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

Cardinal Principles. If you find them unbelievable, you might be sobered to know that they have written many books for the guidance of public school English teachers and are said to go about holding workshops and training sessions for same.

The “thought” of Berne and Zekowski—I know that’s not the right word, but we may not even have the right word in English—repays study. Consider: “You don’t think in sentences. You think in terms of patterns and images. It’s random association.” All of that is true, of course, if you happen to be an imbecile, or maybe a gnu. All of it is also true even for conscious human beings if the verb to think refers to anything, anything at all, that takes place invisibly in the mind. The mind does indeed, from time to time and often with dismal consequences when there is a certain kind of work to be done, find itself occupied with patterns and images and random associations. And it does many things that have no need of sentences: it regrets, it exults, it yearns, it wonders, it fears, it expects, it dreams (perchance to sleep), it wanders, it sees, it hears…you can make your own list. The very fact that there are so many words for the invisible acts of the mind reveals that our language can and regularly does make, as Berne and Zekowski do not, countless fine and subtle distinctions among those acts. And the act in which we do , if we have a command of fundamental processes, make such distinctions may be called thinking; and, in fact, we do that thinking in sentences, in which we say to ourselves that yearning and thinking are different for such and such reasons. We may perform any number of mental acts “in terms of,” whatever that means, patterns and images, but thinking is not one of them. Thinking is done in sentences, logical sentences. Principia mathematica is not random association. Nor, for that matter, is poetry, which Berne and Zekowski are said to write, and which they seem to confuse with “expressing feelings,” which could also include smashing urinals in the boys’ room. It is one of the great wonders of poetry that it can be supremely free and individual in spite of countless traditional and arbitrary restraints, and even in spite of the often greater restraints that poets usually choose to impose on themselves.

Berne and Zekowski, I admit, are probably an extreme case of educationistic anti-intellectualism, but they are, don’t forget, professors of English at a state university where English teachers are trained. Their notions are right at home in the context of Cardinal Principles. They are concerned with expressing feeling, or, as they put it, with the “idea” of expressing feelings. (I don’t know what that might mean, but I suspect that it is not some fine distinction between “expressing” and “the idea of expressing.”) They wish to destroy elitism, which, although dead and lifeless, somehow manages to remain snobbish. They characterize rules as “arbitrary” rules, as though no one had ever put modifiers near what they modify until the rule had been devised, and assert that the arbitrary rules prohibit the expression of feelings, against which assertion some evidence could be adduced. They turn, for example, to the demotic, the advertisements that “use words to create images,” as though that were some startling new use of language and especially to be prized because of its commercial quality. They differ from garden-variety educationists only in detail (and perhaps in their taste for the dramatic—notably absent in educationists) but not in principle. They prefer emotional response to knowledge; they equate technical proficiency with elitism; they imagine grammar as a set of rules, mere information, and the stuff of rote learning; and they depend for their lessons on the popular or practical, to which students can presumably “relate.”

When we look around America, we notice, of course, what seems to be a general decline in our young people of the powers of observation and discrimination and the habits of accuracy and precision that we might expect in the literate. This is an illusion born of the fact that it is only the young people who are occasionally tested or measured. The same disabilities are to be found in all groups, because they have been fostered for so many years now. And those many years of malpractice have fostered the same disabilities within the ranks of the educationists themselves that we can see in the public at large. The now-retired professors of education who learned their appreciation of the “command” of fundamental processes in the shadow of Cardinal Principles taught it to the professors of education, who taught the same to all the teachers and supervisors and facilitators now in the schools, who in their turn can pass on to their students nothing but more of the same.

It follows, therefore, that the formulation and direction of the currently faddish fervor for those fundamental processes are given into the hands of those who lack the skills of those processes and who have grown up in the climate of opinion out of which Berne and Zekowski have formulated their principles. The enterprise cannot succeed any more than pygmies can grow tall by pulling upward on their ears.

Here is how one state system of teacher academies plans to solve the problem:

The Missouri Compromise

You will not be astonished to learn that there are some people in Missouri who cannot manage commas, cannot avoid sentence fragments, cannot regularly make verbs agree with subjects and pronouns with antecedents, and cannot help sounding like literal translations from Bulgarian. If you are a regular reader of this journal, you’ll also be unastonished to hear that those pitiable illiterates are members of the Missouri Association of Colleges of Teacher Education.

These poor saps have finally noticed that lots of irate citizens “have indicated concern of [yes, of ] the decreasing standardized test scores of students.” They even know that a “sensitivity has become quite manifest in the development in state wide [yes, two words] assessment systems.” But they don’t seem too worried. They’ve cleared up the whole mess in a “position statement” called Assessment of Basic Skills Competencies of Potential Teachers.

The Missouri educationists have also just discovered, or have at least come to suspect that they might perhaps decide to assume — tentatively, what the rest of us have always known. They put it thus: “Although many factors may intervene the teacher is viewed by many as a critical variable in the teaching-learning process and, therefore, the key to the improvement in the basic skills of students.”

“The teacher,” they say, “must have a high degree of proficiency in the basic skills. They are expected to transmit to their students through precept and example.”

Yeah. And here are some of the precepts and examples through which these Missouri Teacher-training Turkeys transmit:

“The latter [‘field experiences’] being principally in student teaching with a major emphasis on institutional planning, execution, and evaluation of subject matter to be presented.” And, “Utilizing the assumption that the measuring/ascertaining of the competencies of potential teachers should be done on or about the end of the traditional sophomore year.” For the Turkeys, those are sentences. So why should they care? It’s the taxpayers and children who’ll have to serve them.

Those, of course, are just supersaturated, freebooting participles, but this one passes understanding: “If the student does not meet the prescribed standards of basic skills and the student, before they are formally admitted into teacher education and certainly before graduation, should have remediation and reevaluation.” (Wow, these people are tough! Before graduation, no less.) Any competent sixth-grade teacher would flunk such rubbish, but the Turkeys aren’t worried. As long as they’re in charge, there will be damned few competent sixth-grade teachers in Missouri.

“Also,” say the Turkeys, “there is a question of the relationship of secondary and co-secondary schools in terms of relationships. The authors [ ! ] of this position paper agreed that such an assessment process can have a significant impact [they never discuss insignificant or mere impacts] on secondary school curriculum in turning to an assessment instrument to which the public schools might be inclined to reach toward.”

Why do the good people of Missouri suffer such humbug, without turning to some blunt instrument to which they might be inclined to reach toward? We can tell you why. It’s because these ugly crimes against nature are committed in private among consenting Turkeys. How many “authors,” do you suppose, conspired to write, rewrite, edit, and finally to approve all that gibberish? How many of Missouri’s teacher-trainers, would you guess, have read it? Was not one of them embarrassed or outraged by this sleazy display of ignorance and ineptitude? And if there_was_ one, what do you think he did? He kept his mouth shut. It’s better to suffer a momentary discontent than to attract the taxpayers” attention.

So, unhampered by pesky public outcry, people who cannot devise sentences or make sense or even punctuate will get on with the business of providing Missouri with teachers. And they don’t want any interference, if you please, as they make, well, not “clear,” to be sure, but at least “quite manifest,” in their ghastly and ungrammatical peroration:

“There is an advantage to each institution in Missouri preparing teachers to have an institutional level responsibility rather than a state wide…responsibility for assurance of proficiency of basic skills. Alternate assessment processes allow for diversity of response by each institution. It [?] allows for diversity of response loads [?] by students, it allows for diversity of interpretation of what is basic [that’s the part they like best] for that institution’s student population, and it eliminates conflicts of perogatives [typo?] and rights of faculties of institution to set curriculum in means of assessing a testing or assuring of competencies.”

We have some advice for the good people of Missouri. Turn those rascals out. Pension them off for life at full pay, requiring only that the never again set foot on a campus. Don’t worry about the cost. In fifty years or so, there won’t be any cost. As it is, you’re planning to pay more and more of them for ever and ever. Once they’re gone, on the day they go, in fact, your schools and colleges will become the best in the land.

A knowledge of history is one of the basic skills of which we have been deprived by the educationists’ fervor for shabby social studies and smug civics. We have forgotten that the storekeeper used to pay miscreants to stay away . It worked We’ve gotten it backward. We pay them to hang around and smash the windows. Let’s be realistic and pay the miscreants to do that one thing the we most need them to do-nothing, nothing at all.

I am very sorry to have to award any points at all to the compromisers of Missouri, who are contentedly unconscious of their own ignorance and the ludicrous pathos of their determination to ensure the “measuring/ascertaining” of that “high degree of proficiency in the basic skills,” but they do deserve a few. In the first place, if this is an exculpation, their ignorance was visited upon them by the system in whose service they labor, and, in the next place, there is much justice in the educationists’ routine disclaimer of responsibility for the literacy of incipient teachers. That, they happily point out, is supposed to be the business of the English departments. And they are right, although, if literacy is a fundamental process, it ought to be a concern in every department. But there is no doubt that English departments must be charged with teaching everything that can be taught about the technical skills that provide a command of literacy. And Berne and Zekowski, you will surely remember, are professors not of education but of English, who ply their trade