. These normative questions are the business of the statesman, politician, and tyrant – but not the scholar who is true to the pursuit of knowledge, which arises only from the impartial, unbiased study of some sphere of reality.

ii) This knowledge is facilitated by the Essay Engineering approach to literary studies – a novel evidence- and process-based methodology that provides a systematic approach to grasping the determinate meaning of the literary work, at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter, and analysis. This methodology is derived from the framework of intellectual history (or history of ideas), which studies literary works, but otherwise has little in common with standard literary studies methodologies.

Students are taught to seek the most accurate, impartial analysis possible by reconstructing the represented reality and its tacit conceptual framework. Students learn the complete set of the discrete skills that constitute evidence-based thinking and rigorous argumentation. This “EE Toolbox” provides a step-by-step framework for essay composition that is applicable to all literary works of quality.

The conventional wisdom at even the most esteemed and most selective schools holds that reading and writing are adequately taught. But with the Essay Engineering curriculum, students understand that “reading” in fact consists of meaning reconstruction, and “writing” in fact consists of structuring principle and conceptual framework. These radical reconceptions require discarding altogether conventional notions of reading and writing – and make evident the major deficiencies of the standard curriculum. The standard curriculum effectively incapacitates student cognitive faculties and does not permit accurate and comprehensive meaning comprehension, whether at the level of sentence, paragraph, chapter, or entire work.

This weakness of the standard humanities curriculum is evident in the actual student experience. Among even the most capable students, a common reaction to essay-writing assignments is confusion arising from the lack of an explicit methodology. This confusion is experienced as perplexity and expressed with the question “What am I supposed to do?” Essay Engineering teaches students what they are supposed to do at each and every step, through a series of discrete modules. (These avoid the problem of the highly speculative thesis and analysis that is ungrounded in and contradicted by the actual evidence; which arises as well from the mistaken notion that “every interpretation is just as good as any other”.)

Each EE Module teaches the way to grasp meaning and and generate a “work output” on a different scale: at sentence level, paragraph & chapter level, outline level, and conceptual-analytical level. In the Sentence-Level Module (Micro First-Order Thinking), students reconstruct the meaning of each individual sentence . This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Essay Engineering to grasp because the denoted meaning of a sentence is thought to be self-evident and already understood. (Beyond the direct meaning of the sentence, the indirect meaning is an entirely additional, unrecognized challenge; even without considering the massive complexity of literary works of the first rank.) Reading comprehension is thought to be self-evident and arising spontaneously from rudimentary literacy. (For discussion of mechanical literacy vs. semantic literacy, see below on this page; see also the “Primary School” page here.) But every actual reality and constant student capability indicate otherwise. When tested on a specific sentence, and asked to explain in her or his own words the meaning of a sentence – students can provide, at best, an incomplete and partially correct answer. It is not at all unusual for a student to given answer that is entirely incorrect. The evidence demonstrates that students have an entirely deficient understanding of single-sentence meaning. The greatest human challenge is the deficiency one cannot see; what one thinks one understands, but does not; what one thinks is done correctly, but is done entirely incorrectly.

The Sentence-Level Module (First-Order Thinking, Micro) results in a series of meaning points – disconnected fragments of meaning which are incoherent as actual reality. To see the reality of a discrete episode (as constitutes the meaning of a passage, per the nature of the literary work as a description of reality), students must synthesize multiple meaning points to create a whole from parts. In the Paragraph- and Chapter-Level Module (First-Order Thinking, Macro), students identify and synthesize the major sentence-level meaning points, to create a meaning pattern that is centered on a structuring principle. Only with the meaning pattern and structuring principle does the student understand the actual reality that the literary work describes and represents. In the Outline-Level Module (Idea Generation, via sorting major passages qua structuring principles), students engage in a focused, directed brainstorming that examines these major elements to extrapolate and identify the higher signifying plane. In the Analysis-Level Module (Second-Order Thinking), students create a conceptual framework that connects disparate structuring principles (or formal qualities) for which the linkages are hidden and non-obvious, thus creating a constellation that constitutes a parallel reality. Both meaning pattern and conceptual framework require the Sequence of Points Module, (Structure and Function of Paragraph) which organizes the content in a logically coherent concatenation (a chain of points, or a line of thought) and in a linguistically fluid manner. Logic and language are intertwined, and contribute to the high signal-to-noise ratio that is necessary for an analysis to be both highly intelligible and trenchantly insightful.

These are not merely theoretical constructs – each and every Module has been painstakingly developed in the course of student instruction, and each Module is judged by its effectiveness in helping students achieve superior academic results. Once a student commits to learning the EE Methods of meaning reconstruction and conceptual frameworks, the student makes significant and rapid progress in her or his ability to understand the essential formal qualities (i.e. themes) of the literary work. After two semesters of Essay Engineering study, the typical student can independently work through the EE Modules and write a complete essay of excellent quality. (Typically, three semesters of full-time coursework are required for students to begin to understand the highly sophisticated, highly complex literary works of the advanced level.) The key to student success is advancing beyond the standard humanities curriculum, which fails to teach the essential nature of reading and writing.

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Why a new humanities curriculum? Why a literary studies textbook?

There are two major shortcomings in the existing curriculum for literary studies, which directly affect student academic success in essay composition. The practical purpose of Essay Engineering is to remedy these two shortcomings, which are:

i) the typical student’s Reading Comprehension is incomplete and inaccurate – students in grades nine to twelve generally have a low level of reading comprehension of the literary work; it is usually 20 to 60%, even at the best private schools in the United States. Secondary schools simply do not teach the advanced literacy skills necessary to understand the literary work.

The standard literary studies curriculum presupposes that the meaning of language is self-evident. For this reason, there is little to no time spent on the work of transforming language to meaning.

Essay Engineering teaches the methods for 100% reading comprehension. It teaches students to have a complete and correct understanding of the meaning of each and every sentence in a book. The Independent Reconstruction of sentence meaning is the indispensable basis for all evidence-based textual study and literary analysis. This is grounded in the heuristic-iterative method that teaches students to identify deficiencies in their meaning reconstruction and the required self-correction steps for improving accuracy; resulting in continual self-improvement of reading comprehension and true understanding of the literary work. The methodical identification of indirect meaning is an essential component. Students otherwise grasp the hidden, concealed meaning of sentences only infrequently by happenstance –  without knowing what they are doing, without knowing that this is fundamental to reading comprehension and must be practiced continually. Finally, the passage-level and chapter-level analysis grasps the overarching sense of the literary work.

Literacy, as conceived in the existing primary & secondary school curriculum, is limited to the mechanical literacy that identifies the spoken words that correspond to a written word. It teaches the mechanical process of recognizing a group of letters and identifying the word thus signified – but it is not at all concerned with the meaning of each individual word, and the resulting, aggregate meaning of the sentence! This mechanical literacy is adequate for reading books in grades one or two, where the meaning of words and sentences is entirely self-evident (as in everyday human speech). The meaning of words and sentences (i.e. the semantic sense or propositional content) are obvious in primary school. But an altogether different type of literacy – the semantic literacy taught by EE – is required for the literary work that contains an immensely complex representation of reality, and where the meaning of sentences is far from obvious. Quite the opposite, the meaning of sentences in literary works is at best complex, and more often entirely obscure. Already in grade four books contain, at the very least, a modicum of sophisticated and indirect meaning (e.g. Wind in the Willows, Chronicles of Narnia). And in the literary works undertaken in grade nine and above (e.g. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), the complexity is enough to present a significant challenge to even graduate students at elite universities, never mind high school students. Semantic literacy results in 100% accurate comprehension of propositional content – this is the essential content contained in a book. An understanding of this propositional content is the basis for the literary analysis, which in turn is the content of the essay.

It is possible to study mathematics by counting on one’s fingers. But it is a far more effective endeavor with instruction in multiplication and division, geometry and algebra, and calculus. This methodical, skill-based approach is the standard curriculum for secondary school mathematics. Essay Engineering aims to provide an equivalent standardized curriculum for literary studies.

ii) the skills required for Essay Composition are simply not taught – the vaunted five-paragraph format tells students what the answer to an essay question should look like – but not the steps and skills that are necessary to create such an answer. There is no conception of the actual method and process of essay composition.

Essay Engineering teaches a pragmatic, process-oriented method for essay composition. It consists of a Module sequence and the innovative, effective, and intuitive skills. The Synthesis of multiple passages (linear and non-linear) allows for identification of the Structuring Principle (or proto-thesis) and generates a corresponding Conceptual Framework (or formal pattern), this being the essential content in the Analysis of a literary work. In parallel, the Sequence of Points is the fundamental form of the Paragraph. It consists of a concatenation of points, or the line of thought that expresses rigorous argumentation. Whereby each point is connected logically & linguistically to previous and subsequent point. The points express the set of subtle variations and sub-definitions which explicate and expand thesis, and which as a whole constitute the definition of the formal quality, the conceptual account of underlying forces that determine cause and effect in reality. The Sequence of Points organizes the content with a Basic Idea (or Thesis), which is then investigated, explicated, and defined in a series of Subtle Variations, or Explanatory Points defined by their propositional content. (Constructing this propositional content rests on the foundation of the semantic literacy.)

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Is there a historical precedent for this kind of critique of humanities instruction?

Two thousand five-hundred years ago, Socrates criticized the written word and outlined its essential flaw: that reading a book does not unto itself allow a person to understand the thoughts presented in the book. (The tacit comparison was to the precedent oral culture where knowledge was transmitted always and only through discussion and speech; in the oral culture, there is no such thing as either books or essay-writing.) Socrates’ critique of the written word is that it creates only the appearance of understanding, while lacking the essential quality of knowledge. For knowledge inheres first, foremost, and only in the active creation of thought (as indicated by his reference to memory) and not in the written record of a thought (i.e. a book).

“And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. That which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (Plato. Phaedrus.)

σύ, πατὴρ ὢν γραμμάτων, δι᾽ εὔνοιαν τοὐναντίον εἶπες ἢ δύναται. τοῦτο γὰρ τῶν μαθόντων λήθην μὲν ἐν ψυχαῖς παρέξει μνήμης ἀμελετησίᾳ, ἅτε διὰ πίστιν γραφῆς ἔξωθεν ὑπ᾽ ἀλλοτρίων τύπων, οὐκ ἔνδοθεν αὐτοὺς ὑφ᾽ αὑτῶν ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους: οὔκουν μνήμης ἀλλὰ ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον ηὗρες. σοφίας δὲ τοῖς μαθηταῖς δόξαν, οὐκ ἀλήθειαν πορίζεις: πολυήκοοι γάρ σοι γενόμενοι ἄνευ διδαχῆς πολυγνώμονες εἶναι δόξουσιν, ἀγνώμονες ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλῆθος ὄντες, καὶ χαλεποὶ συνεῖναι, δοξόσοφοι γεγονότες ἀντὶ σοφῶν.’ (Φαῖδρος τοῦ Πλάτωνος. 275α.)

Socrates’ criticism is that the student who learns from books will learn very little. As a result, the student has neither a thorough nor rigorous understanding of the topic at hand; the student can offer only a reminiscence of the subject. Just ask any high school or college student to explain what they understand about the book they last read. A common reply is “I don’t remember what I read”. Essay Engineering is, of course, grounded entirely in the present-day textual culture, but it uses the written word to produce active thought – first in grasping meaning (via independent reconstruction); then in creating a representation of events (via a reconstituted reality); finally in transforming this reality into a conceptual version (via the formal quality and conceptual framework). The weakness of the written word is its tendency to be facile and careless, and to conceal the confusion attendant to a complete lack of understanding.

A similar observation is found in twentieth-century philosophy: “No one can think a thought for me, as no one but myself can put on a hat” [“Niemand kann einen Gedanken für mich denken, wie mir niemand als ich den Hut aufsetzen kann.” (1929. Vermischte Bemerkungen 452)]

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Why is the existing humanities curriculum taught the way it is?

The standard humanities and literary studies curriculum of today’s secondary schools is derived from the approaches developed by university English departments in the twentieth century. A handful of twentieth century trends in academic literary studies have been most influential. The New Criticism (I.A. Richards, Warren Brooks) taught that the meaning of a literary work is immediately accessible to the reader, and tacitly granted validity to any and all interpretations; this notion is antithetical to semantic literacy, since not all interpretations pass the test of rigor in adhering to empirical evidence. The notion of Aesthetic Autonomy (general 19th century trend; reiterated in the twentieth century by many, e.g. Peter Bürger) posits aesthetic objects, and thus literary works, as belonging to a transcendental realm apart from everyday human existence; this concept is antithetical to conceiving of a literary work in terms of mimesis, or a representation of reality. The Post-Structuralism movement (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al) rejects the notion that a literary work contains a fixed meaning, and instead imagines the essence of the literary work to contain only unstable and ultimately indeterminate meaning – thus leading to an infinite regress where all interpretations are equally valid; where the critic engages in interminable exegesis of questionable result; where the notion of accuracy has neither relevance nor purchase; and where the notion of meaning has lost both signification and function; these post-structuralist theories are antithetical to the notion of propositional content.

These tendencies are preceded by the so-called Copernican Revolution of Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2d ed 1787) rejected the possibility of objective knowledge of reality. According to Kant’s positing of human cognitive faculties, the object-in-itself (the noumenon) cannot be known; we can know only the phenomenon, or the object as conditioned by and contingent upon the subjective distortions unavoidable in every act of human perception. Thus, Kant denies the possibility of an objective understanding of empirical reality.

Essay Engineering does not purport to allow absolute and indubitable truths. But it does posit the study of literature where impartiality and careful attention to language can identify the better interpretation, which allows for a quasi-objective grasp of reality. It is, of course, still contingent upon the subjective tendencies of the individual. But Kant’s Copernican Revolution has been given way to the aforementioned 20th century literary theories and an extreme, unquestioned thesis of radical scepticism and epistemological nihilism – this thesis is commonplace and dominant in America and Europe, in unquestioned truisms that “every opinion is important, every opinion is equally good”, “no interpretation is better than any other”, “you cannot be objective in journalistic reportage”. These truisms insist on what cannot be done, thus making a tacit admission of defeat, thus insisting that knowledge is hopelessly deformed by subjective distortions, thus discarding the very notion of accuracy. Every human being indeed has the right to an opinion – but this does not mean that every opinion is necessarily sound and well-founded.

Essay Engineering rejects these truisms and seeks rather what better knowledge we can find. Essay Engineering proposes instead that impartial scrutiny and its careful attention to the meaning of words can lead to the better interpretation, as adjudicated by the evidence of empirical reality (or a representation of this in the literary work). There are, consistent with this proposition, other approaches to literary studies – such as Aristotle’s notion that literature teaches universals, while history teaches particulars – which are little discussed in literary studies departments.

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What is the intellectual lineage of Essay Engineering?

Essay Engineering continues the tradition of European intellectual history as practiced in the twentieth century by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Johns Hopkins), Isaiah Berlin (Oxford), and Donald H. Fleming (Harvard). A defining attribute of this methodology is the emphasis on rigorous textual analysis that grounds an interpretive thesis in the impartial and careful analysis of evidence, and results in rigorously tested argumentation. In this tradition, the task of the scholar and student is plainly described by famed German historian Leopold von Ranke: "he merely wants to show what actually was." ("er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.") But the work of the historian is never simplistic or reductive – rigorous thought must convey all intricacies, subtleties, and complexities with the maximum possible clarity, precision, and concision. Essay Engineering builds on the premise that textual meaning is evidence-based and yields determinate propositions.