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

the few to suffer than the many. But it also leads to one more abandonment of an intellectual standard and one more submission to the life-adjustment ideology of Cardinal Principles, and — after all, those now forgotten language requirements have to be replaced — to one more lie about student outcomes and behavioral objectives for a course in the appreciation of foreign-language-speaking cultures. And, when we have finally reached something like our present condition, when the bad name of language study has provided that few college graduates can even speak English, never mind German or French, and when businesses find that their memo writers can’t understand each other, and when thousands of workers are driven out of jobs by foreign competition, then we discover that every Japanese salesman speaks fluent English, and we wonder if that means something.

To whatever other woes it may bring us, of which diminished ability to compete in international trade is only one, we must add another step in the general decline of the intellectual enterprise as a whole, which ought to be the principal business of the schools. This decline, which we can see in science and technology just as well as in the study of the humanities and languages, must continue as long as the inheritors of Cardinal Principles continue in all the committees and administrative posts and in all the centers, both public and private, of educationistic”research.” Even when they are unaware of it, as indeed they often are, all their notions and theories and programs have an underlying theme, the theme that is sounded when the ineffective and thus discontented social studies teacher decides that he would rather go to those evening classes in educationism and become, instead of a mere teacher, a curriculum facilitator or a guidance counselor or even, oh joy, an assistant principal. That theme is compounded partly of a distaste for the work of the intellect, which he has never been able to do with pleasure, and partly of the desire to take some revenge on those who do seem to find that pleasure and in whose eyes he is a second-class citizen. And the whole apparatus of theory and governance established in the shadow of Cardinal Principles and now in complete control of public education in America makes it not only possible but even easy for the failed social studies teacher to rise above his more intellectual colleagues and tell them what and how to teach or, even better, find a place in the eternal task force where needs are assessed within the parameters of planning whether to plan. The sought-after jobs in education are the ones that take you as far as possible from the classroom.

That, by itself, would be splendid, for it would take the silliest people in the education business away from the places where they can do the most harm. Unfortunately, however, all the follies they commit in offices and meeting rooms and administration buildings and tax-supported agencies are visited not on their own heads — they pay each other to think up new follies — but on the heads of the students and teachers whom they have gladly left behind. Thus it is that, after about sixty years of organized and militant anti-intellectualism in the schools, every disorder in education brings power and profit to those who have made that disorder, and every problem is given for solution into the hands of the only people who cannot possibly solve it. The pygmies have been in charge for so long now that we are all cracking our skulls on the doorways of the public buildings; when we go to them for remedy, they urge on us the value of crawling.

ProblemSolving in the Content Area

When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and events, it is always useful to ask, who profits? The problems and disorders in education have become more and more visible in the last few years, of course, and even the ordinary citizen who happens to have no children in the schools suspects that something is very wrong, but he will never understand exactly what is wrong until he realizes that all our educational problems and disorders, none of which are new, although they are more obvious, provide endless and growing employment for the people who made them. Barely literate children may be suffering and facing whole lives of deprivation, but consultants and remediationists and professors of reading education and tax-supported researchers and the editors and publishers of workbooks and handsome packets of materials are doing very well indeed and looking for even better days to come. It is important to note, too, that all those profit-makers have not suddenly appeared among us like the wandering bands of looters who can reasonably be expected to show up after the earthquake. They’ve been around a long time, diligently turning the wheel, professing what must be remediated and remediating what has been professed and enlarging in our society the role of what can only be called the educationist-industrial complex. Anything that may seem to us a disorder in education is for them a golden opportunity—indeed, since they live by tax money, they cannot make their profits until we do see a disorder in education and thus feel obliged to shell out.

Curiously enough, therefore, it is very much in the interest of the policymakers and theoreticians of public schooling that there be problems and failures and that we know about them and also, even more curiously, that any kind of social disorder at all be made the business of the schools. We are encouraged thus to hand over to the educationists not only the problem of widespread illiteracy but also the notorious disinclination of the American voter to trouble himself by going to the polls, the fear and hatred of each race for the others, and the epidemic of venereal disease among thirteen-year-olds.

Sometimes, especially when defending themselves against the charge that they just don’t know how to teach reading and writing and ciphering, the educationists complain that they are unfairly burdened by “public demand” for all sorts of social but nonacademic services and instruction. But, in fact, as any reader of Cardinal Principles would know, they chose long ago to be social engineers rather than academicians, claiming, too, that they had chosen the nobler calling. It would be interesting to put them to the test, offering them the opportunity to give up all that thankless inculcation of right and worthy feelings and habits and stick to teaching only what can be objectively taught and measured. It would, however, take an enlightened and thoughtful public to make that offer, and the influence of Cardinal Principles makes an enlightened and thoughtful public impossible. For all their occasional whimpers, therefore, the educationists are delighted to take upon themselves the right ordering of society, which is, in any case, even more profitable than the cycle of professing and remediating general public illiteracy.

Now here is an interesting and suggestive fact: The seven cardinal principles can be divided, and were in fact divided by their propounders, into two categories. In one category, the category that the educationists themselves have come to call the “cognitive domain,” we can put only one principle, the Command of Fundamental Processes, or Basic Minimum Competence. You will recall that once the principle-makers had named the Command of Fundamental Processes they could think of little more to say about it. There is a fascinating truth hidden in that fact: Educationistic research flourishes where it is possible to say a lot about what is vague and withers where there is little or nothing to say about the concrete. About right emotional response to literature you can natter forever; about adding numbers to each other, what else is there to do but teach it? It is partly for that reason, of course, that all the other six principles are in what they now call the “affective domain,” where there is no limit to talk. Even vocational education, which you might think would be very concrete indeed, is to be a vehicle for various worthy responses, “right relationships toward fellow workers and society,” and even that “clear conception of right relations” between employer and employee, the sort of thing thought useful in East Germany, too. And it is perfectly clear, from Cardinal Principles itself and from educationistic theory and practice thereafter, that educationists are much more interested in the six other principles than in the Commend of Fundamental Processes. This is so not only because the Six can generate more verbiage than the One, but because the consequences of schooling in the One are embarrassingly measurable, while the consequences of schooling in the Six are not only impossible to measure but usually not even discernible for so many years that, when they do begin to appear, the people who caused them will all be dead, or at least retired. Thus it is that our educationists are far readier to offer solutions to disorders in their affective domain than in their cognitive.

Consider, as a trendy example, sex. In a sane civilization, to be sure, the citizens would tell the school people that the sexual attitudes and values of the young were none of the school’s damn business and that they ought to stick to facts, but we don’t do it that way. Our schools have been granted the sex concession by virtue of those cardinal principles that put them in charge of Health, in one context, and Worthy Home-membership, in another. And then there is also the Worthy Use of Leisure. Thus chartered, the educationists who have long dabbled in what they call sex education have now, now that unabashed and self-indulgent libertinism has brought upon us great plagues of divorce, illegitimate births, venereal diseases, and all the social and economic and personal disorders attendant on such things, come into their kingdom. Sex education is in bloom in America.

And what form does it take? What form can it possibly take when it is devised by the inheritors of the cardinal principles and the manipulators of stimulus and response? We can, for the sake of convenience although not in any absolute sense, partition the study of sex, and especially human sexuality, into the educationists’ own categories, the cognitive and the affective. In the one category we can put everything that we can name and know, all that is objectively demonstrable and subject to reasonable hypothesis and prediction. In the other category we will have to put the other things, the feelings, attitudes, values, and responses, worthy or not, that so fascinated the makers of the cardinal principles. Thus, while the latter considerations can be included with the Six, the former must go with the One. The teaching of certain facts about sex and sexuality is like the teaching of reading and writing and ciphering. Knowledge about sex is like any other knowledge, publicly available and publicly verifiable and not variable in accordance with attitudes or emotional responses, however worthy. It is what educationists call “subject matter”—often “mere subject matter”—and can easily be learned without the help of any teacher at all. Most of it is in books, to which a good teacher can, of course, provide useful footnotes in the form of newer knowledge, further description, and the devising of analogies by which facts can be seen as functions of one another and from which hypotheses and principles can be formed. The books do exist, and if students had the habit of reading books there would be no shortage of knowledge about sex. But, because of decades of neglect of the mere subject matter of those fundamental processes, they do not have the habit of reading books any more than the schools have the habit of using books as the primary medium of what is called an education.

The books used in the public schools are almost exclusively books designed specifically to be