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

seem silly and ignorant, at the heart of all they do there is an important and correctly understood truth: thoughtfulness is disruptive, and the work of an individual mind is seldom likely to contribute to the consistent harmony of a collective social system. Therefore, while you, as an individual mind, may judge that the children who wrote to Royko suggest some failure in schooling, and while such might even be the judgment of individual minds who actually do the schooling, those same children represent a mighty success in principle_._ Whatever else they might be, they are not individual minds that will fall into the anticollective habit of thoughtful attention. They may indeed make a ruckus at a rock concert, which is ironically only a part of the “consistent harmony of a collective social system,” but they will not examine and reexamine the ideas and values that have been delivered unto them.

Those students represent another kind of success. Their schools have undertaken, at the expense of skills and knowledge, to instill in them values. And they have values. They know what a fifteen-dollar ticket is worth and that disco sucks. Those are values. They are not determinations from evidence, not descriptions of phenomena, not conclusions from argument. They are assertions of worth. Values. They are neither unusual nor eccentric, however repellent some may find them. But even the most intemperate critic of American educationism cannot accuse the schools of intending to teach such values, and the people in the schools will themselves protest that such reprehensible values are picked upnot in the schools, which struggle bravely and perhaps hopelessly against them, but from “the society.” They are right, and they are wrong. Certainly the resort to violence, hedonistic self-indulgence, and the supposed worth of whatever is popular are celebrated in “the society.” But why is that so? It must be because we are in the habit of accepting values out of suggestion and example rather than of formulating them out of knowledge and thoughtfulness. Andthat must be so because we have been schooled into that habit, for whose sake we have been unschooled in the habit of thoughtful judgment, which would preclude the habit of accepting values out of suggestion and example and make impossible the social adjustment that is the principal aim of the schools. Thoughtful judgment is a specific antibody against uncritical susceptibility to suggestion, so it must be repressed if schooling is to succeed. And when it is repressed successfully, through willful neglect of intellectual discipline and mere information, schoolchildren will form their “values” not from the transparent preachments of teachers who are obviously trying to con them into putting on knickers and delivering newspapers, but from the dramatic and stylish examples of the world of the demotic.

Many pernicious consequences flow from the fact that the schools have appointed themselves inculcators of values and that the American public, itself “adjusted” by the schools, has come to believe that the inculcation of values is a legitimate aim of education. One of the worst of those consequences is now made manifest in the current wave of sectarian demands that the schools, since they are in the values business anyway, ought to teach not just the nonsense they have been teaching but whatever other nonsense any sufficiently noisy group of citizens may prefer. After all, if the schools can “teach” doing your own thing or going with the flow (both of which, curiously enough, can justify any particular belief or deed), why can’t they “teach” that the universe is just as well described in Genesis as in geology, astronomy, paleontology, physics, biology, and chemistry? While they preach, from one side of the mouth, a humanistic contempt for that “excellence narrowly defined” that brought us all those ugly antennas, why can’t they prate, from the other, about the glories of the profit system? There is no good answer to such questions. If a tax-supported government school system devotes itself to any values at all, it can always be made to do exactly that for any other values at all.

One of the inevitable consequences of sixty years of anti-intellectualism in the government schools is the automatic assumption of most Americans that things like spelling and punctuation are political and ideological badges. Those who are fussy about spelling and punctuation, and other such devices, are assumed to be old-fashioned, conservative, and elitist, while those who care little for such traditional trivia must be with it, liberal, and democratic. (This accords ill with another article of American folklore, according to which it is the “educated” who become liberals and abandon the old-time religion of this or that, but the American public has been trained not to see such contradictions.) Because The Underground Grammarian often ridicules academicians who cannot spell or punctuate or even make sense, readers occasionally assume that it must also be against gun control and in favor of prayer in schools and a return to McGuffey’s Readers. I often had letters from strange people asking aid and comfort in such causes, all of them unwitting testimony to the distress and confusion of mind that automatically equates schooling with education and indoctrination with learning. Eventually it seemed good to write a general answer to all such solicitations:

Guarding the Guardians of the Guards

We have been hearing both from and about groups of citizens who have organized themselves as guardians of education and monitors of texts and techniques. Those who have written to us have praised our efforts, claiming a common cause and expecting that we will praise, and promote, their efforts. We will not. They are decent and well-meaning people disturbed about the obvious disorders of education, no doubt, but their understanding of “education” is as thoughtless and self-serving as that of the self-styled professionals of education who brought those disorders upon us.

These guardians of education, while they differ in some ways, all seem proponents of the back-to-basics frenzy, in which we find no merit. We champion mastery, and we mean mastery, not minimum competence, in language and number not because it is the goal of education but because it is absurd to imagine an educated person who lacks it. Having that mastery, we can make of knowledge the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Lacking it, we can make of knowledge nothing more than the substance of training and the content of indoctrination.

The back-to-basics enthusiasts, who never fail to note the paramount importance of being able to read want-ads and to write letters of application, treat the skills of number and language as subdivisions of vocational training to be imparted and done with, as though reading a micrometer and reading a paragraph were acts of the same nature. In one sense, literacy is a trivial skill, easily acquired and neither more nor less valuable than those darlings of the schools, the “life skills,” things like shoe-tying and crossing at the corner. In another sense, it is an endless and demanding enterprise that is also the ground of our knowledge and understanding, but an enterprise little likely to entice the minds of those taught literacy as a life skill.

All unwittingly, therefore, the guardians preach the same degradation of literacy that the educationists have so long practiced, and, strange as it might seem at first, for the same reason. The greatest mischief done in the schools is the attempt to inculcate certain presumed “values,” but the guardians understand that less than perfectly. They fancy that the mischief lies not in the inculcation of values but in the inculcation of the educationists’ values rather than the guardians’ values. All would be well, they imagine, if only the school would foster the “right” values. And that is why they must make of literacy a “basic” life skill rather than a way of life. If you want to foster in children certain values and preclude others, you must take care that they do not develop an appetite for knowledge and the skill to make of it the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Jefferson’s words are an assertion of faith, not fact; fact may be “self-evident,” but “truth” is not. If it were, earth would be fair, and all men glad and wise.

There is a momentous difference between coming to believe what we have often been told and deciding, as Jefferson did, out of knowledge and thoughtful judgment, to “hold” something true. The former is a kind of slavery and easy to achieve; the latter is difficult, for it requires knowledge and governed intellect, in other words, an education, but it is freedom.

Freedom is, to be sure, frightening. There is no telling what values free people will choose to hold. Decent and well-meaning guardians of values were horrified by the monstrous principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is, of course, out of fear that the guardians preach the inculcation of values, fear of knowledge and thought.

Most of the guardians urge things like the study of history and economics “emphasizing the benefits of the free enterprise system.” We wholeheartedly share the guardians’ devotion to the free enterprise system, but they obviously don’t share our equal devotion to the study of history and economics, which will inevitably bring the knowledge of some facts, events, and ideas that are not at all conducive to our wholehearted devotion to the free enterprise system. When we study history from a certain point of view, we do not study history. If our students someday discover, as in fact they will, that we were sometimes mistaken in our knowledge of history, they will probably forgive us. But if they discover, as in fact they do, that we have misrepresented or omitted knowledge in the service of some values, they will learn to distrust both us and those values, as indeed they should-and apparently do.

If our values are grounded, as we usually imagine they are, in evidence and reason, then those who can see the evidence and who know the ways of reason are likely to adopt them. However, if we find ourselves tampering with the evidence and tempering the power of language, the medium of reason, then perhaps we ought to reevaluate our values. Should that prove unacceptable, we should at least be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others that we do not love.

The guardians do differ in one important way from the educationists. The guardians have lost their nerve, while the educationists still have plenty. The guardians, although they often wave the flag, do not truly hold the most basic value of a free society: the belief that, given the choice, knowing and thoughtful people will choose to continue in a free society. Those who do hold that value must guard against the guardians. But not in the classroom.

We misunderstand the dangers of schooling. We fancy that what is at stake is some obviously needed widespread level of competence and ability, a large population of people able to cope with the demands of a complicated and technical system. And there is, to be sure, some danger that we will have fewer effective people than we need. But we have at stake in the schools something far more important than that, for what is effectively precluded by the essential and pervasive ideology of the government school system is nothing less than individual freedom.

We could probably say many things about the unhappy schoolboy who knows the value of a ticket and even that “people die every three second,” but of them all the most important is that he is not free. His beliefs and values are not his; he is theirs. He is possessed, as anyone must be possessed who knows nothing of the claim that