Or is he too old?

[Paul Nightingale]

"After the Film Generation" is unavailable (to me, anyway) but Kauffmann has
expressed himself in an interview with Bert Cardullo, in Jody McAuliffe ed,
Plays, Movies and Critics, Duke University Press (1993).

With particular reference to what he had written in AFG Kauffmann discusses
the entry into academia of film, and then compares this to the way
literature is studied. It's "a paradox" that film became an academic subject
and that turned off people from studying film. In the same way, literature
students no longer read books after graduation:

"Let's assume that there were once people who read, read with pleasure and
freely; then literature became for them a straitened, compartmentalized,
curricular activity. At the beginning, I think the teaching of literature in
colleges and universities helped people -- I'm speaking always about the
general person, not the specialist. But later, I think, it became for them a
means of, in their minds, finishing with literature: 'I've read my great
books, now I'm free.'"

And then, going back to film: "I don't mean that people stopped going to
films after they finished their film courses, which they took on their way
to becoming doctors, lawyers, or just general good citizens. But that their
interest in any kind of expansion or extension of themselves as the result
of film experience, in taking any kind of trouble to see films, was
something they associated with the moribund past, with note taking, exams,
and papers." (All quotations, 231)

Anti-intellectualism 101. Terrance might have quoted this, or Kauffmann
elsewhere to the same effect, but didn't.

What to say?

Most obviously, Kauffmann (who seems to have done pretty well out of being a
popular, if not populist, intellectual) makes a fundamental error in
overlooking (or hoping his readers will overlook) that education =
assessment regime rather than learning. It's not the intellectual challenge
of reading that puts readers off; rather it's the exposure of the self
to/through assessment. This is what students I've worked with and
interviewed for ongoing research have told me, one way or another. They
resent being force-fed something called Literature, not because it makes
their brains hurt, but because it's a means to an end. They opt in and out,
switch on and off--all as a way of maintaining a degree of control. It's
called resistance, and rather more complex than saying: 'School puts me off
thinking'.