Review of Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary

Raquel Alicia Coy

Professor Barbara Gleason

ENGL C0853: Adult Learners of L&L

May 20, 2014

Review: Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared.

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Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.

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            Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose is a memoir of the life of its author which highlights the deep problems in the American education system and posits possible solutions to these problems. Roses uses a compelling style in his book, a narrative method that draws the reader in and an informal tone that lends itself to a wide audience. This writing style and tone effectively shatters the seemingly impenetrable wall that blocks many people from seeing the true problems in the education system. Rose paints the portraits of the people lost in the education system by telling his story and the stories of other people he has met in his life. By doing so, he breathes life into oft-reported statistics by humanizing the lives of working-class students who struggle in academic pursuits. Rose uses his life experience and observations as the basis for his argument. The argument that shapes this book is that many working-class students are underprepared for school because of the traditional approach to education which leaves students alienated from education. Rose argues that the problems in the system are primarily rooted in societal issues related to socio-economic status, bias and prejudice, and higher value being put on standardization as opposed to the reinforcing the human factor in education. This books follows a fairly linear progression from Rose’s childhood experience, his experience in higher education, and his coming into his own as an educator. The varied roles Rose occupies throughout the book lend validity to his diagnosis of the problems in the education system.

            Mike Rose was born to immigrant, working-class parents in 1944. His mother and father were from Italy, and initially, they struggled to succeed in the United States while living in Pennsylvania. After the economy in Altoona, Pennsylvania collapsed along with Rose’s father’s restaurant, the family moved to Los Angles, California, hoping for a better future. However, the city was not fertile ground for their hopes and dreams, as Rose feared his “parents must have felt isolated and deceived. They had fallen into the abyss of paradise—two more poor settlers trying to make a go of it in the City of the Angels” (Rose 13). In spite of their disillusionment with the promise American prosperity, Rose’s parents enrolled him in St. Regina’s Grammar School, hoping that a good education would boost his success later on in life. Even as early as his grammar school days, he began to feel disengaged from his education and began to daydream in order to avoid grammar lessons and mathematics (Rose 18). Outside of the formal classroom setting, however, he demonstrated a natural inquisitiveness that led him to become interested in science and reading. His parents encouraged him by buying him a chemistry set and by bringing home paper for him to draw out the universe. The library at St. Regina proved to be a good source to encourage his reading, and Rose began to harbor a love for science fiction. While he may not have performed highly in mathematics and grammar, he was engaging in science and reading in an informal manner.

            Despite his parent’s efforts to facilitate a fruitful education for Rose, he was placed into the vocational education track in high school. This track was aimed at providing students with education that would lead them into the workforce, not into higher education. This was an important event in Rose’s life, and it was predicated on a clerical error which mixed up his files with another student’s records. In his early years in high school, Rose struggled through the vocational education track, all the while becoming more and more disassociated from the experience of formal education. One of Rose’s main points in this book is that students will either rise to meet high standards or sink to low ones. His experience in the vocational education track clearly exemplifies this phenomena. A combination of sub-par teachers and students’ lack of motivation only enhance the underlining problem with the vocational track: the implication that the student in the vocational track is not suited to academic pursuits. The vocational track did not seek to educate but to occupy students (Rose 28). In Rose’s discussion of a fellow vocational education classmate, Ken Harvey, and his insistence that he just wanted to be average, Rose writes, “What Ken and so many others do is protect themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track….” (Rose 28). Like the rest of his classmates, Rose found himself mentally shoring up his defenses and utilizing the escape mechanisms his used in St. Regina’s.

            In an unforeseen, fortuitous turn of events, Rose was switched from the vocational education track to the College Prep program. One of his teachers at Our Lady of Mercy, Brother Clint, noticed that Rose was doing exceedingly well in his Biology class. Brother Clint found the clerical error and suggested that Rose be moved to the college track in his junior year. Even more life-changing than his escape out of the vocational track was Rose’s introduction to Jack MacFarland. MacFarland sparked Rose’s intellectual curiosity once again, for he had a uniquely invigorating teaching style that Rose had not yet inured himself to. MacFarland helped Rose get into college. MacFarland encouraged Rose to apply to college and even facilitated Rose’s admission to Loyola University for probationary period.

            Once in Loyola, MacFarland began to experience college as an underprepared student. Despite MacFarland’s year-long guidance, Rose did not feel well-equipped to handle freshman college classes. Rose found himself grasping to keep up with his coursework. By sophomore year, his grades averaged a C. Rose cultivated mentors who helped him through this critical period of his life. Rose writes, “The teachers that fate and Jack MacFarland’s crisis interventions sent my way worked at making the humanities truly human. What transpired between us was the essence of human liberal education, and it enabled me to move far beyond the cognitive charade of my freshman year” (Rose 48). He was able to win a fellowship for his graduate studies at the University of California, LA. Eventually he was able to adjust to the work through MacFarland’s intervention.  Another important factor in this part of his life was the maturation of his writing style. In many ways, his progress in his writing is a metaphor of the hypothetical projected progress of a student’s academic career. At first, Rose’s writing was rife with technical grammatical issues: run-on sentences, fragments, misused words, and incorrect noun-pronoun antecedents. However, as he began to gain more and more confidence, he began to make errors that were more stylistic in nature. His writing began to resemble the inflated language that many fledgling academic scholars believe to be sophisticated (Rose 54). Rose points out the importance of this process and how inextricable it is to the growth of the student. Rose writes, “The botched performances, though, are part of [the learning process], and developing writers will grow through them if they are able to write for people who care about language, people who are willing to sit with them and help them” (Rose 54). The errors Rose made are similar to the errors that many students make, and these errors are not grounds for judging students as inadequate. They are merely the growing pains of the maturing student and are signs that they need help to continue growing.

            While in graduate school at UCLA, Rose sharply felt the switch from a small liberal arts college like Loyola to the large, imposing academic institution of UCLA. The sheer size of UCLA compared to relatively small scale campus of Loyola was jarring. Even more importantly, Rose began to feel dissatisfied with his studies. This was not the same disassociation he felt in his earlier years, although the feeling mirrored it. At UCLA, Rose began to glimpse the lack of a humanistic approach to education. He tried to find ways to counter his dissatisfaction; he took classes outside of his discipline, ones that focused on human studies such as Psychology and Sociology.  Then, Rose joined the Teacher Corps and began to experience the education system from the perspective of an educator. Rose and his fellow interns worked within the neighbors of the students they were helping. He describes the students and families he met during his time in Teacher Corps. Afterwards, Rose began to work of the Veterans Program. He began to conceptualize the core of his own curriculum for teaching writing. His curriculum is structured around four key aspects: summarizing, classifying, comparing, and analyzing (Rose 138).

In the last chapters of the book, Rose begins to bring into focus the problems in the education system. These observations are built up from the years-long experience Rose has within the education system. One problem Rose mentions is the prioritization of research over teaching among educators in higher education. Another is the lack of support for students in terms of mentoring. Yet another issue stems from the very nature of the canonical method of teaching through drills. Rose stresses that reintroducing a human element into teaching will help exponentially alleviate the problems in the education system.

Overall, the most powerful element of the book was the narrative device Rose uses to prove his argument. The character sketches peppered throughout the memoir trigger empathetic responses in readers. When the reader reads about every student, it is as if she really has met that person. Two critiques that can be made of this book is reliance on the qualitative, observational data vs quantitative, statistical data and the use of the very device that makes it so compelling, the narrative. To some, Rose’s argument might have been bolstered if he added in the success rates of his classes, especially after he implemented his own curriculum. In addition, the narrative style of writing may register with academics—those who are more accustomed to the traditional quantitative research method—as not compelling enough. However, the point Rose is trying to make does best with a qualitative study because part of his argument is humanizing the population he is discussing. As it stands, Lives on the Boundary is accessible to people outside of academia, which makes it even more persuasive than other books which have tried to convey the same information. Furthermore, despite the book being somewhat dated, the concepts and arguments are very much still relevant to society today, and Rose’s approach narrative style renders it a classic.