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

in a school where teacher-training happens. Although it is, to be sure, the very existence of the articles of educationistic faith that makes Bernes and Zekowskis possible , professors of English are supposed to have some of theirown articles of faith, which ought to double them up with hysterical laughter when Bernes and Zekowskis appear at department meetings. So the poor professors of education are put in the sad position of having to lament aloud that even the professors of English have swallowed the potion bottled by the professors of education. There’s a satisfying sort of justice in that, but it still means that there is not much hope of breaking the cycle in which illiteracy is passed on from generation to generation.

The story of what has happened to English departments in the last few decades, especially in English departments attached to teacher-training academies, would make a fat and dull book. In brief, that history can be seen as a conditioned response to the dual role of the study of English as imagined in Cardinal Principles, where the command of fundamental processes on the one hand and the right emotional response to literature on the other were obviously assigned to the same people. Since a fervid dedication to the former has not exactly been a hallmark of the schools, and since the latter can more or less be “taught” by anyone, the teaching of English has evolved into a curious creature that now looks something like a pair of wings with no bird between them. There is the Right Wing, devoted to the study of literature (pronounced in four syllables and without any trace of a “ch”), which has handed over the much-hated and laborious teaching of composition to graduate assistants and junior department members panting after promotion, who look upon the work as a necessary apprenticeship to be swiftly accomplished so that they might go on to teaching seminars in the early Elizabethan dramatists.

The Left Wing is more complicated, because it is divided into two persuasions or parties, the democrats and the technocrats. The democrats are really true inheritors of Cardinal Principles, for they propose literature as a vehicle of social and “interpersonal” understanding and an incentive to the appreciation of the brotherhood of all mankind and the human condition. It is the democrats of the Left Wing who have multiplied the offerings in the catalog by cooking up courses in everything from the Urban Experience to Adolescence in America and Female Problems in an Age of Lowered Expectations. Such courses all have, inevitably, their analogues in the high schools, where the study of literature comes down to mini-courses in ghost, sport, or animal stories adapted from popular magazines.

However, while the democrats hold large tracts in the kingdom of government education, the broadest acres are being deeded to the technocrats of the Left Wing, who have prudently provided for themselves and their progeny by reconstruing reading and writing as “communication.” Communication is socially acceptable. Even the desultory deliberations of the uninterested ignorant can be called “communication.” And the eighth-grade rap session on free abortions for eighth graders suddenly becomes a skill to be taught as a legitimate “fundamental process.” All the presumed skills of communication, including film-making and tape-recorder operation and even (this is true) television-watching, become precincts of the great realm of communications, where writing itself, only one precinct, is subdivided into utilitarian fragments. The study of writing thus gives way to courses in Personal Writing, Creative Writing, Journalistic Writing, Technical Writing—well, however long the list, it will be longer tomorrow.

The innumerable offerings of the communicationists—they sometimes call themselves “communicologists”— recommend themselves in the world of educationism by virtue not only of their collectivist aims but also because of their technical flavor. Idle chatter finds respectability and curricular justification when it becomes Interpersonal Group Communication Methodology. Furthermore, while a course in writing needs only some paper and pencils, courses in communicology can generate some very impressive budgets.

Here is a case in point, indeed, a case in several points, for whose sake I must provide some background. The Communications Department in question does its business at the college where I do mine, and it is famous here for having announced its withdrawal from the division of arts and sciences, as we call them. The announcement, a portion of which is quoted, was neither preceded nor accompanied nor followed by any action at all. That in itself was a splendid display of the paramountcy of communication over substance. Now, however, there is some substance at issue, specifically, a proposal to establish what was then called a “Flagship” program of great excellence in the “field” of communications. (The word “Flagship” cannot be printed out in full in The Underground Grammarian):

The Works of Scriblerus X. Machina

When the Communications Department blasted off into the unknown regions of interdivisional space, its chairman left us to mull over his now famous Farewell (_sans_ Hail):

But in the sober light of day after the intoxicating elixirs of self-delusion have begun to fade, after the sonorous tones of your voices have begun to sound hollow, after the technicolor hues of your dreams have begun to mute into the blacks and whites of reality—then you may perhaps face these details of reality.

He was reminding us that we had not yet entered the twentieth century, so he must have chosen that quaint and antiquated tone of purple fustian for ironic emphasis—don’t you think? How subtly he reminds us of our enslavement to outworn tradition by his innovative use of “mute” as an intransitive verb and that multimedia metaphor in which our elixirs “fade” before our very eyes!

Now the Communications Department re-enters our atmosphere, blazing like another Kohoutek, and bringing no faded elixirs but a heady draft proposal for a F–— of its very own.

We looked at the part where they tell all about the teaching of writing, twentieth-century style. Here’s the plan:

The communications Department proposes to establish an ideal classroom for the teaching of the basic writing course…While there is no single classroom prototype that could be considered ideal for all circumstances, there is a concern that different approaches be taken. One of the keys in suggesting an ideal classroom is that traditional classrooms have a way of perpetuating traditional approaches…By bringing together in one room a large variety of audiovisual implements, creating a relaxed atmosphere by having the room carpeted with pictures on the walls and easy chairs and tables and by having duplicating equipment and a variety of newspapers and magazines readily available, we can encourage attempts to change both students’ perceptions and teachers’ approaches to the task of learning how to write.

Now why couldn’t we have thought of all that neat stuff? Because we’ve been hung up perpetuating traditional approaches—things like drill and practice, writing and rewriting—that’s why. Even desks! Now we see. What we need is a dentist’s waiting room redone by Radio Shack, magazines and Muzak, comfy chairs, and a shiny new Xerox so the scholars won’t have to fight over the latest number of Popular Mechanics.

Notice a refreshing absence of flat, empty surfaces where a thoughtless student might accidentally write words on a piece of paper and set the whole class back a century. That’s the hard part, all right, putting the words on the paper. That’s why hardly anyone was able to write before the advent of that large variety of audiovisual implements. (Implements?)

The proposal itself seems to have been put together in just such an innovative, relaxing setting. Notice, for instance, the creative (or easy chair) treatment of punctuation in that bit about the pictures. The room is carpeted with pictures on the walls. The pictures are on the walls and easy chairs and tables. It’s a split-screen effect. Electron ic!

Elsewhere we find:

A second prong in the outreach of the department would come from a Communication Consultancy Center. This would be created as an umbrella from which many different kinds of services could be offered to the community.

Stunning. No fuddy-duddy of the age of paper and pencil could ever have accomplished prose like that. The secret is “vision.” Only a writer who has learned his craft from long hours of assiduous (but relaxed) scrutiny of a twenty-inch color implement could hope to develop a vision modern enough to see that outreaches have prongs, prongs coming from their Centers, and that a prong, or maybe a Center, can be created as an umbrella, an umbrella from which services can be dispensed, services that can help us all to learn how to communicate in just this fashion.

Well, you can just bet your Bearcat scanner against a busted quill pen that all our staff writers will be standing at the door the day they open that Communications Consultancy Center. We’re mired in traditions. We could never, for instance, have come up with these spiffy structures that go the tired old passive at least one better—maybe two:

…[the] Department can provide leadership that will cause it to be viewed as a resource . …few of the courses…have been able to be offered on a regular basis….needs should be able to be filled…

You just can’t hope to master that smooth modern style without spending hours, whole seasons probably, in the old easy chair, beer and pretzels at hand, studying the styles of the greatest play-by-play and color men to be found on the audiovisual implement.

And just look at these daring departures from stodgy tradition. We’re so old-fashioned that we almost thought they were mistakes:

…the advantages the computer offers…lies in continuous availability….the equipment needs…is appended. …there needs to be provisions made…

All of this is encouraging for anybody who worries about the teaching of writing here at Glassboro. It shows that the Communications Department is perfectly willing to put some of the taxpayers’ money where somebody’s mouth is—in a collection of machines. Time was when your basic model communications teacher would rather watch reruns of “Washington Week in Review” than teach a writing course. Now they’ll be clamoring to twiddle the dials and leaf through Cosmopolitan and rap about nontraditional approaches to interpersonal communication in the easy chair.

So not to worry. We can all go down to the launching in good conscience, sing in our hollow tones one chorus of “Anchors Aweigh,” smash a fifth of faded elixir on the prow of the refitted Starship Triad, newly home from one uncharted deep, sallying forth into yet another, carrying our hopes and dreams, ere they mute, our tuners and amplifiers and, of course, the prongs of our outreach.

In that blazing display of furniture and equipment, you may have missed the fact that the “ideal classroom” (certainly ideal for some lucky contractors) is for “the teaching of the basic writing course.” Advanced courses in various “writings” will require yet more specialized doodads. The implicit suggestion of all the paraphernalia and even the carefully designed environment will be the same, to wit, that writing is just one of many “skills” of communication, similar in kind to the making of television commercials and the grammarless collages that so pleased Berne and Zewokski. And it follows that “reading” is the skill of receiving and registering “communication,” which, accordingly, may or may not come in the form of writing. And it further follows, therefore, that what the schools mean by “literacy” is not what you think it is. Literacy may be “visual literacy” or the ability to program computers, although it is hard to imagine how people who are not interested in punctuation or spelling can meet the even more stringent demands of computer programs.

But the greatest achievement of the communicationists, and the one that best assures their prosperity, is that they have transformed writing from a private act into a public one, from a solitary search for understanding into a public display of some communication. This suggests some deeper reasons, deeper than