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

That point is important. Although inflated with fake erudition, Pfaffesprache always reveals, inadvertently, its roots in the vulgar, but usually honest, Lumpensprache . Thus we find in that passage the defensive errors of the ignorant, who always use too many modifiers and achieve thereby either redundancy or incoherence. There is no need to specify that a student’s “disposition” is “personal” or to elaborate “subject” into “the particular subject field.” We are not enlightened by hearing that a property is organizational or that the relevant is immediately relevant. “The hypothetical learning mode” tells us only that this pontiff is hazy about the meanings of “mode” and “hypothetical” and short on “learning.”

The pontiff, of course, preaches what he practices in some teacher-training academy. Nevertheless, in spite of his baleful influence, many of his students do not adopt his ignorant babble. They cling faithfully to their own ignorant babble.

They become schoolteachers and compose “thought” questions for study guides: “What did the sculpture told the archologists?” They admonish parents: “Scott is dropping in his studies he acts as if don’t care. Scott want pass in his assignment it all, he had a poem to learn and he fell to do it.” When asked to demonstrate their own literacy, they go out on strike, demanding on the placards “quality educacion” and “descent wages.”

Maybe you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but the pontiffs can fool all of the peasants forever. That accounts for the fact that the society of educationism is made up of two apparently dissimilar classes. Deep down where it really counts, they’re equally less than minimally competent.

We can understand why the educationists defend so truculently that bizarre article of their faith which pronounces superior intelligence and academic accomplishment traits not suitable to schoolteachers. Well, they may have a good point there. There’s more than enough violence in the schools already. If we were to send a bunch of bright and able students to study with the hypothetical learning mode pontiff, they’d ride him out of town on a rail and hurry back to burn down the whole damn teacher-training academy.

It seems, at first, a puzzling fact that those who have spent as much as one half of their time in college studying under professors who fancy that they conceive their instructional approaches on systems models mediated by factors can then go out into the world unable to compose complete sentences or even to spell “education.” However, not until quite recently, and then only in response to external demands, have the teacher-trainers thought it their responsibility to see to it that newly graduated teachers could in fact write complete sentences and spell correctly. (We will see later some entertaining examples of what they do in response to those demands.) Those things were the business of the English department people, and if they failed to teach them, well, too bad, the fledgling teachers would just have to do without them.

Furthermore, the students in teacher-training academies are not in fact expected to adopt or even to examine the language of that “mediated by factors” passage. That is the language of the education textbooks, not the language of the classroom, although in education courses whole classes are not infrequently devoted to the reading of some text, as mealtime in monasteries is devoted to Scripture. Should a student ask, for instance, themeaning of the passage cited, he would probably be told something very much like the suggested translation. Should he ask, however, why such an obvious generalization had to be couched in such strange language, I don’t know what answer he would get, but I would bet that he will soon want to reconsider his choice of a calling. Should he take the last step and ask why anyone would think such a banal truism worthy of serious study, then he probably won’t have to reconsider his choice of a calling. His adviser will do that for him.

The passage is only a ritual recitation which is not supposed to be subjected to thoughtful scrutiny. It is a formulized pastiche of acceptable jargon terms and stock phrases. While it has, for the inattentive, a formidable sound, it is the kind of writing that is surprisingly easy to compose for anyone who is familiar with all of its traditional devices. (The craft of making such prose, strangely enough, is similar to what we can find to this day in the extemporaneous epic recitations of mendicant storytellers in the marketplaces of the Near East. They remember and stitch together thousands of recurring epithets, stock descriptions of the hero, his horse, his armor, standardized metaphors and narrative devices. Educationistic prose, however, is usually less stirring than the recitations of clever beggars.) And who, in any case, would want to scrutinize such a passage? Who? A more than ordinarily inquisitive (and perhaps skeptical) student, that’s who. One who might indeed be able to compose a complete sentence and even spell “education.”

Even in teacher-training academics, there are such students. They usually learn to keep their mouths shut, but those who don’t can be a nuisance. They are not only disconcerting in class, but they are likely to give the place a bad name by complaining in public that their education courses seem silly. (Most schoolteachers - go and ask some - will shrug off their education courses as a kind of necessary evil, a “waste of time.” Those courses, however, are a “waste of time” only for the students enrolled in them; for the institution of teacher-training they are immensely profitable.) That is why the pontiffs feel most comfortable when they can in fact preach to peasants, which is one of the reasons (there are others) for that “bizarre article of faith.”

The ordinary civilian, who may very well remember with awe the apparent erudition of some teacher or other, is not generally aware of this strange doctrine, but there is little enthusiasm in the teacher-training business for outstanding intellectual accomplishment in would-be teachers. One claimed theory is that since a teacher must be able to “relate” to the students before any learning can happen, the teacher ought to be as much like the student as possible, very unlikely in the case of an especially intellectual teacher. The democratizing leaven of ignorance, therefore, may be in fact desirable in a teacher. It is also a supposition of educationistic folklore that intellectuals are likely to be more interested in the subjects they teach than in their students, which will make them cold and distant, perhaps even authoritarian. The latter, at least, is hard to quarrel with, for the pronouncements of one who can in fact speak with authority on some subject are by definition “authoritarian.” They are also, however, exactly the pronouncements any thoughtful person would want to hear if he sought knowledge. This doctrine would seem to suggest that if you feel the need of a diet it would be better to consult with a hairdresser than with a physician, for the hairdresser is much easier to relate to than the frosty physician, whose advice, furthermore, would surely be authoritarian.

The tangled evolution of this strange tenet, which is not at all the same as the contention that it doesn’t require more than ordinary intelligence to teach children the work of the mind, will be considered in later chapters. For now, though, we have to consider the problem that it causes for those who hold it. One part of that problem is invisible to the believers: How can we at once denigrate the authoritarianism of the intellectual while adopting in our own pronouncements the tone, if not the substance, of authoritative intellectualism? While that question does not trouble the teacher-trainers, who are simply unmindful of it, it must bother us, eventually. That part of the problemvisible to them, probably because it is a matter of clear self-interest, is this: If intellectualism is undesirable, its opposite must be desirable; but the opposite of intellectualism, by whatever name, is hard to champion in a supposedly academic context. It would take a bold professor indeed to come out in favor of ignorance and stupidity and offer in their favor arguments based on knowledge and reason, arguments of the sort that are still expected in some of our colleges and universities. It requires only a presumptuous professor to plump for ignorance and stupidity on other grounds, and this is not unheard of, especially in enthusiasts of drugs and pop pseudo-religions. For the institution of teacher-training as a whole, however, something more publicly defensible is needed, and, since the defense can afford neither kookiness nor the appeal to knowledge and reason, it must rest upon what is likely to prove emotionally acceptable to the largest possible audience.

And there is such a defense. Over and against the overweening demands of scholarly intellectualism, the teacher-trainers have set the presumably unquestionable virtues of what they call “humanism.” They use this term in so many different contexts and to characterize so many different kinds of acts and ideologies that I will not attempt to discuss it fully here. It will just have to grow on you. It does not, as you might think, denote as usual a particular school of thought or slant of philosophical or religious speculation connected especially but not exclusively with the Renaissance, although many who use the term have heard of the Renaissance. This is something closer to “humaneness,” as that word is used by what used to be called the “Humane Society,” an organization that publicly deplored the cruel treatment of horses. One of the aims of “humanistic” educationism is to deplore the cruel treatment of children subjected to the overbearing demands of knowledge, scholarship, and logic by the traditional powers of authoritarian intellectualism.

We will return to that strange “humanism,” for it is one of the two fundamental principles that can be said to make up the underlying theory of education in America. The other is what might be called the iron law of behavior modification. Like Free Will and The Omniscience of God, educationistic humanism and behavior modification are ultimately irreconcilable, and their collisions are at the heart of our educational disorders. The theologians, at least, are not unaware of their stubborn little problem, but the educationists seem oblivious to the contradictions inherent in their two favorite principles. Nor could they abandon either, for in their “humanism” they can pose as philosophers and priests, and as modifiers of behavior they can claim to be scientists and healers. We can consider their claims by looking first at the roots of the presumed science of educationism.

The Wundter of It All

The true grandfather of modern educationism is neither Horace Mann, who has a bit more to answer for than we usually imagine, nor John Dewey, who in fact has less to answer for than you would conclude from the deeds of people who haven’t read him. Mann had very good intentions, and if he was unable to predict the future of state supported education in an age of ballooning statism, he was hardly alone. Dewey’s thought was so complicated and diverse, and often so muddily expressed, that it is not (much) to his discredit that facile faddists have seized slogans from his books and elaborated them into strange pedagogical practices.

The illuminating spirit, or evil genius, of modern educationism was Wilhelm Max Wundt, a Hegelian psychologist who established the world’s first laboratory for psychological experimentation at the University of Leipzig, where he worked and taught from 1875 to 1920. He dreamed of transforming psychology, a notably “soft” science dealing in vague generalizations and abstract pronouncements, into a “hard” science, like physics. About human behavior, he hoped to make exact and publicly verifiable statements of empirical fact, from which he could go on to do what scientists must do, formulate hypotheses and make predictions subject to the test of observation and experiment.

Those are hardly evil designs, and