The Graves of Academe, Richard Mitchell [top books to read TXT] 📗

of Secondary Education, a.k.a. The Gang of Twenty-seven, now long forgotten but certainly not gone. They builded better than they knew, and their souls go marching on in every school in America today. The Commission was established in 1913, the year that also brought us the income tax. Many of its members were functionaries of school bureaucracies, from the United States Commissioner of Education himself down through supervisors and associate superintendents and principals and even a high school inspector, whatever that was, to no less a personage than a senior educational secretary of the YMCA. Professors and assistant professors of education represented the higher learning. One of them was chairman of the committee on mathematics, naturally, while the committees on lesser disciplines, notably classical and modern languages, were directed by high school teachers. The stern sciences were served by a professor of education, while the smiling sciences like social studies and the other household arts were overseen by federal bureaucrats. In the whole motley crew there were no scientists, no mathematicians, no historians, no traditional scholars of any sort.

That was surely no accident, for it seems to have been an article of the Commission’s unspoken agenda to overturn the work of an earlier NEA task force that had been made up largely of scholars, the Committee of Ten, called together in 1892 and chaired by Charles W. Eliot, then president of Harvard University. That committee had come out in favor of traditional academic study in the public schools, which they fancied should be devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and the training of the intellect. But what can you expect from a bunch of intellectuals? The Eliot Report of 1893 was given to things like this:

As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of observation; as mathematics are the traditional training of the reasoning faculties; so history and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental power which we call judgment.

Obviously, the Eliot committee did its work in the lost, dark days before the world of education had discovered the power of the bold innovative thrust. All they asked of the high schools was the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment.

The Gang of Twenty-seven, unhampered by intellectual predispositions, found that proposal an elitist’s dream. They concluded, in other words, that precious few schoolchildren were capable of the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment. That, of course, turned out to be the most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy of our century. It is also a splendid example of the muddled thought out of which established educational practice derives its theories. The proposals of the Eliot report are deemed elitist because they presume that most schoolchildren are generally capable of the mastery of subject matter and intellectual skill; the proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, on the other hand, are “democratic” in presuming that most schoolchildren are not capable of such things and should stick to homemaking and the manual arts.

This bizarre principle is still very much with us as a generator of educationistic theory and practice. It shows, among other things, the immense power of words, especially nasty ones like “elitism,” notably abhorrent to our egalitarian society. It is certainly true (and puzzling as well, since the men who made us this egalitarian society were indubitable intellectuals) that we distrust intellectuals. They do seem to be an elite, although, thank goodness, a powerless elite. They butter little bread. Nevertheless, when we ask those intellectuals what we should do in the schools, they tell us to do everything we can to bring forth swarms of other intellectuals, which must lead us to conclude that the intellectual elitists can’t be too smart. What kind of an elitist can it be who wants to generate his own competitors, and lots of them at that? But the champions of a “democratic” public education, righteous enemies of elitism, rejoice in the profitable belief that hardly any of the children in their charge can expect to rise to the level of curriculum facilitator, to say nothing of superintendent of schools.

In the cause of “democratic” public education, the Gang of Twenty-seven compounded illogic with ignorance by deciding that the education proposed by the Eliot committee was primarily meant as “preparation for the college or university.” True, relatively few high school graduates of 1913 went on to college; but even fewer had done so in 1893. Indeed, it was just because so few would go on to more education that the Eliot committee wanted so many to have so much in high school. But the Gang of Twenty-seven decided that since very few students would go on to the mastery of a discipline and the rigorous training of the mind in college, which colleges were still fancied to provide in those days, there was little need to fuss about such things in high school. They had far more interesting things to fuss about in any case, their kinds of things. They enshrined them all, where they abide as holy relics of the cult of educationism to this day, in their final report, issued in 1918 (and printed at government expense, like all the outpourings of educationism ever since) as Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.

Cardinal Principles was a small pamphlet, not much larger than The Communist Manifesto or a man’s hand. It rejected the elitist and undemocratic education of the dark past and provided in its place “preparation for effective living.” It made us the effective livers we are today, and it sends forth every year from our public schools and colleges all those effective livers who will make the future of the nation.

The seven cardinal principles were put forth as the paths to the seven “main objectives of education,” which had finally been discovered once and for all after twenty-five hundred years of intellectual floundering. The first of those main objectives was Health .Health . Its primacy is justified by that firm grasp on the obvious that was to become the very foundation stone of educational theorizing: “Health needs cannot be neglected during the period of secondary education without serious danger to the individual and the race.” How true. You can’t make effective livers out of dead children. And think of the race! Suppose they all die! How then will we get the taxpayers “to secure teachers competent to ascertain and meet the needs of individual pupils and able to inculcate in the entire student body a love for clean sport?”

(It is interesting to notice that, like this one, all of the proposals in Cardinal Principles will call for vastly increased faculties and administrative bureaucracies both in the high schools and in the teachers’ colleges. This has since become the Eighth Cardinal Principle, which you can see doing its work in your local school system whenever any remedy to any problem or shortcoming is proposed: Whatever we do will require more money, more teachers, more administrators, and more mandated courses in education.)

Cardinal Principles even proposed that there be in each school a kind of health officer, whose job would range from looking around for insanitary conditions in the building to inquiring into the social lives of the students, who might well be risking their health in the streets and in ice-cream parlors. It was in the cause of health, I believe, that my own first-grade teacher used to hold fingernail inspection every morning and cry out now and then to some slouching young reprobate: “Posture!” It was in this cause, too, that what was called “physical education” became the oppressive monster that it is today and, by the very power of its name, compounded beyond remedy the educationistic delusion that “education” and “training” are the same thing. It is not a coincidence, nor is it without large consequences, that so many of America’s high school principals were once phys. ed. teachers.

The second “main objective” is, at first, slightly surprising: Command of Fundamental Processes. In 1918 that meant just about what Basic Minimum Competence means today. Although it certainly did not mean anything more than Basic Minimum Competence either, it did at least mean a higher minimum. Nowadays we count ourselves lucky if the students can read and write at the ninth-grade level, whatever that means this year. Cardinal Principles says that such a level of competence, even in 1918, “is not sufficient for the needs of modern life.” (I must say, too, that Cardinal Principles, although stilted and dull, is not written in the self-serving, mindless jargon of today’s educationists. This credit, however, must be balanced against a large debit. It was in the ensuing scramble of silly, pseudo-scholarship required for the justification of the cardinal principles that our educationists discovered the power of mendacious gobbledegook and adopted it as their native tongue.)

Furthermore, it is clear that, while the drafters of Cardinal Principles do put Command of Fundamental Processes second only to Health, they do so apparently as an involuntary bend of the knee to that discredited old elitism. About the other “main objectives” they have a lot to say, and many suggestions as to how curriculum might be manipulated in their accommodation and many new people hired in their cause. When they have called for Command of Fundamental Processes, that’s it. They proceed at once to Worthy Home-membership , a main objective much more to their liking.

Cardinal Principles admits, affirms, in fact, that “In the education of every high-school girl, the household arts should have a prominent place because of their importance to the girl herself and to others whose welfare will be directly in her keeping.” It presumes, too, that even girls who do idle away a few more years in college or in “occupations not related to the household arts” will someday have to face their “actual needs and future responsibilities” and “understand the essentials of food values, of sanitation, and of household budgets.”

Although Worthy Home-membership obviously has a lot to do with cooking and sewing, it also provides for the dilution of whatever may persist of the old elitist curriculum:

The social studies should deal with the home as a fundamental social institution and clarify its relation to the wider interests outside. [That will disqualify history, a discipline notably unconcerned with “the home,” as a worthy study.] Literature should interpret and idealize the human elements that go to make the home. [That knocks out the study of literature, which is remarkably unlikely to do what some educationists decree that it “should” do.] Music and art should result in more beautiful homes and greater joy therein. [They really had to stretch for that one, but it will call to order pretentious art and music teachers who peddle their subjects as intrinsically worthwhile, and it will even justify the inclusion of interior decorating in the high school curriculum.]

It is exactly that, the dilution of ordinary academic study, that makes this kind of “education” so pernicious. Obviously no one can object to housekeeping skills or to beautiful homes and joy therein. But beauty and joy, and even housekeeping skills, are either diminished or destroyed by ignorance and stupidity, which are likely to flourish in a place where history is subordinated to a “social study” of the home as an institution and where literature is chosen for study if it does what it “should” do.

Those funny “educations” are all the more powerful and long-lived because they are designed to grow fat and sassy through eating the bodies of their victims. When we embark on an ambitious program of Worthy Home-membership Education, we justify ourselves by naming some indubitable benefits we intend to bestow: an understanding of “the essentials of food values, of sanitation, and of household budgets,” for instance. Those