56 pages • 1 hour read
Mike RoseA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The preface of Lives on the Boundary sets up the premise of the whole book in just two paragraphs. Mike Rose tells readers that his book challenges the long-held assumptions that standardized tests and arbitrary benchmarks are the best way to evaluate students’ aptitude and intelligence, and in fact, those measurement tools have created an education system that fails its students. He explains his goal is to examine students—both traditional and not—”who have trouble reading and writing in the schools and the workplace” with a specific focus on how their true aptitude is often “hidden by class and cultural barriers” (xi). Rose explains that as an educator who has worked with remedial learners for twenty years, his experience has helped him understand how America’s education system has created what he calls “an educational underclass” by labeling students as poor performers and ignoring the economic, political, and social factors affecting a student’s ability to learn (xi). Rose explains that he will do this with a mix of analysis and personal storytelling, especially since is he was once labeled a remedial student himself. Ultimately, Rose’s goal is to show readers how those students who get lost in the American education system are “some of our greatest unperceived riches” (xi).
The first chapter opens with a few short anecdotes from Rose’s time as a professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches a summer course designed to help underprepared students get ready for their first semester at college. The opening pages follow his students as they struggle through the first few weeks of their freshman year. He introduces readers to Laura from Tijuana, Bobby from an inner-city school, and the students of Dr. Eugenia Gunner’s remedial English class, as he explains how each one struggles with literacy in different ways. And while the struggles may be unique, the end result is the same: Rose’s students question not just whether they can succeed in class, but whether they belong at UCLA at all.
The chapter then digs into what Rose believes is the heart of the problem: a faulty understanding of illiteracy in America and the back-to-basics education movement. He explains that the back-to-basics movement is fueled by a fear of “growing illiteracy and cultural demise,” an idea propagated by articles like “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” which was published in Newsweek in 1975. The back-to-basics movement believes that the best way to tackle the so-called illiteracy epidemic is to emphasize the fundamentals of English by teaching grammar, spelling, syntax, and usage.
Rose, however, challenges this idea by tackling two assumptions: 1) that fundamentals are the best way to teach literacy skills, and 2) that there is a literacy crisis in America at all. Rose starts with the second assumption first, comparing education and literacy rates from 1890 to those from the 1970s. He finds that literacy skills and general education have increased across the board. Rose writes that high school attendance rates increased from 6.7 percent in 1890 to 94.1 percent in 1978, and graduation rates increased from 3.5 percent in 1890 to 75.6 percent in 1970. In addition to better education rates across the board, he also shows that multiple studies have found that teaching grammar does not improve the quality of students’ writing.
Rose goes on to argue that the literacy crisis he identifies at the beginning of the chapter is not new, either. He cites a study from 1898 that found that “30 to 40 percent” of students who took the Subject A Examination—a literacy proficiency exam—were found “not proficient in English, a percentage that has remained fairly stable to this day” (6). To look back at the past as the glory days of education, Rose writes, is actually “yearning for a mythic past” where both education and literacy were less effective, diverse, and accessible than today (6).
While Rose shows readers that the literacy crisis has been manufactured, he also recognizes the significant flaws in America’s current education system. Strategies like the back-to-basics curriculum, remediation courses, and using tests to evaluate students’ skills ignore the “tremendous difficulties” modern students face as they “attempt to find their places in the American educational system” (8). Rose explains that he is writing Lives on the Boundary to tell the stories of marginal students like Laura and Brian, who have been mislabeled as “slow learners” or “remedial” (8). By sharing his own experiences and the lives of his students throughout Lives on the Boundary, Rose hopes to show readers the “intellectual curiosity” of the marginalized students who have been lost in the system.
This chapter tells the story of Rose’s childhood and his experiences as an underprepared, marginalized student. Ross’s story opens with his parents, both of whom immigrated to the United States from Italy as young children. Rose’s parents married and opened an Italian restaurant in Pennsylvania, but when their city’s major employer went bust, so did they. In desperation, his parents moved to Los Angeles, California to seek a better life. Unfortunately, his parents found themselves nothing more than “two poor settlers” trying to eke out a living (13).
Rose then paints a picture of growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1950s. As an only child, he tells readers that his family was poor; Rose’s mother worked as a waitress, and a degenerative disease kept his father from steady work. The family’s financial situation meant that they lived in a small home in a poor community full of blue-collar workers and small mom-and-pop shops. While Rose acknowledges that violence was a part of growing “up on the streets” in South L.A., it was far from his childhood’s defining characteristic. Rather, Rose was most affected by what he calls a subtle, “pervasive” hopelessness that painted human existence as “short and brutish or sad and aimless or long and quiet” (18).
This ennui shaped Rose’s early educational experiences. His parents scraped together enough to send him to a private Catholic boys’ academy named St. Regina’s for elementary school and, later, to Our Lady of Mercy High School. At home, Rose was an intellectually-curious, highly-imaginative child who loved playing with his toy chemistry set and reading pulp science fiction novels. But at school, he was a largely disaffected student who found himself behind in subjects like grammar and math. Rose writes that he struggled to “keep up” and instead began “daydreaming to avoid [his] inadequacy” (19). Things only got worse when his standardized placement test was mixed up with that of another, lower performing student named Tommy. The result was Rose’s placement in vocational—or “bottom level”—classes designed for remedial students. He would languish there for two years (23).
Although Rose’s biology teacher eventually uncovered the error and had Rose transferred into college prep classes, the damage was done. The gaps in Rose’s education made his new classes even more difficult, and he felt “embarrassment,” “frustration,” and “some anger in being reminded once again of long standing inadequacies” (31). Because vocational classes are often meant to occupy students rather than educate them, the knowledge gap between Rose and his peers continued to widen. This was compounded by the death of his father during his junior year.
Luckily for Rose, Mercy High hired a young teacher named Jack MacFarland to take over the school’s English courses. MacFarland was a bohemian and an idealist, and he challenged his students—even the vocational ones—to work hard. Rose was immediately sucked in, and MacFarland’s classes rekindled Rose’s love of reading. Furthermore, MacFarland introduced him to writers like Franz Kafka and William Butler Yeats, and Rose embraced both the knowledge and the challenge. He found hard-won success in MacFarland’s class, and his teacher, impressed by Rose’s writing, encouraged him to go to college. College had not been on Rose’s radar outside of his parents’ pie-in-the-sky dream that he become a doctor, but MacFarland saw his potential. Despite Rose’s mediocre grades—and with a little help from MacFarland—Rose was provisionally admitted into Loyola Marymount University after graduating high school.
Nonfiction books are slightly different than fiction books in that they have a thesis, or a central argument, that the author is trying to prove. While fiction books certainly have purpose—and the authors have specific thematic messages in mind—it is the reader’s job to dig into the text and find its meaning. Nonfiction, on the other hand, puts that responsibility on the author. It is the writer’s job to prove his argument to the reader, not the other way around. Because of that, Rose very clearly states his purpose for writing in the book’s Preface: his goal is to share the stories of students lost in the American education system and show “what happens as people who have failed begin to participate in the educational system that has seemed so harsh and distant to them” (xi). Rose wants to challenge readers’ assumptions about what it means to be a vocational or remedial student and the idea that the educational system is doing everything it can to help those who fall behind.
Rose is also clear about how he intends to prove his point. He explains that he will share his own story as a remedial student alongside the stories of some the students he has taught during his twenty-year-long career as an educator. Likewise, he also includes compelling data and statistics that show the efficacy—or lack thereof—of vocational education programs. This structure is typical of argumentative nonfiction, whether that is a journal article or a book like Lives on the Boundary. Rose combines stories that tug on the heartstrings with hard data in order to create a complete, compelling argument. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher designated that arguments have three modes of appeal: logos, ethos, and pathos.
Logos, or logical appeals, provide cold, hard facts to back up an argument. These are often statistics and data, but they can also be things that are taken as scientific or social fact. But evidence alone is not enough; strong data means nothing if people do not listen to it. Ethos, or ethical appeals, and pathos, or emotional appeals, help engage readers with the data. Ethos helps show readers why they should care about the numbers by appealing to the idea of social morality and the credibility of the writer, and pathos helps forge an emotional connection between the argument and the listener or reader. In other words, pathos captures a reader’s interest, ethos helps readers understand why your position is morally right, and logos substantiates the argument with logic and facts.
The opening section of Lives on the Boundary put all three elements on display. After setting up the thesis of the book in the Preface, Rose’s uses most of the first chapter to disprove the literacy crisis and the efficacy of “grammar first” education to solve a non-existent problem. He compares data from 1890 to research from the 1970s to show that overall education rates have risen, while illiteracy rates have remained stable. Likewise, Rose uses numbers to help build hope. While the idea of “30 to 40 percent” of students being functionally illiterate might be staggering to some, Rose also explains that “75 percent” of American teenagers complete high school, which is well beyond the “45 to 50 percent” of students in Sweden or the “15 percent” in Germany who are able to do the same (6). Through the use of compelling data, Rose challenges long-standing ideas about the American education system while giving readers concrete evidence on which to base their hope for progress.
After creating a strong, compelling logical foundation, Rose relies on ethos to establish his own credibility as an advocate for marginalized students. Like the remedial students he mentions in his first chapter, Rose was also a struggling student. He experienced the same “scuttling along the bottom of the pond” that comes with being stuck in vocational education programs, which means he has learned about the problem from the inside, not from reading about it in a textbook (26). Sharing his first-hand experience helps Rose build equity with readers: they can trust his insight because he was also labeled a slow learner, so he understands how the label affects people’s identities and futures because he has lived it. Establishing himself as an authority on the problem of remediation in the American education system gives Rose’s opinions more weight.
Lastly, Rose uses pathos to create an emotional connection with his readers. Because pathos is often the most powerful—though not necessarily the most logically-sound—argumentative element, Rose uses it throughout the book’s opening chapters. One example of this comes when Rose shares his memories of growing up in Los Angeles. Details like Rose’s father’s illness have no bearing on his overall argument, but they help readers sympathize with Rose, which in turn makes readers more likely to agree with his opinions. Rose uses the same technique at the beginning of the first chapter, too. By telling the story of Laura, a Mexican-American student intimidated by writing, and Brian, an inner-city kid who feels out of his depth in college, Rose immediately puts faces on what otherwise would be nameless “remedial” students. He introduces these students to readers not as statistics, but as real people; in doing so, Rose makes readers care about Laura and Brian and, in turn, everyone who has fallen through the cracks in the educational system.