The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell (best novels for beginners txt) 📕

by the king than we are by the schools, there seems to be no hope of a Declaration of Independence, to say nothing of a revolution. This time, the people, already massively indoctrinated by the values teaching of the schools, are willing parties to their own oppression. We want the schools to teach values, and webelieve what they have told us, that concrete knowledge and strict intellectual discipline are not only separate from “ethical character” but perhaps actually impediments to that lofty goal.

The makers of Cardinal Principles were true prophets when they said that, where the formation of “ethical character” was intended, the school was “the one agency that [could] be controlled definitely and consciously.” And they did it. The national “ethical character,” whatever it may be, didn’t just happen; it is the result of definite and conscious control. Nor can we free ourselves from that control, not only accepted but even approved by most Americans, without an enormous change in many millions of individual minds. Such a change could be wrought only through universal public education, which is exactly what we do not have. We have universal public schooling, which is not even close to education. The confusion between schooling and education, which suffuses every one of the Seven Deadly Principles, and out of which the principle-makers did their work, is what the schools have by now taught us all. It is their only triumph, the only lesson they have taught universally and with complete effectiveness; but it is enough. It took them a bit more than four years, to be sure, but they do seem to have planted a seed that can never be uprooted. Lenin would be envious.

Afterword: Plus a Change

As I was approaching what I hoped would be the end of this book, I received a fat manila envelope from a high-ranking staff officer in the educationistic bureaucracy of the State of New York. His letter, clipped to a great wad of that slick and grimy-looking paper that comes out of copying machines covered with that medium gray print that always makes you want to polish your glasses, read:

Your advice and example are among the influences on the attached grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities for “A Program of Renew Education in Basic Humanities Disciplines.” Because of your influence, I thought you ought to get a copy of the proposal while we are still awaiting the results of NEH’s peer review, which we should have in March and April. I would like to hear your reaction to the proposal (which, you will note, includes a field-test in New Jersey), and I hope that we will be able to call on you for advice on the project if it is funded. Please don’t hesitate to write or call me with questions or advice.

Although the writer was not unknown to me, and although I had actually once spent a day pattering about this and that at the headquarters of his vast bureaucracy, I could think of no way to justify calling that “advice and example,” to say nothing of “influence.” Furthermore, I felt vaguely discomfited to be even a putative party to that process in which one educationistic bureaucracy solicits a slice of our money from another educationistic bureaucracy in order to remedy some newly visible deficiency caused by a third educationistic bureaucracy. If the teacher-training academies of America had not devoted themselves for more than half a century to militant anti-intellectualism, there would now be no need for the National Endowment for the Humanities to take some of our money and give it to the New York State Department of Education, which will thereupon set about beginning to start to prepare to do what it damn well ought to have been doing all along. Accordingly, in spite of my correspondent’s advice not to hesitate with questions or advice, I hesitated.

As I hesitated, it dawned on me. Of course. I was looking at the latest Great Lurch Forward. The whole history of American educationism can be told in Great Lurches Forward. When we recently noticed that even the taxpayers had noticed that astonishingly few high school graduates could read or write, we made the Great Lurch Forward into Basic Minimum Competency. Well, all right, said our educationists, now we know what to do. That was what they had said when we were all so dispirited by the dread Sputnik, which Clifton Fadiman reminded us, although in vain, was simply a flying dog in a metal box, but which frightened most of us enough to make us turn for succor to the educationists, probably the only people around who couldn’t provide any. Aha! they said; now we know what to do. And they lurched forward. Since the day of the Great Primal Lurch, the life adjustmentism of Cardinal Principles, they have lurched from one bold innovative thrust to another. They have lurched out of “self-contained” classrooms right back into them, lurching in the meanwhile in and out of pods and modules. They have lurched from the old math to the new math to the balancing of checkbooks instead of math. And now they are going to lurch into The Humanities.

The lurchers, notably imperceptive of irony in any case, see no irony at all in proposing that those who couldn’t even make us a minimally literate nation will now make us the possessors of the “thoughtful discretion” of which Jefferson dreamed. Since Ido know something about these lurchers in Albany who claim my influence, I can testify that they are not cynical opportunists booking themselves cushy berths on the next great lurch, but that is no consolation. In fact, I could wish they were cynical opportunists, for it may well be that the false and mercenary preacher will convert, out of well-pretended zeal, more souls than will ever be moved by decent, ineffectual honesty. And the Albany lurchers, surely decent and honest, will just as surely prove ineffectual.

Like all those who imagine that it is possible to change or reform the government education system, they seem to have a mistaken metaphor in their heads. I think they see “the schools” as an apparatus of some sort, even, as many educationists unhappily call it, a “delivery system,” something like UPS. There are the trucks. They exist. They even run. You can put in them and then deliver anything you choose. All we have to do is choose. If we choose some nice humanities, we’ll deliver them. But government education is not a neutral vessel into which and out of which diverse fluids can be poured. It is not even an apparatus that can be set or programmed to do whatever we want of it. It is more like an elaborate and complicated organism that has inevitably evolved into exactly and only the creature that can do exactly and only what it must do to survive. It is even more like an extensive, interlocking ecosystem, something like the Great Dismal Swamp, in which every plant and creature, and even the air and earth and water, are what they are and do what they do because that’s the way it must be. You can shoot the tiger, or you can stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.

Here is just one of the objectives of the “Language Arts/English Syllabi” as put forth in the proposal from the New York State Education Department, already tainted, you probably noticed, by that slash, which reveals that no one has paid any thoughtful attention to the conjunction, and thus to theexact nature of the relationship, between those hokey Language Arts, already infamous, and mere English:

Instruction in critical thinking will be integrated into the classroom activities of reading, discussion, and writing about literature and other writing of recognized high quality. The complexity and difficulty of the reading, writing, and discussion will increase progressively from kindergarten through grade twelve.

That certainly sounds great. But, for anyone who knows something of what is done in our schools and teacher academies, who has seen how the work of the mind is done by the theoreticians who design programs, who has an inkling of how education is governed and directed, some questions arise. Who will provide all that instruction in critical thinking? Will they be the teachers who have themselves been exhaustively trained in values clarification and in relating? Will those who carried signs promoting “Quality Educacion” and “Descent Wages for Teachers” cast light on “literature and other writing of recognized high quality”? Will the assistant superintendent for instruction, the ex-shop teacher with a small real estate business on the side, devise the parameters of the plan to integrate the instruction in critical thinking into the various classroom activities? Will that instruction be also integrated into the making of collages for the bulletin board and the appreciation of other cultures at the Christmas party featuring the cookies of many lands? Who will decide, and how, exactly what “complexity” is suitable for the fourth grade and what for the sixth? An ex-guidance counselor turned principal? An ex-principal turned coordinator in Albany? Will the publishers and legislators and professors of education disband their Triple Entente and leave the choice of “literature and other writing of recognized high quality” to the critically thinking teachers? Will the parents, themselves unthinking products of long years of values indoctrination and helpless against the random suggestions of any and all indoctrinators, be tickled pink when their children bring all that critical thinking home? And you can probably devise for yourself dozens of other depressing questions about what is in fact one tiny entry in thirty single-spaced pages of similar “objectives” and schemes and devices.

Furthermore, we can see that in the schools history becomes social studies, writing becomes a communication skill, literature becomes propaganda, and even science becomes brushing after meals. What will “humanities” become? I am sad to say that I have a clue, for in my own school I have seen recently a supposed attempt to cash in on the next Great Lurch Forward, which, fortunately, failed. I say “fortunately” because had it succeeded we would in fact have been further than ever from the education of “informed discretion.”

To see why that failure was fortunate, you must first know some generally hidden things about a public college. By “humanities,” for instance, we mean those studies that do not lead to clearly identifiable paying jobs, and in fact we hardly ever use the word except when we have to distinguish those few and antique disciplines from such things as teacher-training or business education, which are the routine enterprises of the college. Furthermore, wenever speak of “the liberal arts”; we are prevented by a superstitious dread of the kind that would prevent the surviving peasants from uttering aloud the name of Count Dracula. When we do have to admit that all our students ought to share some body of knowledge, and can thus be passed off as members in good standing of Western Culture, we call that what almost every other school in America calls it — “general education.” General education, of course, is to education exactly what general science is to science, a smattering of this and that. Nor is “general education” a euphemism for the liberal arts, and certainly not for the humanities. It is, in fact, not an intellectual entity but a political device, the result of a reluctant compromise among the teachers of everything from puppet-making to self-awareness through massage. It has neither center nor theme, and everyone, although for purely sectarian reasons, agrees that it is simply a mess.

One of our subcommittees undertook to reform general education. After many months of arduous labor, the subcommittee brought forth — well, certainly not a mouse, but something more like a hydra as big as the Ritz — a hydra as it might be designed by a subcommittee, however. Its details were only mildly interesting,