The Bible Has No Thesis

The education system is funny.

Literally funny, I mean, not disturbing funny. (Well, in truth maybe a little of both.) They do a lot of things, some good and some bad, but the biggest curiosity is the somewhat juvenile way that they treat their methods.

It’s like an obsession. Some official, many years past, sat down and spaketh, “This is how it shall be done” — probably on nothing more than a whim — and apparently having other things on its mind, the education system hasn’t bothered to change it since.

Take essays. Please, take them. Consider what they are: small, conveniently-trussed packages of ideas. Theoretically simple and harmless, all they are is a preordained method of presenting a thought.

No problem there.

The problem is in the near-mythical stature the essay format has attained. God did not come forth and proclaim Essay the keeper of the Divine Word; indeed, there’s nothing particularly special about the essay, except that it works. Just like a hundred other formats I could name.

In a loose interpretation, of course, essays are merely any short piece of writing intended to elucidate a particular subject. In this sense, they’re both innocent and unavoidable. If you want to teach students to write, they must write.

However, the “anything short and to the point” definition of essay has been largely eclipsed by the “Almighty set-in-stone structure from which we must not stray” one. You shall have this many paragraphs, an introduction, a conclusion, a thesis and supporting ideas et al. And god forbid that you don’t do them all in exactly the proper way.

Here’s a paragraph change when I’m not transitioning between ideas.

Here’s another.

And another! It burns, doesn’t it? I feel so dirty.

Anyway, it’s not that essays are useless, it’s that there is nothing inherently more useful about them than about, say, a persuasive piece written in extended haiku form. Would the second be harder to write? Probably. Would it necessarily be less complex or profound? Who knows?

Yet despite this, The Essay has become so entrenched in our teaching system that our beloved educators would feel lost without it — and probably afraid, because then they might have to actually read our papers, as opposed to merely matching it against a rubric of does-he-have-enough-sentences-does-he-have-a-thesis-does-his-conclusion-summarize-the-idea.

I point at successful writers, and ask: How many Hemingways, how many Tolstoys, how many Faulkners or Marquez’s or Shakespeares — how many of them would receive an A on a modern-day English paper?