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

used in the public schools. This is in keeping with the mandate of Cardinal Principles that every course is “in need of extensive reorganization in order that it may contribute more effectively to the objectives outlined herein.” A history written by a historian is therefore disqualified unless, by some extraordinary coincidence, it happens to foster the approved responses and appreciations, and that without dependence on mere information. Even should that be so, the book probably would have to be rewritten and simplified for students in whom the Command of Fundamental Processes is meager. A scientist’s book on biology, furthermore, would find no place in the schools because it will not be “properly focused upon personal and community hygiene [and] the principles of sanitation, and their applications.” To find a welcome in the schools, a book must be simply written—“childishly” might be the better word—and carefully designed to elicit worthy responses, in which cause mere information can be not only dismissed but even distorted. Because it must meet those standards, a schoolbook can never be a mere book , as we ordinarily understand the term, a record of the controlled and thoughtful discourse of a knowledgeable, individual mind. To guard against every possible occasion of unworthy response and to root out every appearance of mere information displayed in no cause other than that of mere knowledge requires the diligent labor of a committee in collusion with right-minded consultants and editorial assistants.

In America Revised (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979) by Frances FitzGerald, you will find a full and demoralizing description of how school history books come to be the perversions that they are. And more recently there was a little-noticed but illuminating example of the nature of school “learning materials” in a Hilton Kramer essay in The New York Times on the aftermath of the great Picasso retrospective. The schools are just as good at teaching the right appreciation of art as they are at teaching worthy sexual attitudes, and the Picasso show brought forth not only an “educational” film in which the painter was portrayed, surely to the stupefaction of those with some mere information, as an exemplary parent and role model, but also a teachers’ guide in which Picasso is identified as a Fauve playing with bright colors. That’s bad enough, but his imaginary enlistment in fauvism is also said to have been a result of his abandonment of experimentation with bright colors. And the cover of the teachers’ guide bore a large “Picasso” signature superimposed on a lovely photograph of a studio littered with painter’s paraphernalia and handsome canvases, certainly appreciable, but, to anyone having a little knowledge, easily identifiable as the work of Mir�.

As bad as this ludicrous display of ignorance is, there is something worse, which Hilton Kramer probably doesn’t suspect any more than you do, and that is that no one in the schools is likely to be troubled or embarrassed by such a display. Well, so what? Looking at Mir�‘s studio is also a worthy use of leisure, and a niggling attention to trivial details is exactly the kind of elitism that has always inhibited right emotional response. So there. It is in the same spirit that educationists can blithely justify the omission, in an American history text, of any reference to the Civil War.

The making of a schoolbook is analogous to the classroom rap session in which the ill-informed are supposed to reach understanding through the recitation of slogans and notions and by relating to one another. There are differences, however. For the captive children pretending to formulate “good judgment as to means and methods” for the promotion of some worthy social end and developing “habits of cordial cooperation in social undertakings,” as prescribed in Cardinal Principles, the whole thing is obviously a game. Only a teacher, or an especially dull or cowed student, could take it seriously. But the committees and task forces that devise (you cannot say “write”) those non-books used in the school take their work very seriously indeed. There is profit in it Even prestige. So we can be confident that the “books,” and all the other wondrously diverse and cunningly packaged “learning materials” out of which sex education will be taught, will be acceptable to the ideology of educationism both simplified and tendentious, careless of mere information and careful in the elicitation of right response in the cause of social adjustment. In other words, this “new” campaign intended to remedy whole hosts of social and personal disorders is different from the old program of education as social manipulation only in extent—and, of course, expense. In both cases, much greater.

As our schools now embark on a massive campaign of sexual rehabilitation for all of American youth, we can naturally expect that they will give it all they have, which means, of course, that what they don’t have they won’t give it. What they do have, all they have, is that earnest devotion to the power of suggestion in the cause of social and psychological manipulation, and, although their decades of devotion to pious social adjustment may not be the only cause of our present disorders, they have certainly not prevented them. Now the necessary concomitant of the social adjustment theory of education is the denigration of intellectual discipline, for the sake of which the command of fundamental processes was slighted in Cardinal Principles. Perhaps itis a bit rash, however tempting, to say it is exactly because the schools have been preaching vapid and sentimental sermons for sixty years that hosts of our newborn children and their mothers will become permanent wards of the state, but it is not a bit rash to suspect that widespread and crippling social disorders of all kinds are directly caused by ignorance an thoughtlessness. There is only one remedy for ignorance an thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and million of American children would today stand in no need of sex education, or consumer education or intercultural education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place an education.

We have seen above, for instance, that what is called intercultural education is a shabby dodge by which students and teachers may be excused from the study of history, anthropology, geography, language, literature, philosophy, and who can count what else. That all makes for a long and detailed discussion, but an equivalent and simpler model of the genesis of fake educations can be seen in the trendy and popular consumer education. We are told that we need consumer education because people are easily duped by misleading advertising, cannot figure out the per-ounce price of ketchup, and imagine that they can live on Twinkies and Coca-Cola. (When teenaged mothers raise their illegitimate children on Twinkies and Coca-Cola, that reinforces the need for sex education and also family living education.) The consumer who is duped by misleading advertising does not need consumer education; he needs to know how to read. The housewife who can’t figure out what ketchup costs does not need consumer education; she needs to know how to cipher. And as to those who want to live on Twinkies and Coca-Cola, frankly that’s their own damn business and we ought to leave them alone, but we might legitimately provide them with knowledge about biology and chemistry first and then leave them alone. Our problems come not from ignorance and thoughtlessness about sex any more than from ignorance and thoughtlessness about ketchup, they just come from ignorance and thoughtlessness, which are preserved and nourished in our schools by those whose profits lie in “solving” the problems they have created.

Literacy is like the kingdom of Heaven. Those who seek it first will find that other things are added unto them. Literacy is not the same as Basic Minimum Competence, but, if we provide an emphasis that seems not to have occurred to the principle-makers, it might indeed be described as the command of the fundamental processes of word and number. The power of number, to be sure, is not usually included in “literacy,” but it should be, for it is through the ability to command the techniques both of word and number that we can know and think. There is no other way. To say that we can “know” or “think” in other ways is to blur those words into uselessness so that rather than making fine distinctions they can point vaguely in the direction of any events at all that seem to take place invisibly in the mind. It is exactly that reluctance to seek or even tolerate fine distinctions that makes the muddled jargon of the educationists what it is, and it is not surprising, therefore, that those who have neglected literacy should look for some presumed other ways of knowing and thinking. This makes it possible to excuse or even to justify the failure to teach literacy by claiming that it doesn’t have to be taught anyway. Consider the following, a brief and unfortunately oversimplified piece from The Underground Grammarian:

The Idea of Expressing Feelings In New Mexico

It had to happen. Last month we granted the world’s first DEd, horroris causa, and now everybody wants one. Two new candidates present themselves, and they are not some silly educationists but bona fide associate professors of English out at what they call Eastern New Mexico University.

Laid-back folk. Arlene Zekowski, Stanley Berne. Hate apostrophes. Rules. Arbitrary. Down sentences! Up feelings expressing! Up Zekowski! Up Berne! Right on!

Or, if you prefer, On right! “We’re professors of English,” says Berne. (Hm. Shouldn’t that be “Were professors of English”?) “We are concerned with the idea of expressing feelings. Arbitrary rules of grammar prohibit that.” (Cmon, be patient. Sure he talks that tired old grammar, but only because he has to get to we elitists.) Hes wright. No, thats not expressing feelings. He rite! Wordsworth feeling-expressing fouled-up by verb-subject agreement. Shakespeare shot down—Donne undone by nonrestrictive clauses. Whitman comatose from commas.

Zekowski: “Grammar is elitism. I wish to destroy what is dead, lifeless and snobbish.” Hows that for boring from within? “Arbitrary sentence structure is logical,” she complains, “but the brain isn’t logical. [How true!] You don’t think in sentences. You think in terms of patterns and images. It’s random association.” And further: “Many advertisements don’t use sentences or grammar. They use words to create images.” (Exactly how they use the words she doesn’t say. Could be they sprinklem here and there, collage-wise. Cool. Just think. If Das Kapital had been done like that, we wouldn’t have all this damn trouble now. There’s nothing more dangerous than a bunch of logical sentences, but what would you expect from an elitist like Marx?)

If there’s one thing we love around here, it’s the classing of icons, and we support the idea of expressing feelings 1,000 percent. That’s exactly what we should be teaching these kids. For one thing, it’s a cinch, like playing tennis with the net down, as Frost put it. Another: if we let them in on the secrets of logical sentences and coherent discourse, the ignorant little bastards will go on to take away some of our cushiest jobs, perhaps even as associate professors of English, and that will be the end of lifeless elitism as we know it.

However, while we applaud Zekowski and Berne for their cunning subterfuge, and while we admit that it is the first duty of a DEd to cook up schemes for job security, we cannot give them their degrees just yet. Their plan sounds good off paper, but when they write their grammarless English, we read: “Once upon a time ago. But now nevermore.” Cute and expressive of feeling, sure, but clogged up with grammar. Maybe next year.

Following the appearance of that article, I heard from many readers who accused me of inventing Berne and Zekowski. How silly. Bernes and Zekowskis are generated spontaneously out of the primordial nutrient broth of