Why YouTubers (and Everyone Else) Can't Stop Writing Essays
0:00 this video is brought to you by curiositystream and my streaming video service nebula get access to both using the link in the description below name date class type name date class type introduction three body paragraphs conclusion this is the standard school essay and it needs no further introduction i've been writing them since middle school and since then i've used the five paragraph formula non-stop some papers would be longer some shorter but this was the norm my teachers made sure it was drilled into me a clearly stated thesis in the introduction general restatement as first sentence of the conclusion general remarks for further inquiry at the very end it was always the same this continued as i entered college although now professors demanded more originality i wrote relatively well so wanting to just keep writing i enrolled in what's called a great books program and between that and a second major in philosophy i wrote even more in undergrad than i wrote in high school over 40 essays in
1:00 the last three years alone averaging eight pages each that's almost 350 pages in undergrad in high school almost four out of five students have to write long form essays each year almost three out of five are required to write shorter essays every week why some studies show that essays promote higher order thinking organizational skills and knowledge retention but how did these become skills students needed to be taught in school how did the essay become the way teachers in almost every subject teach those skills the answer is complex but it has to do with railroads a lawyer named francis bacon germany and the struggle to define what it means to be an educated human being i started thinking about these questions when i read the book the essays by michelle dimontan it's one such great book that's part of my curriculum and when i read it i found for the first time something that looked like the papers i'd been writing for the past 14 years or so most of the great books are just that books 200 to 600 page tomes from plato to dostoyevsky
2:00 the essays though still a tone as the name suggests are a compilation of essays on hundreds of subjects but these aren't the rigid school essays that we are used to they meander and flow between topics montane will begin writing about the soul and then go into a historical anecdote about elephants or cannibals they're also personal intimate enough for montane to reveal his eating habits and his painful delivery of kidney stones montane is in fact typically cited as the founder of the modern essay but he's not the reason we write them what he is responsible for is their name for most of his life he was seemingly a typical french yuppie of the fifteen hundreds born and raised in new money he had the resources to work in french politics by the age of 24 when his life fundamentally changed he met another politician a poet by the name of a tien le boetti the two loved talking about literature so much so that montaigne wrote that their wills co-mingled plunged and lost themselves in each other today scholars speculate whether they were gay lovers or romantically involved whatever the case the two had something special and
3:02 montane knew it he declared that their acquaintance had occurred through some secret appointment of heaven drawing them closer to each other than anything else could have the intense friendship was short-lived though soon after the two met laboa t died leaving a hole in montane's heart that he was never quite able to fill he wrote that his mind was like a wild horse running to and fro ever anxious and unable to remain calm lacking anyone who could imitate the conversational power of liboa tea montane wrote his ideas down he did it to purge himself to make his mind ashamed of itself for overthinking he collected these works together and published them as a single volume the essays a name which comes from the french essay a word meaning attempt the choice of title was fitting where before montain attempted to discuss ideas with liboa t now he attempted to write them down by himself indeed by the 1600s early english dictionaries list attempt as the definition of essay this is its origin a romantic tale of lost love recaptured in writing but it isn't the reason we have essays today
4:02 to understand that we need to skip forward a couple hundred years to 1865. in america the civil war had just ended and its consequences for the nation were beyond political for the north the civil war represented the maintenance of the union the development of modern america as we know it today needing to deliver resources quickly and consistently to union troops while the war still raged congress passed the pacific railway act in 1862 for the construction of a transcontinental railroad the act contributed to the near quadrupling of the nation's railways by 1900 stimulating the burgeoning capitalist economy new railways meant new work and new work meant new means of education with the collapse of the slave owning a lead in the south such new education was created with new classes in mind in particular a middle class new business elites needed men to maintain and oversee the construction of railroads and other newly developing businesses it was the task of post-civil war american education to produce these men before the civil war the task of higher education in america was different american universities like those of their predecessors in england
5:02 were ultimately organs of church and state this meant that marginalized voices were not only excluded in practice but by design nearly the entire faculty overseeing colleges was protestant clergymen they're students of the same sex race religion and for the most part same social class education meant nothing other than training the children of political and religious elites to take up the traditional professions of their forefathers in the method of education reinforced this traditionalism everyone took the same classes and read the same books memorizing and reciting greek and roman authorities in the original languages in this way the graduates were primed for speaking rules the pulpit the senate and the judiciary while simultaneously separating themselves from the common man by their identical education by learning rhetoric the study of persuasion and occasionally logic these men were further primed to argue and persuade to move the common man in their favor whatever writing was done was subordinate to speaking the program was neo-humanist hailing from such renaissance reformers as erasmus of rotterdam it was called the studia humanitati said
6:04 fontes or the study of man from the sources that is the latins and the greeks erasmus's turn toward the classics was out of necessity though the education of his day run by the church turned out clerics writing obstructs glosses on ancient literature a process systematized as scholasticism glosses were taught to students for further commentary further glossing in an endless recursion commentary teaching commentary teaching in all this almost no one questioned the legitimacy of the sources used that is almost no one until erasmus by closely reading traditional authorities in original languages erasmus and those aligned with him uncovered a bombshell much of what the church taught up to that point was either translated poorly or downright factually incorrect his antidote to these errors was education independent of the church relying directly on the sources without third party intervention a practice soon picked up by british and american protestants this was the educational program of montane his father influenced by the humanists had montane speak in latin for the first
7:05 six years of his life three of which montaigne lived in almost total isolation the effect of this education on montane's abilities was immense not only had he read all of the greco-roman classics in latin he'd gone on to read contemporary poets like dante and petrarch in italian he was so taken aback by these works that when he retired he carved hundreds of classical quotes into his walls and ceiling it was here in private that he wrote the essays almost but certainly failing to exemplify the humanist ideal of verbones the broad liberally-minded man the liberal man was supposed to be a speaker not a writer rhetoric was at the core of the humanist curriculum as it would continue to be for the neo-humanists writing was always subordinate dedicated to study in close textual analysis itself dedicated to speaking these were impersonal tasks furthermore convincing an audience no matter what was the goal of the well-educated humanist montane however diverged from this program his was a personal literary project and as the essay gained popularity in english his vision of the essay went along with
8:05 it especially in the hands of the poets and philosophers who wrote them under their tutelage the essay as an informal literary device gained immense momentum into the 1800s but a literary alternative to the humanist methods one emphasizing personality wasn't what the new educators needed after the civil war they needed managers in personal organs of a developing industrial machine which could operate despite personality not in virtue of it for this they looked to scientists their leader however was not himself a scientist but a lawyer his name sir francis bacon bacon was also educated in the humanist program but he too found it insufficient floating in the air and failing to rid itself of the traditionalism of the scholastics what was needed he believed was a natural and experimental history a method by which mankind could come to know the natural world not through traditional sources but by trial and error the end goal was to command nature in action to win for man the conquest of the natural to do this bacon argued societies of men needed to come together out of one divine limbus
9:06 dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of god to this end he wrote his own essays legal and formal in structure the very first to be written in english though bacon never founded a society of scientists however his followers did it was called the royal society of london and it exists today within months of its founding though the royal society created a journal where all of its members could publish their works it was the first of its kind and it started a trend in 1665 when the journal was initially founded only it and one other journal existed by 1800 80 new journals were being founded a year it was a trend away from the spoken oral communication of the humanists towards written communication one that spread outward into management by the 1850s railroad industrialists were lamenting the oral culture that neo-humanist education had produced and the complaints weren't unfounded in 1841 a series of collisions on the western railroad between massachusetts and new york killed two and injured 20. it was a disaster the trains had run into each other head-on smashed to a complete wreck the reason
10:09 lack of documented communication managers solve the problem through clear channels of authority engineers communicating downward to timetable creators who communicated back upward to senior managers documentation for the sake of efficiency and safety was thus set in railways by 1856 similar theories concerning the utility of communication as a managerial tool became standard managers requesting a system perfect in its details properly adapted and vigilantly enforced it was an idea called systematic management it had francis bacon to thank for its popularity its ideas were publicized in managerial journals offshoots of the scientific and philosophical journals pioneered by pagan's followers studying the creatures of god thus quickly became the study of workers and by the 1870s scholarly literature and management theory had become ubiquitous the idea behind it was transcending the individual absorbing him into an organizational memory a group mind which could control his actions from above records and reports were the nerves of this mind analytical tools with which
11:11 information could be transmitted and rationalized written communication had thus become paramount for managerial success remember only 80 scholarly journals were founded in 1800 by 1900 this figure had risen to 10 000. specialization had become the name of the game in academia each new community of specialist researchers needed its own journal to publish its findings education now demanded written instruction more so than ever before not only to serve the needs of would-be managers but to perpetuate academia itself the vision of the university as a storehouse of research knowledge rather than a mere means to train political elites began in germany it was called the research ideal and it meant that academic research came first while all else came second it was an attempt by aristocrats like wilhelm von humboldt to reorganize the education system in germany after the occupation of napoleon led by the movement in german philosophy called idealism humboldt envisaged academic societies similar to those of bacon in which knowledge could be systematized and ultimately unified
12:11 the end goal was personal liberation but only for elites a new kind of elite thus became necessary now instead of training speakers the university would train intellectuals in the academic discourses of specialized fields some believe it was a fundamentally aristocratic vision attempting to form an intelligentsia based on preferred access to limit who could enter the new educated elite it was also the vision adopted by american universities after the civil war universities influenced by humboldt adapted two main reforms student research and free electives the two went hand in hand instead of a universal humanist curriculum a single discourse in which all students and faculty were united now students were required to enter into specialized discourses and to begin contributing to them through original research the new system was instituted first at harvard in 1870. here william james the famed american psychologist solidified the role of original student writing by demanding regular critical analyses in his psychology courses students in america had been writing in
13:12 universities and high schools since about 1800 though student writing wasn't new but this writing was in service of the old humanist ideal speech students wrote what were called themes a practice wholly rhetorical in nature without specialization elite students were expected to refer to any number of books a so-called intellectual commons part of the unity that humanists created it was synthetic writing intended to train the student to draw ideas together only to the extent that he was allowed to speak about them the new writing at harvard however demanded analysis a rigorous production of original insights for induction into a culture of professionalism by 1876 with the founding of johns hopkins university the culture of professionalism was solidified as the future of anglophone academia it was the first university founded in america explicitly based on the german model of specialized training harvard had merely transitioned to it a trend began some years earlier in 1862 congress passed the morel act granting land to states for the development of colleges to train the new middle class iowan
14:13 kansas state universities the first founded from the federal grants followed harvard and hopkins to the t elective classes and research writing were immediately instituted the message sent to all newly established universities was clear to succeed imitate harvard and johns hopkins or be left behind with universities across the united states now following the elective model into the 1880s the essay was in a tailspin in the 1850s the essay still retained its generally literary quality textbooks from the decade differentiated it from theme writing according to its free form meandering nature but thanks to holdouts from the classical humanist system the theme was emerging into what we know today as the typical school essay the theme was a highly structured format because the humanists emphasized speech and education they had a chief structural model in marcus cicero an ancient roman orator cicero's own motivations for using strict structure were utilitarian in the throes of roman civil upheavals he felt it his task to codify the education of a speaker for the safety of the republic doing so meant outlining a clearly defined
15:14 structure for speech in six parts by the 1650s this format was adapted to theme writing if it was good enough for speech it would work well enough for the themes as preambles to speech so the educators thought the structure however was changed instead of cicero's six parts the structure was reduced to the modern day five by 1884 in reaction to the specialist writing in electives implemented in 1870 harvard had implemented a requirement making such themes a daily necessity the idea was an attempt to recapture the humanist methods of the past and it stuck students were now tasked with two forms of writing one technical and research oriented and the other thematic and rhetorical where the theme ended and the research writing began was now entirely obscure and dependent on whatever university or school one attended because the essay was a pedagogical device alongside the theme by 1902 the first time the five paragraph essay was used in print the two had become entirely synonymous with research writing for the academy and technical writing for big business the main types of writing required of
16:14 someone at the turn of the century high schools and middle schools across the country were forced to adapt by the standard set by harvard johns hopkins and all the new universities as another holdover from the humanist education it was simply assumed that english teachers would be the ones tasked with teaching this new form of writing it was the belief of the humanists that he who mastered rhetoric could master all the subjects now under the education needed to produce researchers and managers english was meant to be the servant of all other subjects from billboards to engineering report the ability to express yourself correctly is the key to success by 1919 the attitude was firmly established textbooks in english now demanding that students learn what was called the research attitude the modern student writer was thus trained as a medium not an originator his task is to explore the library of the words of the world trained to pick and choose carefully among myriad facts coming ideally to that selfless position of knowing secondary materials so well that he merges with them the research writer is meant in other
17:15 words to give himself up absolutely to the discourse community it was complete impersonality in writing by the 1920s the modern essay as we know it today that vague mixture of research in strict form was thus set in stone by 1959 with the publication of a paper extolling the virtues of the five paragraph form in modern research writing the formal strictures of the essay stuck reform of the system was attempted time and again a parallel movement attempting the literary nature of essays continued in the vein of the poets and the philosophers men and women like william hazlitt and virginia woolf continued in their tradition in the tradition of montane but by the turn of the century the personal essay had become its own hardened literary form no longer a mere attempt a la montaigne it was a form of writing taught learned and repeated by english majors for publication in specialized literary journals it was no longer a mere method of writing but fine literature to be compared and critiqued against its progenitors other educational reforms were however attempted
18:15 Fully intended, John Dewey famously declared that the school exists to prepare the young for future responsibilities and for success in life, and indeed he tried with social reformers to institute methods of learning more active and more engaging beyond the mere library and now Internet researches the essay demanded. The idea was to unify writing with all subjects around social concerns to make the student aware of the importance of the work he or she is doing to the world around him.
Despite success in middle schools, in high schools the reforms mostly fell flat. The demands of specialized writing were simply too heavy. In science especially, becoming initiated into the discourse of a discipline—whether chemistry, physics, or biology—was simply too burdensome for schools.
Others attempted to revive the humanist curriculum under the name Great Books, the program that I'm a part of, but that movement never really caught on either. By 1915, the school system had emerged into a complex organization, centralized and in constant need of resources. Understaffed and underfunded, schools lack the resources to do
19:15 anything more than teach the bare-bones skills that researchers and businessmen demanded of them.
"We virtually have no money to spend whatsoever. I mean, it's impossible to teach art on a zero-dollar budget. We've been years without proper funding in our state, and it shows: bathrooms with no doors, leaky roofs, chairs that are falling apart, old textbooks."
By the 1950s, a general industrial model thus became standard: specific information taught by science and history departments, while universal skills were taught by English and arts departments. By the 1960s, many colleges introduced entrance essays to test composition skills, further entrenching the essay's use for teachers.
In all this, though, students' writing hardly improved. In 1874, more than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing. By 1950, surveys found that university education had still not produced any significant improvements in undergraduate writing. Today, there is no single set of skills or knowledge defined for teaching writing. The school essay, particularly in its five-paragraph form,
20:17 is just a default. As mentioned at the beginning, some theorists of writing argue that it boosts neurocognitive pathways associated with organization. Others argue that it's helpful for teachers: it cuts down the variety of assignments that they need to grade. "If you look at a teacher and you say to them, 'We want you to be a therapist, we want you to be a social worker, we want you to be a teacher, obviously, uh we want you to have some safety training,' and then you layer in the joys of the pandemic and learning to teach online and to teach remotely, but don't forget that we do have the joy of standardized testing that we're going to layer on top of that, and then we're going to evaluate how you're successfully navigating all of the challenges facing the world while you're teaching a kid to read..."
At bottom, though, teachers use the essay today because it's an easy, orderly, and efficient way of priming students for more complex writing. When exactly they're supposed to do that kind of writing and how exactly they're going to learn it, nobody really knows. Because of the SAT's essay and college entrance essays, it also remains useful in the broader industrial model of education, too.
21:18 As one teacher put it: "Too many students, too little time, too few resources, too much bureaucracy." Teachers just don't have an alternative. The essay, five-paragraph or otherwise, just gets the job done.
What that job is, it's hard to say. It has something to do with training managers to produce memoranda and reports for businesses. It also has something to do with the research ideal: producing an intellectual elite who can easily navigate the community discourse of a certain discipline. Both are attempts to reduce the individual to the now-trite idea of a cog in the machine, a mere producer of information for the group mind. We write so many essays in school because educators need us to. It's useful to keep writing when your future allegedly demands it.
Today, Montaigne's personal essay is practically irrelevant. The essay as we know it is largely a tool to create future producers of more essays, and that's about it. Is Cicero's model really the best way to do that 2,000 years later? Probably not. Is the highly structured research essay really the best way to communicate information? As of the year 2000, academia has
22:19 published something like 50 million articles. No one can read through all of them, but we've got papers describing them and papers describing those papers and so on forever, similar to the Scholastics of yore.
To quote Mark Fisher: "Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the sad passions that intoxicate and entrance us." I hope in some way, in explaining the modern school essay's origins and railroads in the Scientific Revolution, I've attempted something similar.
It's a point that I, now editing this video, would like to emphasize: this is only an attempt at an explanation, only one story. I've left out numerous details, and there are many more stories to be told about the history of business and education. If you'd like to learn more about these stories, check out some of the books I listed in the description, or watch a documentary. I recently started watching a docu-series called The Ascent of Money, provided by this video's sponsor, CuriosityStream. If you're interested in more historical and business-related underpinnings
23:20 beneath everyday life, I recommend it—both the documentary and CuriosityStream itself. They're a subscription streaming service with thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles, and their support for independent creators like me is part of what makes this channel possible. They've partnered with educational creators, myself included, to help launch Nebula, a platform we've built together to create content with greater creative freedom. Tom Scott, Austin McConnell, and Polyphonic are just a few of the creators whose content is featured here. It's all ad-free, and when you use my link in the description, you'll get CuriosityStream at 26% off and Nebula completely for free. If you sign up by June 20th, you'll actually get 41% off for Father's Day. Again, the link is in the description, so thank you. I really appreciate it.
On another note, I'm on the lookout for editors right now. I'm actually still in college—I haven't graduated yet and won't for another year—so creating these videos by myself with the kind of quality that I want is pretty difficult, as you can tell by my long hiatuses. If
24:21 you're interested in helping me edit these videos, shoot me an email and I'll be in touch as soon as possible.
With that, this is Mr. Amazing. Thank you for watching.
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