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

benefits, of course, can be had, along with a great deal more, by those who study and learn such things as biology, chemistry, and mathematics, but those stern old disciplines offer little scope for the bold, innovative thrust and the increased budget. So we pretend, or some of us may actually believe, that home budgeting, which is a skill all these girls need, can be learned in the absence of mathematics, which is an elitist skill useful only for a few.

And sure enough — little by little the study and practice of such subjects as science and mathematics decline, and fewer and fewer students take such courses. We have helped this decline by providing easy and “democratic” options for those who seem to have a little trouble with the demanding elitism of traditional academic study. Now the day has come when very few high school girls can do any arithmetic at all. Now is our triumph. We can redignify Worthy Home-membership Education with a trendy new name, Consumer Education, and teach nutrition and wary shopping to girls who are innocent of science and unable to figure out the price of an ounce of macaroni. Those deficits, which flow from our very existence, we can now put forth as arguments for our continued existence. This pattern, of course, can describe the growth and triumph of any of those “educations.”

Another such education was the fourth main objective in Cardinal Principles: Vocation. The Commission’s proposals for a vocational education program that would take up “much of the pupil’s time” derive from its own cardinal principles: that few students can do academic work and would best spend their time in learning homemaking skills and trades, and that the larger purpose of public education was to bring about a certain social order. They urge vocational education not only to “equip the individual to secure a livelihood for himself and those dependent on him,” but also so that he may “maintain the right relationships toward his fellow workers and society.” The Commission does not, of course, explain what “right relationships” might be, perhaps presuming that all the other educationists who read their report would surely favor right relationships over wrong relationships without giving the matter any thought. As usual.

But vocational education, as imagined in Cardinal Principles, was not to be a separate program within the schools; it was intended that even those students who did not spend “much of their time” in the wood shop would nevertheless “develop an appreciation of the significance” of vocations “and a clear conception of right relations [there they are again] between the members of the chosen vocation, between different vocational groups, between employer and employee, and between producer and consumer.” All such things can be studied, of course, in the context of several well-known disciplines, but study can provide only knowledge. Cardinal Principles does not call for knowledge of these matters, however, but for “appreciation” and a “clear conception of right relations.”

It is a thematic illusion of our educational enterprise that understanding can be had without knowledge, that the discretion can be informed without information, that judgment need not wait on evidence. Before we can ask what are the right relations between producer and consumer, for instance, we must know what are all the possible relations between producer and consumer. We must know antecedents and consequences; we must know functions and contexts. We must, in fact, know more than we can hope to know, which is why thoughtful people only reluctantly and armed with as much knowledge as possible leap from knowing into judging and decide to “hold” some truths self-evident.

On the other hand, Cardinal Principles, in speaking of its fifth main objective, Civics Education, leaps blithely into: “Too frequently, however, does mere information, conventional in value and remote in its bearing, make up the content of the social studies.” Mere information. What the Commission might mean by “conventional in value” I just don’t know, but I do know, along with all who have ever studied, that only a fool is willing to take the risk that this or that bit of mere information is “remote in its bearing.” Facts seem unrelated only to those who know few facts.

As you might expect, Civics Education — what a noble cause! — is given enormous power to alter and dilute the content of traditional academic subjects:

History should so treat the growth of institutions that their present value may be appreciated. Geography should show the interdependence of men while it shows their common dependence on nature. Civics should concern itself less with constitutional questions and remote governmental functions, and should direct attention to social agencies close at hand and to the informal activities of daily life that regard and seek the common good. Such agencies as child-welfare organizations and consumers’ leagues afford specific opportunities for the expression of civic qualities by the older pupils.

The work in English should kindle social ideals and give insight into social conditions and into personal character as related to these conditions. Hence the emphasis by the committee on English on the importance of a knowledge of social activities, social movements, and social needs on the part of the teacher of English.

And, not content with prescribing an “appreciation” of institutions that would satisfy Lenin, ignorance of the constitution in the name of responsible citizenship, and literature as an instigator of social compliance, the Commission decides also that “all subjects should contribute to good citizenship.” (My italics.) While they would probably not suggest, in that cause, that the binomial theorem be put to a vote in class, their descendants and adherents will , in fact, suggest that mathematics, obviously “remote in its bearing” on good citizenship, is not really at the heart of the educational enterprise.

While its concrete proposals for Civics Education are very much like its proposals for all the other educations, Cardinal Principles, in the name of “attitudes and habits important in a democracy,” goes an extra step and prescribes what should actually happen in the classroom. It urges “the assignment of projects and problems to groups of pupils for cooperative solution and the socialized recitation whereby the class as a whole develops a sense of collective responsibility. Both of these devices give training in collective thinking.” Here we can see the theoretical foundations of the rap session, the encounter group, the values clarification module, and the typical course in education, but also something far worse.

For thousands of years, many decent, knowing, and thoughtful people have hated and feared democracy, and with good reasons. We don’t think of it that way any longer, probably because we have all been to schools devoted to the cardinal principles, but the framers of our society took great pains to guard us against the obvious (to them) dangers inherent in majority rule. It was precisely to commend and elucidate the constitution’s ability to protect the few from the ignorance or self-interest of the many that Madison wrote the tenth Federalist Paper; which is, of course, not included in the Civics Education curriculum. The children who are to generate “cooperative solutions” and “socialized recitations” are to do so without concern for, or even any knowledge of, “constitutional questions and remote governmental functions” like checks and balances. They will do their “collective thinking” unencumbered by “mere information.”

It is another of the educationists’ self-serving delusions that if enough of the ignorant pool their resources, knowledge will appear, and that a parliament of fools can deliberate its way to wisdom. This delusion is not entirely groundless. It is grounded in another delusion, the one that flows from a half-baked adaptation of the work of Wundt.

You will recall Cattell’s curious conclusion that learning the sounds of letters was not useful in learning to read because those who could read did not sound out the letters. Recall also that Wundt saw learning (he did not say “education”) as a conditioned response to stimuli. For American educationists, such “facts” were absorbed into a generalized notion that might be put something like this: We notice that educated people, whatever that might mean, have certain attributes and that they do things in certain ways, or, since we are educationists, that they “exhibit certain behaviors.” So, if our students come to have those attributes and exhibit those behaviors, they will be educated, and we will be educators.

Educated and thoughtful people have indeed often met and deliberated together and solved problems and found wisdom. Just look at the Constitutional Convention, for example, or, if you’re a little short on mere information, consider the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. Therefore, if we assign projects and problems to groups of students we will instill in them the same “sense of collective responsibility” that we see so often among the educated and thoughtful. In that fashion, furthermore, we will engender in them an appropriate appreciation of “the ideals of American democracy and loyalty to them,” as Cardinal Principles recommends.

An analogous line of reasoning would begin with the observation that musicians have been known to play “Lady of Spain” and end with the determination to train seals to play “Lady of Spain” on bicycle horns and turn them into musicians.

And there is another ominous and far-reaching implication in the Commission’s assignment of projects and problems hidden, not very deeply, in “collective thinking.” This phrase reveals an appalling ignorance and thoughtlessness out of which terrifying educationistic malfeasances have been growing for decades.

Schooling is done in public places, but the roots of an education can grow only in the hidden ground of the mind. Lessons are taught in social institutions, but they can be learned only by private people. The acts that are at once the means and the ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done. There is no such thing as “collective thinking.” Our schools can be an instrument for socialization or an incentive to thoughtfulness, but they cannot be both.

Thus it is, for instance, that such elementary skills as reading and writing, public analogues of private thinking, are so ill taught in the schools. It is not sufficient explanation of this failure to point out that the educationists who design the schools are themselves notoriously poor readers and writers, although they are. That leads us only to ask in turn why that should be so. At the root of our widespread and institutionalized illiteracy is a fevered commitment to socialization and an equally unhealthy hostility to the solitary, and thus probably antisocial, work of the mind. In school, the inane and uninformed regurgitations of the ninth-grade rap session on solar energy as a viable alternative to nuclear power are positive, creative, self-esteem-enhancing student behavioral outcomes; the child who sits alone at the turning of the staircase, reading, is a weirdo. The students did not bring that “appreciation” to school; they learned it there.

Somewhat later in their history, the educationists will justify and formalize their hostility to the intellect, with which they never did feel comfortable, by inventing the “affective domain” of feelings and attitudes and appreciations and setting its gracious virtues over against the tedious and unimaginative “rote” learning of the merely “cognitive domain.” But they will only raise walls where the Gang of Twenty-seven has dug the foundation. We can see the marks of their shovels in all those appreciations and attitudes and values and “worthy” attributes of this and that. And when they come to their sixth main objective of secondary education, Worthy Use of Leisure, they outdo their successors in a sublime presumptuousness possible only to the happily and profoundly ignorant.

As to the Worthy Use of Leisure, they counsel thus:

Heretofore the high school has given little conscious attention to this objective. It has so exclusively sought intellectual discipline that it has seldom treated