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

we can tell, there will be no study of any identifiable body of knowledge, just rapping, preferably with someone who says Mama mia! now and then.

This workshop is not expected to have results; it anticipates “outcomes,” outcomes of some “nature.” One anticipated outcome is:

of the nature of…development of ability to anticipate factors likely to influence proposals for changes in human relations…

What this means, of course, is that they hope the student will be informed, rational, and prudent. So hope we all; but to suggest that there are forms of rationality and prudence specifically germane to “intercultural relations” is fatuous. To suggest further that someone knows how to instill those virtues is patently absurd, if not mendacious. Who is rational and prudent needs no workshop to teach him how to be rational and prudent about Bulgarians any more than a man who can find the diameter of circle needs to be schooled in the methodology of finding the diameter of a pizza; and who is neither prudent nor rational will scarcely be helped through chatting with Bulgarians. Furthermore, who would become knowledgeable about Bulgarians will do better to study their history or language or literature than to pursue

[d]evelopment of ability to apply selected tools or procedures for analyzing, assessing, and surveying school and/or community provisions for intercultural education.

And how will students show that they have (get? interact with? what?) these outcomes? The proposal looks for “taped evidence of interaction with other cultures” (they probably mean a person from another culture), “oral presentations that exemplify good intercultural education practices,” “peer performance assessments,” “records of participation” (in what, would you guess?), and even “practical written tools” (try to figurethat one out).

We must put aside small questions (how, for instance, is a good intercultural education practice different from other good education practices?) to explore the central question: What, exactly, is the subject matter here? Is it information about diverse cultures? That is available—inescapable, in fact—in the study of anthropology, art, economics, geography, history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, and many other traditional disciplines. Is this the study of the collisions of cultures and their effects upon one another? Ditto. Is this a study of tolerance and love?

The proposers cannot intend either of the first two, for if they do, there is no need to propose anything. Let’s hope they don’t mean that third possibility. There must be some limits to what they can teach.

If intercultural education is in truth some new subject matter not yet widely known, it must have been described somewhere in clear English and with concrete reference to things in the real world. We deserve to hear such a description, since the language of the proposal tells us little (that’s often the aim of this kind of jargon) and makes us suspect much.

We must in fairness say that the proposal has been given comprehensive, penetrating scrutiny and analysis by the very Dean of Professional Studies, so it seems only honest to print her commentary — in full:

A good idea-long overdue.

The background of that proposal is instructive: In the State of New Jersey, as in many other states, students in teacher-training programs are required to have some instruction in what is generally called the “appreciation” of other cultures. This seems to be all the more important as the public schools, especially in the cities, fill up with children of recently arrived immigrants from many different lands. I say that it “seems” important, because I’m not sure that it is really necessary to “appreciate” Bulgarian culture, whatever that means, in order to teach arithmetic to children whose parents came from Bulgaria, although it would obviously do a math teacher no harm to have knowledge about Bulgarian culture. But the mandate, in any case, is not for knowledge. The incipient teacher is to appreciate other cultures so that he can relate andinteract .

Here we see again — we see it everywhere — the shadow of Cardinal Principles. Knowledge, generally a matter of mere information, is untrustworthy as a generator of right response, so that intercultural appreciation can be taught through learning some folk dances and sampling the traditional cookies of many lands. But it must be taught, for those who award teaching certificates require it. They require it because their cousins in the teacher academies, whose enrollments are falling, need some more required courses with which to justify their continued employment. In the same cause, and with the great weight of the tradition of Cardinal Principles, the teacher-trainers must hold that such academic studies as anthropology, history, literature, or language can not provide a worthy appreciation of other cultures. Since the teacher-trainers, and the certifiers, and the managers and bureaucrats of entire systems of state education are all from the same litter, and since legislators all have more important things than education to think about, especially in New Jersey, where someone has to pay attention to casinos, basic minimum intercultural appreciation speedily becomes the law of the land. And the professors of education who get to “teach” it have assured their continued employment and proved yet again that a teacher can teach anything, anything at all.

Educationists can say that, of course, only when “anything” means “anything that should be taught,” in the system of worthiness enunciated in Cardinal Principles, and when “taught” means “produced as a response to stimulus,” as defined in the methodology of behavior modification. You will notice that the state-supported monopoly in intercultural education does not concede that a professor of anthropology can teach “the appreciation of other cultures.” Far from it, he is all too likely to teach mere information, which may or may not lead to what should be taught, appreciation, the worthy response.

That’s why the word “appreciation” is so important both in Cardinal Principles and in all educationistic theorizing thereafter. First, it sounds good. Who can be against it? More important, it is a code word with which to indicate, without having to be concrete and specific, any or all of the “worthy” attributes that we may expect as the student outcomes of anything that is done in school, however trivial or trendy. In one sense, “appreciation” is familiar to anyone who has been through “Music Appreciation,” a course that usually does not require any study or knowledge of harmony, counterpoint, or even the classification of elementary forms, although it often does provide uplifting or entertaining vignettes from the lives of composers. In another and far more important sense, the meaning of “appreciation” is what is embedded in the notion that when we have learned some Bulgarian folk dances we will better “appreciate” Bulgarian culture, and that that will be good. “Appreciation” seems to be used to suggest an amiable tolerance of that which someone thinks we ought to tolerate but probably wouldn’t if we were left alone.

A student outcome of the order of appreciation has another tremendous value in an anti-intellectual education: No one can measure it. No one can measure “right emotional response” or “worthy ethical character” either. The value of such student outcomes is in fact double. They make it impossible to check up on the effectiveness of a curriculum, and they permit the bogus “research” of educationistic theorizing, in which such things as existentiality and commitment to the goodness of man at his core are put forth as measurable quantities. Who is to say, after all, exactly which students, and with what ardor, are indeed singing their own songs and dancing their ways through life after two weeks of harmony and small-group discussions at the University of Tennessee? Unfortunately, someone probably will undertake to do just that, perhaps the very chappie who told us all about the “values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy pertinent to transpersonally oriented non-public school teachers.”

The Student Outcomes Principle (it seems to deserve capitals) is the Prime Mover of American education. It is our equivalent of the Death of God, after which everything is permitted. It arises inevitably from the intersection of that sentimental humanisticism that has made the schools into virtue-nurseries where guards patrol the corridors, and the iron law of behavior modification that has made them laboratories where all the experiments fail. But that’s all right. As schools, and consequently the rest of society, become more anarchic, the educationists can point to an ever greater need for the inculcation of values, and every failed experiment makes room for new devils in the guise of faddish innovations.

But the Student Outcomes Principle has brought us even worse abominations than the fads and gimmicks that have been tripping over each other’s heels for the last sixty years. Since the proponents of that principle have become the makers of policy at all levels of public education, they have been able to refashion even the most traditional courses of study into exercises in the inculcation of right emotional response and the clarification of values. Such was proposed, of course, in Cardinal Principles and in some cases easily effected by the ouster of history for the sake of social studies, for instance, in which the especially civic virtues, whatever they happen to be at any given time, are fostered by idle gossip about current events and some ill-informed generalizations about remote tribes.

The process, however, has onlybegun when social studies are implanted in the secondary public schools. Imagine what happens thereafter: At first, of course, the history teachers must be the social studies teachers. The less committed they are to the traditional study of history, the more likely they are to welcome this opportunity to escape the tyranny of mere information and develop instead an “appreciation and…a clear conception of right relations.” History itself now becomes nothing more than a social study, and by no means primus inter pares but rather an aging and demanding relative less and less acceptable in a rapidly growing family of trendy issues. The next generation of social studies teachers cannot be students of history, or certainly not merely students of history. This means that whatever is to be done in the high schools in the name of social studies must also be done in the teachers’ colleges where the social studies teachers are to learn their trade. The professors of such things as history and economics, therefore, have to be reeducated. They must welcome into partnership the sociologists, who are cousins to the educationists both in language and ideology, and learn to appreciate the priority of values over mere information. This is done in the name of “meeting the needs of the students,” which is another way of expressing the Student Outcomes Principle, and which can have any practical effect you please depending only on the “needs” chosen.

Imagine that you are a bright young history scholar who has become an instructor in a college where there is a school of teacher education. After a year or two of teaching the basic freshman course in Western Civilization, which is already a social studies course, devoted to a little bit of everything and anything that probably ought to be appreciated, you discover that you would like to spend more time in teaching about the Renaissance in Italy, a body of knowledge in which you are especially well informed. Since the history department is small and offers no course in the Italian Renaissance, you write a description and a syllabus and send off a course proposal to the curriculum committee, with the blessing of your fellow history professors, who believe that the Italian Renaissance is worth studying.

Now your proposal comes before the curriculum committee, where the educationists and would-be administrators are serving with gladness and where the rules and procedures, as well as the ideology, have long been established by others of their kind. When they look at your proposal, they do not think about the intrinsic value of the study of the Renaissance in Italy; they ask rather about the projected student outcomes and the measurable