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

>do seek are those that enable us to write exactly what we mean. They would also find “until such time that” a silly inflation of “until,” and an example of the thoughtlessness so common in freshman compositions.

Well, no matter. Dyke doesn’t claim to be the cutting edge. So let’s take up his challenge and try to handle the edge itself. We’ll start with the very edge of the edge, Waterman’s first paragraph. Mind your fingers:

Though an increasing interest on the part of the educational community is being shown in transpersonal teaching, the literature reflects a lack of empirically based studies concerning the teacher characteristics associated with its adoption. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to attempt to identify characteristics (values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy) pertinent to transpersonally oriented non-public school teachers and to compare and contrast those characteristics to those of public school oriented teachers.

We expected some incisiveness out there on the cutting edge, but the first paragraph is clouded by uncertainty and imprecision:

* Like other educationists, Waterman evades clear declarations and active verbs, as though he were afraid to take any chances even on a bland generalization like the assertion that somebody is showing interest in something. He retreats into an awkward and periphrastic jumble, saying that increasing interest “on the part” of somebody is “being” shown in transpersonal teaching. (Let’s get to that later.)

* The timidity of educationistic prose is not simply a stylistic twitch. It expresses an uncertain mind and the fear of challenge. That “literature” named by Waterman either lacks something or it doesn’t, but he will say only that it “reflects” a lack. Likewise, he assigns himself not exactly the task of “identifying” but only of “attempting” to identify something or other — just in case.

* In what way, we wonder, is a characteristic “pertinent to” some teachers different from a characteristic “of” some teachers? What can we suppose about the mind that prefers the former to the latter?

* Are those “public school oriented teachers” actually teachers in public schools, or could they be teachers anywhere who just happen to be obsessed with thinking about the public schools? Could they even be teachers who face in the direction of public schools?

Enough. The cutting edge in New Mexico is indeed blunted and ragged, and probably septic as well, and it was thoughtful of Dyke to warn us of the horrible wound it might inflict. Let’s get out the long tongs.

Educationists feel secure, or as secure as they can feel, when they can prattle about the unmeasurable. If you natter about attitudes and values, no one can prove you a fool by pointing to some facts. However, while the retreat from the measurable provides comfort for the educationist, it makes it hard for him to claim, as he would so dearly love to, that “education” actually is a body of knowledge and that his Faculty Club card should not be stamped: “Valid only when accompanied by an adult.” What a dilemma.

Many doctoral candidates in education just head for the nearest exit. They bestow upon us “conclusive findings” as to the efficacy of yellow traffic lines on the cafeteria floor and the number of junior high school girls in the suburbs of Duluth who elected badminton rather than archery.

For those who want to doserious research way out there on the cutting edge, however, a trickier dodge is needed, and the education academy is quick to supply it. Most D.Ed. programs require of their candidates no competence in foreign languages, which makes them attractive and accessible to those whose verbal abilities are meager. It assures that those abilities willremain meager, too, lest the teacher academies hatch out some thankless bird capable of seeing, and telling the world, that the teacher-training professors just can’t make sense. The teacher-trainers, therefore, make virtue of necessity by claiming that an educationistic scholar doesn’t need verbal skill anyway, but a one-semester course in statistics instead. And that’s why their “research” bristles with commensurate model analyses and stepwise regression strategies.

Now we can look at Waterman’s “transpersonal teaching.” In the pages that we have, there is no definition, but we know that

the personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching are: (I) a view of man as essentially and inherently good at his core, (2) that the locus of power and authority in one’s life is within the individual, and (3) that when dealing with life situations it is most effective to apply one’s values to a solution with flexibility, and free of preconceptions or prejudice.

We already know how Waterman writes, so we’re not surprised by redundancy or jargon, or even that disconcerting violation of parallelism. What does surprise us is that the work of the mind way out there on the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas sounds so much like a mimeographed prospectus for a nondenominational Sunday-school class to be taught by some amiable but slightly addled addict of popular self-help paperbacks and magazine articles about the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas in Marin County.

Waterman’s values, quasi-theological and pseudo-philosophical, can become objects of “research” only to educationists. First they circulate questionnaires, either homemade or, as in Waterman’s case, prefabricated by other educationists. Then they tabulate the “answers,” which are usually spaces filled in or numbers checked by captives eager to finish a stupid questionnaire. The answers reveal, of course, only what the answerers have chosen to say, which may or may not reveal what they feel or believe. In fact, it probably does not, especially in this “research.” Even non transpersonal teachers know enough not to give straight answers to prying busybodies.

Most of us can see a difference between a study of angels and a study of testimony about angels. Waterman sees that the R2 of Self-Regard is .0123, and, of Inner-Directed, a hefty .4544. Existentiality’s R2 is a modest .0460. Yeah. And next year he’s going to whip off Weltschmerz and Ennui, and we’ll know exactly how we feel about the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas in New Mexico.

In the meantime, though, we are going to cook up a little “empirically based study” of our own. We’re just dying to find out some nifty data about the R2 of Hubris.

It would surely be an injustice to Wundt, who was meticulously intelligent, by all accounts, to think that he would be a party to the granting of a doctorate, even in Educational Management/Development, for such cloudy work. Nevertheless, he asked for it. The presumed method of Waterman’s “empirically based study” promises to quantify mental and emotional conditions and events in publicly verifiable measurements. Those strange numbers, left unexplained in the original article, are typical of the measurements. They are determined statistically by counting up and manipulating the answers to the questionnaires. Such is the educationist’s equivalent of the scientific method, and even Wundt would reject it.

There is no counting the doctorates in education that have been awarded to those who have done nothing more than tabulate the answers to questionnaires. That such degrees are so common, however, is not only because the work is easy, bad enough, but also because the supposed objects of study often cannot be known directly. When they can, in fact, they are obviously trivial. When all the badminton and archery coaches have sent in their completed questionnaires, then you know something about the junior high school girls in the suburbs of Duluth. Or, to be more exact, you know what the badminton and archery coaches say about those girls. Nevertheless, the nature of the knowledge is such that it is publicly verifiable through direct observation. But it is of very limited use and will not bring great renown to its discoverer.

On the other hand, the nature of knowledge about the “values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy” of “transpersonal teachers” does not recommend such knowledge as verifiable through observation. We do not “see” such things; we can only make inferences about them. We do not even know what “transpersonal” might mean, for its form, analogous to “transcontinental,” suggests nothing rational. Nor can we figure it out by imagining its antonym, i.e., what would we mean if we said that some teacher was “nontranspersonal.” When we are told the “personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching,” we learn only that teachers who seem to have these certain beliefs rather than others are being called “transpersonal,” but the term distinguishes them only from the nontranspersonal teachers, who, presumably, donot have those beliefs. And a surly pack of misanthropes and defeatiststhey must be.

Never mind. Educationists love to sound technical, and they have a penchant for giving important-sounding names to things that need no names at all. In that fashion, for instance, they do not call a very small class a very small class or helping one student helping one student. They decide that such things are properly named “micro-teaching.” It may seem to you that it doesn’t make any difference, but it turns out to make a big difference indeed. You cannot write dissertations and articles, you cannot teach courses in teacher academies, you cannot get grants of public money, you cannot hire out as a consultant, you cannot set up a project and assemble a staff, if all you’re going to do is talk about very small classes and the fact that a teacher will often help one student. You can do all of those things, and more, if you are an expert in micro-teaching. Thus Waterman, by giving a classy name to people who would otherwise be nothing more than reasonably kind, confident, and resourceful teachers, provides himself with a topic worthy of serious study.

Well, nice people are nice, no doubt. But how do we know that, and how can we decide which are the nicer nice people and by precisely how much they are nicer? This is the kind of concern that modern educationism has inherited from Wundt’s by now much-debased principles. And answers are sought not by recourse to evidence but by the gathering of testimony, testimony invariably and inevitably tainted by subjectivity. It would be bad enough that such methods nullify the value of educationistic “research.” What is far worse is that such research becomes the pattern for the study of “education” generally. Students of teacher-training are continuously exposed to such presumed methods of inquiry. Since they spend so much of their time in education courses, they can have little training in rigidly scientific disciplines, even if they intend to teach them, and they are easily bamboozled into thinking that this kind of exercise is science. Their bewilderment has to be compounded by the fact that this putative science is about things which, for other purposes than dissertations, educationists will claim as human “values” to be inculcated as separate from “mere” intellectual attainments. Those are things like Waterman’s Self-Regard, Existentiality, and Inner-Directed (which desperately needs a substantive).

The educationistic mind is deeply divided against itself. It wants to follow Wundt and believe that teaching and learning are objectively measurable phenomena and that those who study teaching and learning are therefore scientists and worthy of chairs in colleges and universities. At the same time it wants to contend that the profoundly important results of an education, especially the education of a teacher, are attitudes, values, and “philosophies” that transcend cognition. Waterman, an educationist, asks this kind of question: How do public and private school teachers compare with each other in their Existentiality? He who asks after the degree of your Existentiality may just as well ask for a numerical value for your hunger, and will, in either case, simply have to accept what you tell him. Such “research” wouldn’t even make an interesting parlor game.

But what else can Waterman, or any orthodox educationist, do? He is not likely to ask, for instance: How do public and private school teachers of mathematics compare with each other in their knowledge of mathematics? That question could be