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

their obvious distaste for the mere information required in the teaching of writing, for the pro forma mention and subsequent neglect of those fundamental processes in Cardinal Principles. Everywhere in that pamphlet, we can find exhortations to socialization through group efforts, group discussions, group thinking, and even games and dances. We find specific condemnations of too much knowledge of mere facts and too much attention to intellectual discipline, characteristic foreshadowings of that later indictment of “excellence narrowly defined.” In an even more recent policy statement from the National Education Association, Curriculum Change Toward the 21st Century (1977), a reappraisal and expanded reaffirmation of Cardinal Principles, we read:

Imbedded in the question of freedom is an educational dilemma—the long-standing enigma of how to obtain the important output of superior minds without creating an elite of scientists, politicians, social planners and commentators, military specialists, business executives, and so on.

Or, in other words, how can we manage to muzzle the ox while he treadeth out the corn?

The supposed love of democracy out of which the commissioners devised their principles is really just a hatred of those “superior minds,” from which, notice, we can profit not by the study and practice of superior mindfulness but by “obtaining their output.” While we will discourage students from a painful retracing of the path of Newton’s logic, for instance, we will take profit and pleasure from the fact that Newton has made it possible (for some few of us, who do have to be watched carefully for signs of incipient elitism) to construct devices that work.

But we mustn’t forget that bullet, the one that “spins” end over end in perfect but antisocial obedience to the laws of motion. (A thoughtful writer would have written “tumbles,” but, having done that out of thoughtfulness, he would probably, out of that same thoughtfulness, have understood that the point of the example was utterly irrelevant.) Of the output that we might obtain from those superior minds, some must prove unworthy, which is to say, antihumanistic, which in turn is to say, the work of an individual mind heedless of collective values. It is thus a primary aim of social adjustment educationism to disarm and overwhelm the individual mind and replace it with a comprehensive data bank of received and unexamined attitudes, values, opinions, and worthy emotional responses. All of the curricular dilutions and manipulations prescribed in Cardinal Principles are means to that end. And, to that end, there is only one certain impediment. It is the one “student outcome” that our schools simply cannot afford to provide, even if they could, which, out of thoughtless acceptance of their own principles, they can’t. It is, of course, literacy.

“Literacy” needs some redefining. When Jefferson spoke of that literacy that would provide “informed discretion,” he did not mean the ability to read the instructions for assembling a swing set or even for assembling a nuclear power generating plant. He did not mean the ability to write a correctly punctuated letter of application for a job. He did not mean the ability to devise, or even to “appreciate,” advertisements that “use words to create images.” He did not mean the habit of worthy emotional response to literature. In short, he did not mean any, or even all taken together, of those “skills” that we now put forth as studies in communications or language arts. He did mean certain habits and powers of the individual mind, habits and powers that can be learned and refined only by long practice in reading and writing.

Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a portion of education. It is education. It is at once the ability and the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and, out of knowledge and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses, however “worthy,” to make judgments. Literate people are not easy prey. They do know an inference from a statement of fact. They are not easily persuaded by pretended authority. They are attentive to the natural requirements of logic. They can make distinctions, very fine distinctions, and are able both to notice and to examine their own predispositions and even their only presumably “right emotional responses.” To say that young human beings are incapable of such powers is elitism.

But our schools do say that. And thus they not only preclude those powers in the students but in the whole system. Today’s teachers and the teachers of today’s teachers are all the inevitable results of the system. They simply don’t know what literacy is. This accounts for one of the most bewildering contradictions to be found in the current pandemonium of bold, innovative thrusts in basic minimum competencies. On the one hand, our educationists fancy that literacy is something you achieve when you have developed enough “skills.” But it turns out that many of those skills are in fact the results of much practice and hard knowledge and habits of rote learning and mere information, things in short supply not only among the hapless students but also among the teachers and the teachers of the teachers. Therefore, on some other hand, having discovered how hard it is to teach those skills in a system where no one is very good at them, the educationists can also fancy that literacy isnot simply a matter of skills, which now become “mere” skills, and that it might just as well be achieved in their absence.

“Problemsolving in the content area” is a favorite pastime of educationists. In the case of literacy, it works this way: Literacy, whatever it is, must be a student outcome. So let’s try to teach those basic skills and offer mini-courses and interesting electives in all sorts of communications and language arts and let the students express themselves and improve their self-esteem. Then we’ll find out what the student outcomes are and call them “literacy.” Put in those terms, the proposition sounds too preposterous to win approval even among educationists, unless you happen to be one of millions of American parents who have wondered how compositions full of uncorrected and perhaps unnoticed mechanical errors could earn such good grades.

The convenient redefinition of literacy, however, is not merely a happy dodge for teachers. It is national policy in the realm of educationism, which embraces even those outlying provinces that we mistakenly deem buffer states between us and the traditional expansionism of governmental social adjustment. The same comfortable and undemanding redefinition is a matter of policy at the Educational Testing Service:

The Holistic Hustle

Fortunately for American educationists, there is never any dearth of trashy and popular fads, the raw material of curricular novelty. The half-life of most bold innovative thrusts is less than that of the pet rock or the nude encounter group, and pedagogical gimmicks have to be cooked up more often than situation comedies. But, thanks to the fertile inventiveness always inspired by exuberant greed, the master schlockmongers will always provide the educationists with full measures of readily adaptable inanities.

Of course, there is a difference between the peddlers of pop and the educationists. The peddlers of pop are skillful. When promoters have deposited the take from Woodstocks and Earth Days, the educationists come limping behind with mini-courses in the “poetry” of rock and roll, and environmental awareness. In a frantic scramble after what crumbs may fall from the merchants’ tables, they rush to “teach” soap-opera-watching, the casting of horoscopes, and the throwing of the Frisbee. Coming soon: Elvis, the copper bracelet, and the T-shirt as literature.

Future historians of education (how’s that for a dreary calling?) will understand better than we that the most powerful influence on education in our time was not new knowledge of the psychology of learning, not the rise and dominance of the electronic media, not the fervor for democratization that followed the civil rights movements, not even the newly awakened public recognition of the tensions between the demands of an increasingly automated society and a reinvigorated and often antimaterialistic individualism, but, purely and simply, the Big Mac. Our schools are, in almost every respect, analogues of the fast-food industry, although there probably is some nourishment in the Big Mac. Even the slogans are the same: Have it your way; We do it all for yoo-oo-oo.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that educationists respond to public discontent not by trying to improve what they do, but by trying to “educate” the public into some other “perception” of what they do. In education, as in the fast-food business, it’s called “image enhancement,” and, like all flackery, it’s done with slogans and buzz words. When the public finally noticed, for instance, that fewer and fewer children were learning to read, the educationists quickly discovered that “learning disabilities” were far more common than anyone had ever suspected. Therefore, we ought in fact to praise the schools for doing such a great job with swarms of undernourished, disaffected imbeciles, many of whom were also myopic, hard of hearing, hyperactive (if not lethargic), or even lacking in self-esteem.

Now, pestered by complaints about student writing, the educationists have drawn from the bottomless pit of mindless pop a bucket of inspiration, the Whatever Turns You On Plan for the Enhancement of Public Perceptions Concerning Student Writing. They call it “holistic” grading. It will improve grades dramatically without requiring any improvement in the teaching of writing. It will work even in schools where there is no teaching of writing. Now that’s educationism.

Most of what we’ve heard about holistic grading has come from the horse’s mouth, the National Council of Teachers of English. We now have a report from another part of the horse, the Educational Testing Service, which is offering “workshops” in holistic grading:

With this method, the essay is read for a total impression of its quality rather than for such separate aspects of writing skill as organization, punctuation, diction, or spelling. The method takes a positive approach to the rating of compositions by asking the reader to concentrate on what the student has accomplished rather than on what the student has failed to do or has done badly. Holistic scoring is both efficient and accurate. The standards by which compositions are judged are those that the readers have developed from their training and from their experiences with student writing.

We have to presume that the written parts of tests given by ETS will be “rated” in this “efficient and accurate” fashion from now on. In a few years, we’ll hear that the writing crisis, if indeed there ever was one, is over.

This, you see, is a “positive approach.” To fuss about organization, punctuation, diction, and spelling is the bad old negative approach that caused the whole flap to begin with.

To judge writing by this “holistic” method is like judging a musical performance without reference to rhythm, tempo, or dynamics, and taking no heed of false notes or of “organization.” What could we say of a performance in which all of those things were wrong? We could certainly not judge it as a musical performance if we choose to give no weight to the attributes of musical performance. If we could consider things without regarding their attributes, which we can’t, we wouldn’t even know what the hell they were. It is only by their attributes that we can distinguish a musical performance from a billiard ball. It is by just such attributes as organization and diction, dismissed above as presumably optional “aspects,” that we can distinguish between written composition and the egg stains on an educationist’s face.

And that is a distinction that we had better learn to make. There will never be good, universal, public education in America until we learn, from their own words, that the people in charge of it are badly in need of an education. Educated people will not be deceived by such nonsense. Some knowledge of the history of thought and some