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

is to be used, and the superintendent has to uphold them…What if a teacher decided to use Playboy or Hustler? I think the school system has an obligation to set standards and to set curriculum.

Forgive me, reader, if I fear that you may have missed the main point of this little story. If you are exasperated at yet another suggestion that we have put the yahoos in charge of the schools, then you have missed the main point. That superintendent, yahoo or not — and it doesn’t really matter — is absolutely right. He recites with perfect accuracy the principles of an ideological collectivism. Now you might say, speaking as an individual mind that can know, understand, and judge, that the difference between Playboy and the Poetics is obvious. It is, quite simply, a matter of worth. But a superintendent is not an individual mind but rather a functionary of a collective ideology. It is not his function to know, understand, and judge, but only to function appropriately according to his place in the apparatus. (That sort of “worker” seems superbly characterized by the word “apparatchik,” the best possible job description for most of the people who “educate” our children.) The apparatus is not intended to distinguish what is worthy from what is not, but what is approved from what is not. That distinction requires only knowledge of the list, and it absolutely precludes understanding and judgment. Therefore, from the point of view of the apparatus of which the superintendent is simply a component, there is no difference between Playboy and the Poetics. We have thus an educational system that, exactly because it is “values oriented,” can by its intrinsic nature have no values whatsoever, but only collectively derived “standards.”

Now, if you still dream that education can be changed by the people who work in it, imagine yourself trying to discuss that little matter with that superintendent, the man in charge of the life and work of the intellect in a whole school system, and who says, “I don’t know whether he is right or wrong about the books.” Remember, he speaks the truth. He doesn’t know. In that imagined conference you will see a miniature but perfectly accurate paradigm of all intentions to change the government schools.

It is instructive to notice that when dissidents are unmasked in the schools, it is usually because of a book. I mean, of course, a book, not a textbook. A book is the permanent record of the work of a solitary human mind, to be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by another solitary human mind. A committee can no more make a book than it can play the violin, but almost every “book” used in schools — and in teacher-training academies — is written collectively and for collective purposes. The makers of schoolbooks are “writers” only in the sense that the sign painter who labels bathroom doors is a “writer,” or the pilot who draws in the sky slogans in smoke. Such messages — enormously dignified in schools as “communications” — can never, however long and seemingly complex they become, provide the substance of anything more than collective training. Education comes from books. And it goes into books. Education arises when one mind ponders the work of another. Thus, since the elements and circumstances of an education are beyond number, since all minds are different not only from one another but even from their earlier selves, there is no end to understanding, no final judgment. And that is why books are so scarce in schools and why a teacher can find himself a pariah in the “academic” enterprise because of an essay by Aristotle. The schools are devoted to collective conclusions, what that superintendent calls “standards,” and not to the interminable (and to educationists “selfish and antisocial”) ruminations of understanding and judgment.

A magnificent education, as countless examples attest, can come from nothing more than reading and writing. In the one we behold the work of the solitary mind, in the other we do it, but we do it in such a way that we can behold again, and understand, and judge, the work of a solitary mind-our own. In the cause of education, there are no substitutes for reading and writing, nor do they require any supplements. Film-strips and flip-charts and all the countless gimmicks and gadgets that clutter our classrooms — which are, by the way, every bit as profitable as the antennas and jet exhaust fumes so righteously deplored by our humanisticist educationists — are the trash and pollution of education and reveal the schools’ corporate belief that children are mentally crippled and must be cajoled into learning anything at all. But the gimmickry of the schools is more than simple cajolery, which most students see quite clearly as something between condescension and contempt; it is an integral and large portion of a general program designed to prevent solitude. And while the children themselves are pestered with values clarification modules and relating sessions and group activities lest they fall into solitude, they are also protected from dangerous exposure to the fruits of solitary thinking in others. Committees and commissions and teaching teams and curriculum standard setters make the film-strips and movies and tapes and slide-shows and packets of learning materials. Their very teachers, raised in the same tradition and then doubly indoctrinated in the teacher training academies, are not solitary minds but collective spokesmen, not minds that pursue understanding but only mouths that transmit communications. The system will find no fault in any teacher, no matter how scant his knowledge, who is ever mindful of awareness enhancement and the parameters of remediational strategies in meeting the felt needs of the whole child, but it will suspend without pay a teacher who brings into class a nonstandard work of a solitary mind.

Still, some dissidents do survive. And, because they are themselves solitary minds, some few lucky students will find, even in the worst school, the beginnings of an education. The dissidents are those teachers we all remember, the Miss Morrisons and the Mr. Martins who made — we don’t know just how — some important difference. And they will always make that important difference, although our schools of education make it harder and harder for a solitary mind to emerge intact and independent. But they will save only a few other solitary minds here and there. They cannot save, or reform, or even change the system. Two facts prevent them: They are almost always teachers, privates in the ranks, the least powerful and influential people in the schools; and, for all the good that they do now and then, their self-interest is best served by the same establishment that harbors and rewards the guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators and the supervisors and superintendents and all the whole host of fools and frauds who could probably not make a living in anything other than a government agency. They are — the dissidents — also government agents.

We have reached a point at which even Mencken’s sound advice would be no help. Sure, we could probably burn down all the colleges and hang all the professors, but that would still leave us with fifty state departments of education, and a federal one, hundreds of educationistic research institutes and curriculum development outfits, a like number of publishers and learning materials designers and manufacturers, who knows how many awareness-orientated teachers’ centers, and who can count what else, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Unfortunately, burning the colleges and hanging the professors just won’t do it. Our schools, a parody of education, are impervious to anything less than revolution-obliteration and reconstitution. But that is impossible.

In the first place, nobody cares that much. It just isn’t worth the trouble. The only ones who care, although not that much, might be the dissidents, but they can never make a revolution. In America we have rules for revolution, and obviously good rules at that. Who would make a revolution among us is expected to pledge thereto life, fortune, and sacred honor. Some of us dissidents (I think I can speak for them) would like no doubt to imagine pledging our lives in some great cause, but when you get right down to it there is nothing more at stake here than the freedom of somebody else’s children. Besides, we have contracts. Whether we can pledge our lives or not they do not specify, but they do make it clear that there is to be no tampering with the terms and conditions of our employment. As to our fortunes, well, you know very well that we have none. Most unaccountably, the wise and happy society of ethical characters and worthy citizens that we have fostered for so long in our schools now seems to value us less than it values bus drivers and trash collectors. So we can pledge no fortunes, not even our guaranteed annual increments. And as to that sacred honor, which sounds suspiciously antiquated and elitist, you do have to admit that it is a value notoriously difficult to clarify in group discussions. On that we must pass. The closest we might come is to pledge our tenure, but we can’t. It sounds noble, of course, but it would simply erode the standards of the profession.

But maybe things will change.