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

spent my whole life in one school or another, and I was, of course, faintly aware that I was only faintly aware of what was going on out in the world. When I looked at that blackboard and imagined all those students dutifully “drawing” the alphabet in their blue-books, I realized that I didn’t even know what was going on down at the other end of the hall. Nevertheless, it still didn’t occur to me that this astonishing examination had something to do with those questions that I had long since stopped asking myself.

It turned out, of course, that what I had seen was a final examination in one of those “education” courses, about which, at that time, I knew nothing. Well, that’s not quite true: I did know one thing, because earlier that semester I had looked into a classroom where something amazing was happening. There, in front of the class, stood an unusually attractive young lady, a student, tricked out in a fetching bunny outfit - not the kind you’re probably imagining, just a pair of paper ears pinned into her hair and a stunning puff of absorbent cotton somehow or other tacked on behind and clothes, too, of course, but I can’t recall any details. She was reading aloud, with expression, and even with an occasional hop, from a large book spread out flat at about hip level, glancing down at it remarkably infrequently. Large type. She was doing a practice lesson. I awarded her instantly an A plus.

So I knew two things about the making of a teacher. Both seemed engaging rather than repellent. After all, who can be against legible writing on the blackboard? To be sure, I myself wouldn’t have assigned it a value of more than half the grade on a final examination; perhaps, had it been in my charge to foster, I would simply have required it as a tool of the trade without bestowing upon it any special credit at all. And it did occur to me that what the students drew in their examination books might not be an accurate measure of their skill in drawing the same things on a blackboard, an unusually intractable medium, but the motive seemed good. And as for pretty girls in cunning outfits, what could be more cheering? It seemed to me that those teacher-trainers must be amiable and playful folk with well-developed aesthetic sensibilities and a penchant for drama, in bold contrast to the rest of us who taught what you call “subjects,” dour and narrow people reciting lectures and devising “thought” questions. And who knows? Could it be that I would now actually remember the political consequences of Henry’s sad pilgrimage to Canossa if only my history professor had put on sackcloth and lectured on his knees?

And I began to watch the teacher-trainers in idle moments, in my idle moments, that is, not theirs. They were rarely idle. They were busy rumbling down the hall pushing metal carts laden with projectors and loudspeakers, which they actually knew how to hook up and operate. I could hear them in the next classroom shoving the desks into sociable circles so that, as in King Arthur’s court, no one would be disadvantaged by having to sit below the salt, or breaking up into small groups, so that understanding could be reached by democratic consensus rather than imposed by authority. Sometimes whole classes could be heard singing - a delightful change of atmosphere in precincts otherwise darkened by realism and naturalism and the intellectual despair of eminent Victorians.

All in all, I thought the teacher-trainers harmless and childlike, optimistic and ingenuous. I knew, to be sure, that many of them held what they called doctorates in things like comparative storage systems for badminton supplies and for cafeteria management, but so what? They weren’t pretending to teach anything that called for traditional training in scholarship, were they? Doctorates in education, I remembered from my days in graduate school, are much easier to get than any other kind, but what did that matter? A doctorate, after all was just a union card, a ticket of admission to a remarkably good life, and why shouldn’t those decent and well-meaning people have doctorates just like everybody else? As to whether what they did had any value in the training of teachers, I just didn’t know. I wasn’t curious enough to pay thoughtful attention, and they didn’t seem to be hurting anyone. Live and let live.

So I did. Once the novelty of their techniques wore off, and long before it dawned on me that those techniques were better called “antics,” I just stopped thinking about them. The teacher-trainers were not in my mind at all when I started to publish The Underground Grammarian in 1976. The Bicentennial Year was in my mind, and Tom Paine and even William Lloyd Garrison, and, most of all, the ghastly, fractured, ignorant English that is routinely written and spread around by college administrators, the people charged with the making and executing of policy in the cause of higher education in America. I presumed that those administrators would be the natural prey of a journal devoted to the display of ignorance in unlikely places. It never even struck me then that most administrators were once the teacher-trainers who were not in my mind.

And I will beg your indulgence, reader, in suggesting that when you look at the world and wonder what’s going on, the teacher-trainers are not in your mind. Nuclear weapons and taxes are in your mind, along with politicians and other criminals. Pollution and racial discord are in your mind. Prices double and pleasures dwindle, violence and ignorance multiply and expectations diminish, and all the season’s new television shows are aimed at demented children, and master sergeants have to puzzle out in comic-book style manuals how to pull the triggers on their Titan missiles, and sometimes, in a moment of pure panic, you wonder whether you shouldn’t have voted for Goldwater after all. And when you wave a finger this way and that, trying to point it at someone, anyone, the teacher-trainers are not in your mind.

Sometimes, to be sure, you do suspect and even indict “the schools.” Ah, if only “the schools” would do this or that. But what? Everybody has a formula, sort of. Money, obviously, isn’t the answer. They have money beyond counting. Less money can hardly be the answer - just ask the National Education Association. So what are we to do? Public schools? Private schools? Vouchers? Integration? Remediation? Consolidation? Back to basics? Forward to relevancy in bold innovative thrusts?

Then again, you may not even ask these questions, for to do so is to see a connection that not many Americans have thought to make. Millions of us have nothing at all to do with the schools. We have no children in the schools, and we don’t know what they’re doing, and we don’t much care, except about the taxes we pay to support the enterprise. We can easily think of many things that must be far more important than education, a notably dreary topic in any case. Surely politics is more important than education. So is economics. Technology. National defense. Even art! And the six o’clock news in any city in the land makes it perfectly clear that the most important things that happened in your part of the world today were murders, rapes, and a fire of unknown origin in an abandoned warehouse. And as for the schools, most of us just hope that they’ll teach the children to read and write and cipher someday soon and just not bother us. We have all those important things to worry about and we really can’t be bothered with wondering about whether the schools should experiment with a groundbreaking return to the self-contained classroom.

In fact, the destiny of this land, of any land, is exactly and inevitably determined by the nature and abilities of the children now in school. The future simply has no other resources. And, an even more dismaying fact, because it tells of us , not them, this land as it is today is the exact and inevitable result of the nature and abilities of the schoolchildren that we were. And the things that you think important, everything from the politics to the rapes and murders and fires, are what they are and have for us the meanings that they have precisely because of what we were.

Public education, because it is so nearly universal and because, notwithstanding minor variations, it is a monolithic and self-sustaining institution, has more power to create our national character than anything else in America. While it does not bring us oil shortages or volcanic eruptions, it does determine what we will think and do about such things. It determines what we will feel and how we will do the work of the mind. This should not be surprising. You, and you alone, could do as much if you could somehow manage to influence almost every American child day after day for about twelve years, although, as an individual controlling consciousness, you would probably do a better job in many respects. There is, of course, no individual controlling consciousness in the institution of education - no villain need be - but the institution, like any institution, has a kind of mind and will of its own. It changes, if at all, only very slowly, and, since you don’t find it as important as politics or fire, it changes only at the will of those relatively few people who actually do find it important, because they live by it. Nor is it their will - and why should it be ? - to make any change that is not in their self-interest. “They,” of course are a loosely confederated host of administrators, bureaucrats, consultants, professors, researchers, and Heaven only knows how many other titled functionaries. They are a very diverse group, but they have, with astonishingly rare exceptions, one thing in common. They have all been through the process that we call teacher-training, and most of them have done some of that themselves. They are the people who are not in your mind when you wonder what the hell is happening to us.

And they would never have gotten back into my mind had I not undertaken, for what I now think frivolous reasons, what turned out to be a serious and infuriating study of the use of language, a study that had to lead to a consideration of the meaning of the use of language. That study is, of course, the business of The Underground Grammarian, which has been accurately enough described as a journal of radical, academic terrorism. It is radical because it seeks in language the root of the thoughtlessness that more and more seems to characterize our culture. It is academic both because the tenor of the study to which it subjects the work of its victims is scholastic and because it finds the most egregious examples of mindless and mendacious babble neither in the corporation nor in the Congress but in the schools. It is terrorist because it exploits the fear that many academics feel when they know that their words might appear in print before the eyes of the public, mere civilians who are not members of the education club.

Here is the brief statement of editorial policies that appeared in the first issue of The Underground Grammarian:

Editorial Policies

The Underground Grammarian is an unauthorized journal devoted to the protection of the Mother Tongue at Glassboro State College. Our language can be written and even spoken correctly, even beautifully. We do not demand beauty, but bad English cannot be excused or tolerated in a college. The Underground Grammarian will expose and ridicule examples of jargon, faulty syntax, redundancy, needless neologism, and any other kind of outrage against English.

Clear language engenders clear