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

Cardinal Principles have not been mitigated by the passage of time or the pressure of momentous events. Quite to the contrary, they have been regularly reaffirmed and reinvigorated, both in theory and practice. The devisers of the Seven Deadly Principles set out not to teach certain skills and knowledge to hosts of children but to change the nature of American society. They succeeded. They didn’t, of course, make the vast mass of the people stupid and uninformed, for that happens in the course of nature without any need for deliberate effort, but they did arrange that fewer and fewer would reach escape velocity and rise out of the vast mass of the stupid and uninformed. As the consequences of the deadly principles become evident, sometimes one by one and sometimes in whole hosts of troubles, the descendants of the Gang of Twenty-seven point them out as justifications for even more of the same, more schemes to alter a society already suffering from all the earlier alterations.

The seven “main objectives of education” are still the main objectives of education, although one of them, Command of Fundamental Processes, was always somewhat less main than the others and remains so now that it has been renamed Basic Minimum Competence, in which term the important word is “minimum.” And it is exactly toward the achievement of those objectives, especially the greater six, that the training and indoctrination of schoolteachers is directed. Earnest attention to the seventh is just not possible in this scheme, for it would require precisely those things that Cardinal Principles finds inimical to “right” and “worthy” values: stringent intellectual discipline and great stores of mere information. The professors of education are not interested in those things, for their own training and indoctrination are no different from what they visit upon their students. After all, what else have they to bestow? And the professors of everything else just don’t want to be bothered, and what they do have to bestow they save for a few favored students who will in turn become the professors of everything else who just don’t want to be bothered. Mencken was right.

The Principles March On

The educationism that now informs our schools and teacher academies is an amalgam of post-Wundtian misunderstanding and the Sunday-school do-goodism of Cardinal Principles. From the former it takes its characteristically therapeutic and manipulative methods and devices, and from the latter its pious pretensions as an agent of social harmony and guardian of the public virtue. In one way, therefore, it is pseudo-scientific, and in the other, pseudo-religious. It is the devotion to contradictory principles of dubious validity that generates the mental climate of educationism and leads to that special fatuousness so typical of American educational thought, a vexing blend of the illogical and the sentimental.

As recently as 1971, the National Education Association undertook a project called “Schools for the 70’s and Beyond.” The ensuing “main report,” “written primarily [sic] by Warren T. Greenleaf and Gary A. Griffin,” was published as a slim volume: A Call to Action. Although it was clearly written in the shadow of growing discontent about schools, it urged at least consideration of “the thesis that school excellence narrowly defined, not school failure narrowly defined, has given us most of the problems that divide our nation in 1970” — an entertaining proposition, and one that would surely confirm the assertion in Cardinal Principles that too much attention to intellectual discipline inhibits right understanding. And the “argument” put forth in support of that thesis is itself a dramatic example of worthy disregard for mere information:

It was not illiterate, backward men who spiked our residential skylines with steel forests of television antennas, spoiled our rivers with the defecations of a hundred “growth” industries, fouled our air with the sooty contrails of a thousand jet planes taking off daily, or choked our cities with automobiles that cost as much to park as to buy. That work was accomplished by men whose schooling enabled them to develop transistors, no-deposit-no-return bottles, pressurized cabins, and a 36-months-to-pay economy.

You say you want to understand how a modern technological society works? Well, now you know. Men with schooling cunningly trick the multitudes into buying television antennas and driving expensive cars. Educated elitists force decent citizens to travel in airplanes and callously require them to dispose of bottles at their own expense. It isn’t the “illiterate, backward men” who visit these horrors on us; untainted by “excellence narrowly defined,” they can manage only rape, murder, arson, and an occasional gas-station stickup.

This amazingly stupid oversimplification is perfectly typical of educational theory. It is typical, too, in its confusion of “education” with the ability to design transistors and to pressurize cabins, which is precisely the sort of thing Cardinal Principles had in mind when it spoke of vocational training. Such a confusion is inevitable, however, when the pursuit of intellectual discipline is seen as hostile to right and worthy understanding. Even a fairly elementary technology, that of the electrician or plumber, for example, depends on certain disciplined habits of mind and a suitably large mass of information. The designing of transistors may be more complicated, but it is essentially the same kind of enterprise as plumbing. A distrust of intellectual discipline must eventually become a distrust of any disciplined habits of mind and any traditional store of “mere information.” Logically, therefore, the writers of a Call to Action might also have indicted plumbers and electricians, the plumbers for having connected us to sewage systems and thence to the spoiling of rivers, and the electricians for making it easy to plug in the television sets for whose sake we have bought all those antennas.

Anti-intellectualism is like anti-Semitism, which only begins with the hating of Jews. From there it goes on to the ferreting out of hitherto-unsuspected manifestations of Jewishness, and anti-intellectualism goes on even to the denigration of technology, and thus of the very vocational training that schools offer as one of many antidotes to intellectualism. One could reasonably expect, therefore, that vocational training in the schools must become a halfhearted and half-baked enterprise, whose obvious purpose is not the teaching of even a relatively simple technology but the segregation of students for whom even “appreciation” seems too difficult. That, as it happens, is the case.

The writers of A Call to Action do not rest their case on the malefactors who brought us industrial waste and installment payments, outrageous impositions probably dating from neolithic elitism. They go on to say that “It was not ignorant men who designed a rifle bullet that could spin end over end to increase its flesh-tearing capacity.” That, they remind us, was done by men with “schooling in the far reaches of physics.” Well, maybe to an educationist a tumbling bullet, like the barb on a spear or the juice on an arrowhead, really does seem to come from the far reaches of physics. That would make sense.

They name also those devious “men sufficiently well educated to cite precedents from 200 years of American law” as the ones “who juggled school boundaries…to keep black children separate from white.” It was not , they assure us, “back-country bumpkins” who evilly studied law in order to “manipulate city ordinances.” The back-country bumpkins left that sort of thing to the overeducated gentry and just went on about the business of beating and shooting and lynching.

It is fascinating, of course, to hear those who operate the schools argue that because there are people who can build aircraft for profit and cite law in their own cause we may conclude that the schools have actually provided too much “excellence.” What is even more fascinating is that this bewildering and ignorant line of reasoning should find, apparently, no detractors among the vast membership of the National Education Association, many thousands of whom must have read and taken comfort from A Call to Action.

When I still fancied that the mindless and illogical utterances so common in Academe were the results simply of haste or carelessness, and long before I began to study the educationists’ self-justifications in works like Cardinal Principles and A Call to Action, the following ominously suggestive article appeared in The Underground Grammarian:

Prostrate Trouble at NJEA

There is a kind of thoughtlessness that is not exactly stupidity. It is a failing seen in ordinarily intelligent people who, under the influence of self-interest, prefer to evade clarity of thought in precise language, giving themselves instead to recitation of the vague and comfortable. They write prostrate prose in which they let themselves be walked all over by verbal inaccuracies and the failures of logic that those inaccuracies always cause. Such prose is especially dangerous because it often sounds like common sense around the old pot-bellied stove. We will consider a case of cracker-barrel cant from the ruminations of one James P. Connerton.

Connerton is the new executive director of the New Jersey Education Association. All we know of him is what we read in the NJEA_Review_ of January, 1979, to wit, that he has now returned to New Jersey after ten years spent in unspecified enterprises “in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, and other states.” How many other states, deponent saith not, but he doth say: “His goals are our goals. Our aspirations are his aspirations. Our joy and our pain are his joy and pain.” The pain probably has to do with moving expenses.

Deponent is Frank Totten, the president of NJEA. Here’s more of what he writes:

Together we are the NJEA. All of us have made us what we are today. What we will be in 10 or 20 years depends on our determination, our forsight, our hard work, and our togetherness.

Jim Connerton is determined, farsighted, hardworking and one of us. As in the past, we’ll do it together. We will determine our future and the future will be better because we have worked together.

Welcome home Jim. We need you. The present and the future will be better for us because we’ll work through them together.

That has a quaint charm, no? It sounds like the language in which invocations are spoken at the firemen’s annual clambake and certificates of achievement awarded at Little League banquets. Very American. However, we’d be readier to accept it — even to applaud it — if only it had begun with the traditional Unaccustomed As I Am. In this case, though, we might feel more confident about the future of civilization if one of the state’s best-known schoolteachers seemed more accustomed to written English, even to such trivia as comma splices and paragraph logic.

Never mind. Totten is only a harbinger. The har that he binges is an article in which Connerton speaks his mind: “Our ‘top’ priorities.”

Strictly speaking, we can not name more than one priority, or first thing , but the plural is irresistible to those who want to dignify anything they think they may someday prepare to begin to get ready to do something about or even just to think about. When a word means almost anything, it means almost nothing. To name something is to distinguish it from all the other things.

At the NJEA, they seem to have so many priorities that they have to distinguish them from one another, calling some of them “top” priorities. We must assume that they have also some middle priorities and bottom priorities. Of top priorities, Connerton explores a mere twelve. Here’s what he says about a vexatious top priority indeed:

Every reasonable person concedes that we can’t hold the parent accountable for the color of a child’s hair, that we can’t rate the minister by the number of parishioners who break the Commandments, and that we can’t blame the coach when a linebacker misses a tackle. Most people also concede that we can’t judge teachers by the scores their