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\title{\Huge \bfseries The Graves of Academe}
\author{\huge Richard Mitchell}
\date{~}

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\begin{quote}

{\itshape It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things
that men of intemperate minds cannot be free;
their passions forge their fetters.}

---Edmund Burke 
\end{quote}

Praised by critics across the nation, {\itshape The Graves of Academe} is
Richard Mitchell's angry and brilliant tour through America's bloated public
school system --- whose mangled, self-serving language and policies would
make Orwell wince. Stamped with vintage Mitchell wit and laced with stinging
examples from {\itshape The Underground Grammarian, The Graves of Academe} pinpoints
the historic sources of the mind-boggling ``educationist'' bureaucracy
and reveals why today's schools are riddled not only with illiterate students
but with illiterate teachers and administrators as well.

{\itshape The Graves of Academe} is a book of the highest importance\ldots its
slashing and irrefutable attack, not on teachers, but on the educational
establishment that trains them --- and which his trained us\ldots Mr. Mitchell
is invaluable. Also --- he's enormously entertaining:  --- Clifton
Fadiman

``This is one of those books that seem to make such eminent common sense
that you feel compelled to read aloud selected passages to those within
hearing --- regardless of whether they want to listen.'' {\itshape Dallas
Times Herald}

``\ldots makes H.L. Mencken sound like a waffler.'' {\itshape Time}

``Mitchell is a brilliant stylist, a shrewd observer and a genuine
wit.'' {\itshape National Review}

``\ldots a delightfully satirical book on the malaise of the American educational
system, `the professional educator,' the people who, in the eyes of the
authors Richard Mitchell, are responsible for the deplorable state of American
English\ldots Amen and hallelujah, this is fine reading.'' {\itshape Charleston
Evening Post}

``\ldots this angry, witty, and very accurate assessment of the current
educational scene should be required reading for every parent who has or
will have children in what Mitchell calls `The Great Dismal Swamp' of public
education.'' {\itshape Fresno Bee}

``Witty, literate, thoughtful and provocative\ldots '' {\itshape Atlantic
City Sunday Press}

\tableofcontents

\chapter{Foreword}

This book started out to be a large collection of pieces from {\itshape The
Underground Grammarian,} a dissident if tiny journal that has achieved
notoriety if not fame, and to which I am a party. Such a collection was
proposed by a publisher (not, I am happy to say,  {\bfseries my}  publisher) and
recommended as a not-too-difficult task. My own publisher, Little, Brown,
although wise enough not to suggest such a venture, was nevertheless not
as prudent when it came to signing a contract.

I spent several months choosing, ordering, and contemplating selections
from {\itshape The Underground Grammarian,} intending to sort them by themes
and stitch them together with running commentaries, elaborations, and second
thoughts. Even third thoughts. It turned out a stupid and pointless exercise.
If there is anyone who thinks that the world needs such a collection, let
him make it.

What stopped me was this: As I went through scores of essays on the relation
of language to the work of the mind and critical commentaries on displays
of ignorance and stupidity in the written work of academicians, I could
see that some were more important than others. They suggested a single theme.
They were all more or less about the same thing, that special and unmistakable
kind of mendacious babble that characterizes  {\bfseries not}  politicians or businessmen,
not Pentagon spokesmen or commercial hucksters, but, always and only, those
members of the academic community who are pleased to call themselves the
``professionals'' of education. Those pieces, taken together, seemed
to me at least a skimpy outline, or, better, scattered reference points
suggesting something much larger and more momentous than a mere collection
of ponderous inanities. It seemed to me that I could, from certain of those
small articles, make out the murky form of the hidden monster whose mere
projections they were, breaking here and there the oily surface of some
dark pool.

As a result, I abandoned the collection and undertook the task of describing,
by extrapolation from one visible protuberance to another, and with a little
probing, the great invisible hulk of the beast, the brooding monstrosity
of American educationism, the immense, mindless brute that by now troubles
the waters of all,  {\bfseries all}  that is done in our land in the supposed cause
of ``education,'' since when, as you see, I can rarely bring myself
to write that word without quotation marks, or even fashion a sentence less
than nine {\bfseries }  or ten lines long, lest I inadvertently fail to suggest
the creature's awesome dimensions and seemingly endless tentacular complexities.
I will try to do better. The somber subject requires clarity.

Thou canst not, however, draw out this Leviathan with an hook either. A
complete, thoughtful history and analysis of American educationism would
require several fat volumes, and even the author's best friends would not
read it. It is, after all, a boring subject. I have done my best to make
it interesting by dwelling on its startling and horrifying attributes, which
are, in any case, the most important indicators of its harmful powers. It's
not a pretty sight. I have been, too, as brief as possible. In consequence,
there is probably no understanding in this book of which it is not possible
to say: ``Well, true, but there's more to it than that.'' Quite
so. I hope that many will someday look for the ``more,'' but I will
be content, for now, with the ``true.'' I have everywhere provided
as true an understanding as I can discover, and I am persuaded that a comprehensive
and detailed historical analysis will, if it ever appears, show that my
assessment of American educationism is encyclopaedically incomplete but
right anyway. The prodigious monster is down there, I know, and even if
its tentacles and appendages, its  {\bfseries} gross organs and protrusions, its
subtle convolutions and recesses, are invisible, I have still seen enough
to know the nature of the beast.


\mainmatter


\chapter{Propositions Three and Seven}



In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king.
And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king.
And why not? It's only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really
a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows
that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit
knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people
had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will
be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed
not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but,
just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly
blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other
half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and
they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against
a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes
and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity
to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the
land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit.
However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear,
for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported
and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of
antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will
trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called ``education.''

Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures,
institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only
to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally
decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival,
institutions are never capable of altruism, heroism, or even self-denial.
If you imagine that they are, if, for instance, you fancy that the welfare
system or the Federal Reserve exists and labors for ``the good of the
people,'' then you can be sure that the minions of the one-eyed man
and the half-wit are pleased with you.

Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact,
be successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that
education in America is ``failing,'' it is because we don't understand
the institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily,
hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely  {\bfseries because}  of our accusations
of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to
 {\bfseries our}  power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we
complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to individual
freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim -- to be, that
is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can raise
up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend individual
freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of education claims
direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding Fathers.

Jefferson was in favor of education, indubitably, but he meant the condition,
not the word. He held that there was no expectation, ``in a state of
civilization,'' that we could be both free and ignorant. The modifier
is important; it is to suggest that we might indeed be ``free''
and ignorant in savagery. Free at least from the conventional and mutually
admitted restraints to which civilized people bind themselves.

Using Jefferson's terms, we can derive exactly eight propositions to think
about:

\begin{enumerate}
\item[1.] We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
\item[2.] We can be ignorant and free in civilization.
\item[3.] We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
\item[4.] We can be ignorant and unfree in savagery.
\item[5.] We can be educated and free in savagery.
\item[6.] We can be educated and free in civilization.
\item[7.] We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
\item[8.] We can be educated and unfree in savagery.
\end{enumerate}

Jefferson asserts that the second is impossible, thereby implying the possibility
of the first and the sixth. The fifth and the eighth seem unlikely, for
if we are indeed educated it will be both a result of civilization and a
cause of civilization. The fourth is just a quibble, for the ``freedom''
at issue is not freedom from natural exigencies, to which all are subject,
but from the devised constraints possible only in a state of civilization.
The truth of the third and the seventh, unhappily, is recommended by knowledge
and experience.

Omitting those propositions that seem impossible or meaningless, we are
left with:

\begin{enumerate}
\item[1.] We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
\item[3.] We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
\item[6.] We can be educated and free in civilization.
\item[7.] We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
\end{enumerate}

And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jefferson's, while
3 and 7 are  {\bfseries implicitly}  Jefferson's. They describe conditions not
only perfectly possible but perfectly real. Unfreedom, the forced submission
to constraints beyond those mutually admitted by knowing and willing members
of a civilization, is not unheard of. Indeed, it is, in greater or less
degree, the current condition of all humanity.

Civilization is itself an institution and has, like all institutions, one
paramount goal, its own perpetuation. It was Jefferson's dream that that
civilization could best perpetuate itself in which the citizens were ``educated,''
whatever he meant by that, and we do have some clue as to what he meant.
He wrote of the ``informed discretion'' of the people as the only
acceptable depository of power in a republic. He knew very well that the
people might be neither informed nor discreet, that is, able to make fine
distinctions, but held that the remedy for that was not to be sought in
depriving the people of their proper power but in better informing their
discretion.

And to what end were the people to exercise the power of their informed
discretion? The answer, of course, shouldn't be surprising, but, because
we have been taught to confuse government and its institutions with civilization
in general, it often is. Jefferson saw the informed discretion of the people
as one of those checks and balances for which our constitutional democracy
is justly famous, for it was only with such a power that the people could
defend themselves  {\bfseries against}  government and its institutions. ``The
functionaries of  {\bfseries every}  government,'' wrote Jefferson, although
the italics are mine, ``have propensities to command  {\bfseries at will} 
the liberty and property of their constituents.'' Jefferson knew --
isn't this the unique genius of American constitutionalism? that government
was a dangerous master and a treacherous servant and that the first concern
of free people was to keep their government on a leash, a pretty short one
at that.

Consider again Propositions 3 and 7: 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in
civilization, and 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization. Imagine
that you are one of those functionaries of government in whom there has
grown, it seems inescapable, the propensity to command, in however oblique
a fashion and for whatever supposedly good purpose, the liberty and property
of your constituents. Which would you prefer, educated constituents or ignorant
ones? Wait. Be sure to answer the question in Jefferson's terms. Which would
you rather face, even considering your own conviction that the cause in
which you want to command liberty and property is just -- citizens  {\bfseries with
or without}  the power of informed discretion? Citizens having that power
will require of you a laborious and detailed justification of your intentions
and expectations and may, even having that, adduce other information and
exercise further discretion to the contrary of your propensities. On the
other hand, the ill-informed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded
by the recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to self-interest, however
spurious. It is only informed discretion that can detect such maneuvers.

And that's how government works. There is nothing evil about it. It's perfectly
natural. You and I would do it the same way. In fact, the chances are good
that we  {\bfseries are}  doing things that way, since more and more of us are
in fact functionaries of government in one way or another and dependent
for our daily bread on some share of the property of our constituents, and
sometimes (as in the public schools) upon the restriction of their liberty.

It was the genius of Jefferson to see that free people would rarely have
to defend their freedom against principalities and powers and satanic enemies
of the good, but that they  {\bfseries would}  have to defend it daily against
the perfectly natural and inevitable propensities of functionaries. Any
fool, can see, eventually, the danger to freedom in a self-confessed military
dictatorship, but it takes informed discretion to see the same danger in
bland bureaucracies made up entirely of decent people who are just doing
their jobs. But Jefferson was optimistic. As to the liberty and property
of the people, he saw that ``there is no safe deposit for them but with
the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.''
And he was convinced, alas, that the people could easily come by that information:
``Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is secure.''

That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have those
things, don't we? So all is secure, no? No.

Just as we cannot assume that what we call ``education'' is the
same as Jefferson's ``informed discretion,'' we cannot assume that
Jefferson meant what we mean by ``press'' and ``able to read.''
In our time, the press, in spite of threats real or imagined, is in fact
free. And, if we define ``literacy'' in a very special and limited
way, almost everyone is able to read, more or less. But when Jefferson looked
at ``the press,'' what did he see? Or, more to the point, what did
he  {\bfseries not}  see? He did not see monthly periodicals devoted entirely to
such things as hair care and motorcycling and the imagined intimate details
of the lives of television stars and rock singers. He did not see a sports
page, a fashion page, a household hints column, or an astrological forecast.
He did not see a never-ending succession of breathless articles on low-budget
decorating for the executive couple in the big city, career enhancement
through creative haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through enlightened
self-interest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of ``the important''
as composed primarily of the doings and undoings of entertainers, athletes,
politicians, and criminals.

He would not, I think, have been unduly dismayed by all that. Of course,
he would have been  {\bfseries dismayed}, but not unduly. Such things are implicit
in the freedom of the press, and if enough people want them, they'll have
them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered  {\bfseries why}  so many people wanted
such things, but that's not to the point just now.) Jefferson did, naturally,
see ``the press'' giving news and information, but, more than that,
he also saw in it the very  {\bfseries practice}  of informed discretion. In his
time, after all, {\itshape Common Sense} and {\itshape The Federalist Papers} were
simply parts of ``the press.'' And ``every man able to read''
would have been, for Jefferson, every man able to read, weigh, and consider
things like {\itshape Common Sense} and {\itshape The Federalist Papers}. He would
have recognized at once our editorial pages and our journals of enquiry
and opinion, but he would have found it ominous that hardly anyone reads
those things, and positively portentous that this omission arises not so
much from casual neglect as from a common and measurable  {\bfseries inability} 
to read such things with either comprehension or pleasure.

Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can make
out many words, but all is not secure. Wait. That's not quite clear. Some
things  {\bfseries are}  secure. The agencies and institutions of government are
secure. The functionaries whose propensity it is to command our liberty
and property, they are secure. And, as the one-eyed man is the more secure
in proportion to the number of citizens he can blind, our functionaries
are the more secure in proportion to those of us who are strangers to the
powers of informed discretion. It is possible, of course, to keep educated
people unfree in a state of civilization, but it's much easier to keep ignorant
people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is easiest of all if you
can convince the ignorant that they  {\bfseries  are}  educated, for you can thus
make them collaborators in your disposition of their liberty and property.
That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that it may be invisible
to those who perform it, of American public education.

Public education does its work superbly, almost perfectly. It works in fairly
strict accordance with its own implicit theory of ``education,''
an elaborate ideology of which only some small details are generally known
to the public. This is hardly surprising, for the rare citizen who actually
 {\bfseries wants}  to know something about educationistic theory, a dismal subject,
finds that it is habitually expressed in tangled, ungrammatical jargon,
penetrable, when it is at all, only to one who has nothing better to do.
I hope, little by little, to dissect and elucidate that theory, for it is
in fact even more frightening than it is dismal. For now, I can take only
a first but essential step and urge you to consider this principle: The
clouded language of educational theory is an evolved, protective adaptation
that hinders thought and understanding. As such, it is no more the result
of conscious intention than the markings of a moth. But it works. Thus,
those who give themselves to the presumed study and the presumptuous promulgation
of educational theory are usually both deceivers  {\bfseries and}  deceived. The
murky language where their minds habitually dwell at once unminds them and
gives them the power to unmind others.

We will, with appropriate examples, explore the evolution of that strange
trait, especially in that portion of the educational establishment where
it is most evident: that is, among the people to whom we have given the
training of teachers and the formulation of educational theory. In the cumbersome
and complicated contraption we call ``public education,'' the trainers
of teachers have special powers and privileges. Although in law they are
governed by civilian boards and legislatures, they are in fact but little
governed, for they have convinced the boards and legislatures that only
teacher-trainers can judge the work of teacher-trainers. That wasn't hard
to do, for boards and legislatures are made up largely of people who have,
in their time, already been blinded by the one-eyed man, having been given,
as helpless children, what we call ``education'' rather than practice
in informed discretion. The very language in which the teacher-trainers
explain their labors will quickly discourage close scrutiny in even a thoughtful
board member, perhaps  {\bfseries especially}  in a thoughtful board member, who
has after all, other and more important (he thinks) things to do.

It is not strictly true that the public schools are a state-supported monopoly.
There are other schools. But the teacher-trainers are certainly a state-supported
monopoly. There are no other teacher-trainers than the ones we have, and
they are all in the business of teaching something they call ``education.''
No one knows exactly what that is, and even among educationists there is
some mild contention as to whether there actually exists some body of knowledge
that can be called ``education'' as separate from other knowable
subjects. You may want to make up your own mind as to that, for in later
chapters you will see examples of what is actually done by those who teach
``education.'' But for now we must consider the usually unnoticed
effects of the monopoly they enjoy.

The laws of supply and demand work in the academic world just as they do
in the marketplace, which is to say, of course, that what is natural and
reasonable will not happen where government intervenes. Our schools can
be usefully likened to a nationalized industrial system in which the production
of goods is directed not by entrepreneurs looking to profit but by social
planners intending to change the world. Thus it is the business of the schools,
and the special task of the educationists who produce teachers, to generate
both supply  {\bfseries and}  demand, so that the nation will want exactly what
it is they intend to provide.

Within the academic marketplace, there are many enterprises other than educationism,
however. Historically, they have not seen themselves in competition with
one another, although I'm sure that the faculties of the medieval universities
were not reluctant to claim that  {\bfseries their}  disciplines were more noble
than the others. Individual professors, of course, must indeed have competed
for students, by whom they were paid, but the students, many of whom were
to become professors themselves, were free to devote themselves to whatever
discipline seemed good. But between one discipline and another there seems
to have been, rather than competition, sectarianism.

A similar sectarianism has been revivified by our current educational disorders.
If you ask a professor of geography why we seem to be turning into a nation
of ignorant rabble, he will not be able to refrain from pointing out that
we don't teach geography anymore and that high school graduates aren't even
sure of the name of the next state, never mind the climatic characteristics
of the Great Plains or the rivers that drain the Ohio Valley. Professors
of physics will allude to the all-too-inevitable consequences of ignorance
of the laws of motion and thermodynamics. You can easily devise for yourself
the comments of professors of mathematics, languages, history, literature,
and indeed of any who teach those things we think of as traditional academic
disciplines. Their views will be, of course, at least partly predictable
expressions of self-interest; however, they will also be correct, and, if
taken all together, will indeed tell us much about our present troubles.

The academic world is like any other group of related enterprises in which
everybody can provide something but nobody can provide everything. For the
building of houses, for instance, we need many different things, and they
are not easily interchangeable. When we need copper tubing, we need copper
tubing, and we can't make do with wallboard instead. If houses are built,
therefore, many people making many different things will be able to produce
what is both useful and profitable. And, while the makers of copper tubing
won't have to worry about competition from the makers of wallboard, they
will have to be mindful of other makers of copper tubing and also of the
makers of plastic tubing. That will be good for the whole enterprise.

Suppose, though, that the copper-tubing people should, through quirk or
cunning, secure for themselves some special legal privilege. First they
persuade the state, which already has the power to license the building
of houses, to prohibit the use of plastic tubing. That's good, but so long
as the state is willing to go that far, the copper-tubing makers seek and
achieve a regulation requiring some absolute minimum quantity of copper
tubing in every new house. Now you must suppose that the copper-tubing lobby
has grown so rich and powerful that the law now requires that fifty percent
of the mass of every new house must be made up of copper tubing.

Houses could still be built. Walls, floors, and ceilings could be made of
coils and bundles of copper tubing smeared over with plaster or stucco.
Copper tubing could be cleverly welded and twisted into everything from
doorknobs to windowsills and produced in large sizes for heating ducts and
chimneys. The houses would be dreadful, of course, and, should you ask why,
you will discover that craftsmen in the building trades are more direct
and outspoken than college professors. They'll just tell you straight out
that these are lousy houses because of all that damn copper tubing. If the
professor of mathematics were equally frank, he'd tell you that our schools
are full of supposed teachers of mathematics who have studied ``education''
when they should have studied mathematics.

This is, I admit, not an exact analogy. The manufacture of copper tubing
actually does have some relationship to the building of houses, while the
study of ``education'' has no relationship at all to the making
of educated people. The analogy would perhaps have been better had I chosen,
instead of the manufacturers of copper tubing, the manufacturers of gelatin
desserts. To grasp the true nature of the place of educationism in the academic
world, you have to imagine that houses are to be made mostly of Jell-O --
each flavor equally represented -- and that the builders must eat a bowl
an hour.

(Well, that analogy fails, too. Jell-O is at least a colorful and entertaining
treat with no known harmful side effects. The same cannot be said of the
study of ``education.'')

Our public system of education, from Head Start to the graduate schools
of the state universities, might also be called a government system. Those
who teach in its primary and secondary schools are required by law to serve
time, often as much as one half of their undergraduate program, in the classes
of the teacher-trainers. Should they seek graduate degrees, which will bring
them automatic raises, they will still have to spend about one half their
time taking yet again courses devoted to things like interpersonal relations
and the appreciation of alternative remediation enhancements. The educationistic
monopoly is strong enough that in at least one state (there are probably
others, but I'm afraid to find out), a high school mathematics teacher who
is arrogant enough to take a master's degree in mathematics will discover
that he is no longer certified to teach that subject. If he wants to keep
his job, he must take a degree in ``mathematics education,'' which
will, of course, permit him to spend  {\bfseries some}  of his time studying his
subject. Even where there is no such visibly monopolistic requirement, the
laws and regulations of the public schools, which have been devised by educationists
in the teachers' colleges, provide an effective equivalent.

The intellectual climate of the public schools, which must inevitably become
the intellectual climate of the nation, does not seem to be conducive to
the spread of what Jefferson called informed discretion. The intellectual
climate of the nation today  {\bfseries  came}  from the public schools, where almost
every one of us was schooled in the work of the mind. We are a people who
imagine that we are weighing important issues when we exchange generalizations
and well-known opinions. We decide how to vote or what to buy according
to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which is easily engendered in
us by the manipulation of language, which we have neither the will nor the
ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach conclusions without having
the faintest idea of the difference between inferences and statements of
fact, often without any suspicions that there are such things and that they
 {\bfseries are}  different. We are easily persuaded and repersuaded by what seems
authoritative, without any notion of those attributes and abilities that
characterize authority. We do not notice elementary fallacies in logic;
it doesn't even occur to us to look for them; few of us are even aware that
such things exist. We make no regular distinctions between those kinds of
things that can be known and objectively verified and those that can only
be believed or not. Nor are we likely to examine, when we believe or not,
the induced predispositions that may make us do the one or the other. We
are easy prey.

That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and everywhere
is not to the point. They just won't do for a free society. Jefferson and
his friends made a revolution against ignorance and unreason, which would
preclude freedom in any form of government whatsoever. If we cannot make
ourselves a knowledgeable and thoughtful people -- those are the requisites
of informed discretion -- then we cannot be free. But our revolutionists
did at least provide us with that form of government which, unlike others,
does grant the possibility of freedom, provided, of course, the public has
the habit of informed discretion. That possibility is all we have just now.

Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of ill-informed and
casually thoughtless captives. Even when we are well-informed and thoughtful,
however, we cannot be free where the character of the nation and its institutions
must reflect the ignorance and unreason of the popular will. But if we  {\bfseries are
} well-informed and thoughtful, we can take comfort in the fact that our
form of government is carefully designed to preclude that condition described
in Proposition 7. As long as we remain a constitutional republic, we cannot
ever be both educated and unfree. It just won't work, and that may be the
single greatest insight of the makers of our revolution.

Therefore, whatever it is they do in the teachers' colleges of America has
had and will always have tremendous consequences. By comparison with the
attitudes and intellectual habits and ideological predispositions inculcated
in American teachers, the acts of Congress are trivial. Indeed, the latter
proceed from the former. If, as a result of the labors of our educationists,
we were obviously clear-sighted and thoughtful and thus able to enjoy the
freedom promised in our constitutional system, then we would know something
about those educationists. If, on the other hand, we are blind and witless,
then we would know -- if there are any of us who  {\bfseries can}  know -- something
else about them. To know anything at all about those educationists, however,
we must look at what they do, at what they say they do, and even at  {\bfseries how} 
they say what they do.





\chapter{The End of the String}




As a schoolboy, I always presumed that my teachers were experts in the subjects
that they taught. My physics teacher must, of course, be a physicist, and
my history teacher a historian. I knew that my music teacher was a musician,
for I had actually heard him play, and, during a dismal year in military
school, I could see with my own eyes that the Professor of Military Science
and Tactics was a bird colonel.

Even when I became a schoolteacher myself, quite by accident, I imagined
that I had been chosen for the work because of my knowledge of the subject
I was to teach. It turned out not to be exactly so, for I was soon asked
to teach something else, of which my knowledge was scanty. No matter, I
was told. I could bone up over the summer. Eventually, I was asked to teach
something about which I knew nothing, nothing at all. Still no matter. I
seemed to be a fairly effective teacher and at least smart enough to stay
a lesson or two ahead of the students. That's just what I did. No one saw
anything wrong with that, and the students never caught me. It was nevertheless
depressing, for it led me to suspect that my physics teacher perhaps hadn't
been a physicist after all.

What then,  {\bfseries exactly}, was he? What was it that made a teacher a teacher,
if it wasn't, as it obviously wasn't, an expert knowledge of some subject
matter? How could it be that I was able to teach, to the complete satisfaction
of my colleagues and supervisors, and with no  {\bfseries visible}  detriment to
my students, a subject of which I knew practically nothing at first, and
of which, after a year of teaching it, I knew just about what anyone could
know of it after one year of study? Was there something  {\bfseries wrong}  with
that? Was there something wrong with me that I suspected that there  {\bfseries was} 
something wrong with that?

It took me many years to find answers to those questions, and, when I did,
it wasn't because I was looking for them. It was because I finally settled
in what was called a State Teachers College. (Like Pikes Peak, it had no
apostrophe.) As it happens, it is no longer a State Teachers College. The
legislature later enacted a long and complicated law which had, as far as
I can tell, the sole effect of removing from that title the word ``Teachers.''
The college has not changed much, except that where it was once unashamedly
a teachers' college, it is now ashamedly a teachers' college. There I was,
and I couldn't help looking around.

At the end of my first semester, I walked into a classroom where I was to
give a final examination. (We don't do much of that anymore, since it may
just be a violation of someone's rights.) On the blackboard was the final
examination that had just been given to some other class. Very neatly written
it was, too. The last question -- I'll never forget it was worth fifty-two
percent of the grade: ``Draw all the letters of the alphabet, both upper
and lower case.'' Draw.

There is some truth in the ``ivory tower'' notion of academic life.
I had 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  {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 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 {\itshape 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
 {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries us}, not them, this land as it is today is the
exact and inevitable result of the nature and abilities of the schoolchildren
that  {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries meaning}  of the use of language. That study
is, of course, the business of {\itshape 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 {\itshape The Underground Grammarian:}

\begin{quote}

Editorial Policies

{\itshape 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. {\itshape 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 thought, and clear thought is the most important
benefit of education. We are neither peddlers nor politicians that we should
prosper by that use of language which carries the least meaning. We cannot
honorably accept the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who
employ us as we darken counsel by words without understanding. 

\end{quote}


My first motives were just about what you would expect from an English
teacher: a supposed reverence for that ``Mother Tongue,'' the noble
and ancient language of Shakespeare and Milton and all the others; the notion
that the judicious choice of a semicolon was a nice display of what Veblen
called ``the instinct of workmanship,'' a good thing; and especially
that sense of smug satisfaction that comes from knowing exactly why to use
the word ``nice'' when making a nice display. There was also the
natural, and perfectly justifiable, contempt that any front-line teacher
feels for administrators. So many of them seem to be born aluminum-siding
salesmen who took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Nor is that contempt
mitigated by the fact that many of them (but by no means all) were once
front-line teachers themselves. On the contrary, that reveals what they
really think of teaching: a humble and tedious calling useful only as a
necessary step to a better life and better pay. There is furthermore, in
almost every teacher, a small, dark current of fascism, and the work of
administration not only permits but actually encourages it.

I did say, to be sure, that ``clear language engenders clear thought,
and clear thought is the most important benefit of education,'' but
that was little more than a recitation. That's what we're expected to say
in this business, and we keep saying it and nodding, saying it and nodding.
And, like most of the things that people are expected to say, it's true
in a way, and false in a way, and not well thought out. There is an important
principle to be drawn here: Many of our supposed ``ideas'' are in
fact recitations, recitations not of what we think or understand but of
what we simply believe that we believe. Thinking is done in language, and
understanding, a result of thinking, is expressed in language, but, when
we simply adopt and recite what has been expressed, we have committed neither
thinking nor understanding. When the first issue of {\itshape The Underground Grammarian}
appeared, I had neither thought about nor understood that lofty proposition
about clear language and. clear thought. But the words were there on the
page, and they demanded attention.

All that talk about the ability to write letters of application for jobs
is bunk; here is the real value of teaching everybody,  {\bfseries everybody},
to write clear, coherent, and more or less conventional prose: The words
we write demand far more attention than those we speak. The habit of writing
exposes us to that demand, and skill in writing makes us able to pay logical
and thoughtful attention. Having done that, we can come to understand what
before we could only recite. We may find it bunk or wisdom, but, while we
had better reject the bunk, we can accept the wisdom as truly our own rather
than some random suggestion of popular belief. If we have neither the habit
nor the skill of writing, however, we have to guess which is the bunk and
which the wisdom, and we will almost invariably guess according to something
we feel, not according to something to which we have given thoughtful attention.

I had not, in fact, given thoughtful attention to ``clear thought''
and ``clear language'' and the ways in which they might relate to
each other, but I had at least taken hold of one end of what turned out
to be a long and tangled string. An examination, if only of comma faults
and dangling participles, had begun. Examination has a life of its own.
You simply cannot think about commas and the place of modifiers without
finding that you are thinking about thinking. It is impossible to examine
language at any level without examining the work of a mind. I knew that
Wittgenstein had said that all philosophy was the examination of language,
but I assumed, because I wasn't paying thoughtful attention, that he was
referring to the obvious fact that philosophy was about ideas, and that
ideas could be read only in language. I don't think that anymore. I'm convinced
that he was talking about language  {\bfseries as}  language, with its commas and
modifiers, and especially about writing, a special case of language, permanently
accessible.

Consider, for example, the following sentence, which was quoted without
comment in a much later issue:

\begin{quote}
Teratology

During the 1980-81 school year, the project will provide teachers and
administrators with education and support designed to optimize the behaviors
and conditions in the school which support student learning to the extent
that at least two thirds of the teachers receiving training and support
in Expectations will report, on a specifically designed survey, changes
in at least two school related operational characteristics that have been
identified as critical elements of the network of expectations that support
learning. 
\end{quote}

What we learn from studying that sentence has very little to do with
the digest of rules in the back of the composition handbook. It has to do
with the nature of a mind and the way it does its work. That is revealing
enough, but it's only the beginning. The mind we see at work in that sentence
is not the mind of an isolated eccentric. That writer is a member, and probably
in all too good standing, of a community of minds and the inheritor of a
massive tradition. It represents what is obviously acceptable to a society
of like-minded peers and superiors and subordinates. It speaks, one might
say, for  {\bfseries the} mind of a vast bureaucracy, and, furthermore, since
no mind works that way naturally, it must have  {\bfseries learned}  that trick.

When we study that sentence, therefore, we study the intellectual climate
of the society in which such work of the mind is not only acceptable but
desirable, and we study the traditions and practices that must have formed
both the society and the individual mind. That example is in no way extraordinary
or even unusual; it is, in fact, typical. (You will know that, of course,
if you have any acquaintance with the business of the schools, and, if you
haven't, you'll soon see for yourself.) So we can ask: What is the intellectual
climate of that society? What traditions and practices have formed that
climate? Having answers to those questions, we can ask: Why is a society
so endowed and so constituted given the task of teaching minds to work well,
and how likely is it to succeed in that work?

In speaking of that ``society'' in such general terms, I have to
advise civilians that I do not mean ``the teachers,'' or at least
not simply the teachers. Most people think that teachers  {\bfseries are}  the
agents of public education and that all those guidance counselors and curriculum
facilitators and others are merely support services. This is not so. Of
all the agents of our system of public education, the teachers are by far
the least influential, and what they actually accomplish or don't accomplish
in their classrooms has very little to do with the worth of ``education''
in the large sense. This is not to say that teachers are uninfluenced by
the intellectual climate of the system as a whole, far from it, but only
that they are the lowliest foot-sloggers in a vast army. Some of them will
rise from the ranks and will be no longer teachers. They will become the
people whose minds work like the mind of that writer just cited. Indeed,
if their minds work that way, they are all the more likely to rise. But
as long as they remain teachers they are, and they're so treated as, mere
employees, who may or may not be seeking admittance to the seats of power.

Incipient schoolteachers -- I have known hundreds of them -- are generally
decent young people of average intelligence. Some are stupid, of course,
and some rarer few are brilliant. Almost all of them seem a bit more than
ordinarily ethical, and I can't believe that any one of them ever decided
to be a teacher for the sake of doing harm. Furthermore, the task of teaching
a mind to work well is not a particularly difficult one. Teachers do not
have to be brilliant, although they probably shouldn't be stupid. In short,
almost all of those who seek to be teachers are quite capable of being good
teachers, but something happens to them on the way to the classroom. They
fall into bad company. Here is an example of what they must face:



\begin{quote}

Pontiffs and Peasants

Unlike socialism, the realm of educationism was never meant to be a classless
society. Just now it's an emasculated feudalism whose few surviving 
 {\bfseries pugnantes} 
have decided to settle down with the unholy but happy Saracens, leaving
the miserable  {\bfseries laborantes}  to fend for themselves under the silly governance
of the puffed-up  {\bfseries orantes}. The go-getter, self-promoting grant-grabbers
have all wangled themselves cushy consultancies and juicy jobs in government.
The wretched tillers of the soil are hoeing hard rows in the public schools
and risking life and limb in the cause of minimum competence. The jargon-besotted
clergy are bestowing upon each other rich benefices of experiential continua
and peddling cheap remediational indulgences, fighting to keep their teacher-training
academies growing in an age of closing schools and dwindling faith in bold
innovative thrusts in non-cognitive curriculum design facilitation. Fat
flocks, fat shepherds. Things do look bad, but let us not despair. The Black
Death has been reported in Arizona, and it may yet spread. 

\end{quote}

It's not always easy to tell the pontiffs from the peasants. The sumptuary
laws no longer apply. In the time of love-beads, both classes wear love-beads;
in the time of Levi's, Levi's. Our best clue --  {\bfseries always}  the best clue
when we want to assess the work of the mind -- is the language used by each
class,  {\bfseries Lumpensprache}  by the peasants and  {\bfseries Pfaffesprache}, a
classier lingo indeed, by the pontiffs.

Here's a typical passage of the latter as it appeared, unfortunately without
attribution, in an otherwise splendid column by Howard Hurwitz, a syndicated
writer on education:

\begin{quote}
``These instructional approaches are perhaps best conceived on a systems
model, where instructional variables (input factors) are mediated by factors
of students' existing cognitive structure (organizational properties of
the learner's immediately relevant concepts in the particular subject field);
and by personal predispositions and tolerance toward the requirements of
inference, abstraction, and impulse control, all prerequisite to achievement
in the discovery or the hypothetical learning mode.'' 
\end{quote}






So. It may mean that what a student learns depends on what he already
knows and on whether or not he gives a damn. For a pontiff of educationism,
that's already a novel and arresting idea, but if he said it in plain English
he wouldn't be allowed to teach any courses in it. Indeed, if he 
 {\bfseries could} 
say it in plain English he would probably have enough sense not to say it,
thus disclosing to the world that years of study have brought him at last
to a firm grasp on the obvious.

Even when intoning the obvious, however, a pontiff keeps his head down.
Did you notice that ``perhaps''? He doesn't actually commit himself
to the proposition that approaches are best conceived as a model where variables
are mediated by factors; he is willing only to opine that approaches are
``perhaps'' best conceived as a model where variables are mediated
by factors. If that were humility rather than self-defense, it would suit
him well, for he seems to think that ``conceived'' means ``understood''
and that ``mediated'' means ``mitigated'' and that ``factors''
and ``variables'' can mean anything at all. He's not so good with
semicolons either.

That point is important. Although inflated with fake erudition, 
 {\bfseries Pfaffesprache} 
always reveals, inadvertently, its roots in the vulgar, but usually honest,
 {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 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,
the  {\bfseries  meaning} 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  {\bfseries 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 problem   {\bfseries  visible}  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   {\bfseries 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.




\chapter{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 they are, of course, as Hegel might
have warned Wundt had he had the chance, clearly an expression of the {\itshape Zeitgeist
}of the late nineteenth century. They are not evil any more than science
itself is evil, but their ``scientific'' intentions take on a strange
flavor when we consider that {\itshape Zeitgeist.} That was the age in which
Zola embarked on a mighty series of novels, an enterprise that he fancied
a genuinely scientific experiment. That's the point of his now-forgotten
book on the novel as a kind of science, {\itshape Le Roman Experimental:} True,
we cannot raise whole generations in miniature worlds in the laboratory
and chart their deeds and destinies, but we can, if we are sufficiently
knowledgeable and disciplined, do pretty much the same thing in a book.
Zola, thus, was never without his notebook, in which he jotted, probably
to the consternation of all who knew him, his ``observations'' of
(presumably) unguarded human behavior.



That was also the age of Marx and Freud, and the growing suspicion, the
worm that late Victorian intellectuals were bound and determined to eat
even if it   {\bfseries didn't}  kill them, that Darwin had shown us only
one of the mighty determinisms that governed human behavior and destiny.
Who can blame Wundt, therefore, if he imagined that one who knew enough
could measure, predict, and even elicit all those things that we call feelings,
sentiments, emotions, attitudes, and ideas, to say nothing of mere deeds.
But while we are considerately not blaming him, let us call on his own ``science''
in a rough and ready way, without precise measurements, alas, and be a little
suspicious of his motives.



People who make their livings in ``soft'' sciences and the arts
are not entirely at ease in the company of chemists and physicists and other
``hard'' scientists. In such company, the psychologists and sociologists
and the professors of English feel like touch-football enthusiasts who have
wandered by mistake into the locker room of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Only
true philosophers, not professors of philosophy, are entirely immune to
that nasty suspicion that rises in the heart of the ``humanist''
when he hears about recombinant DNA or quarks. (Well, that's not quite true.
The untempered clod is also immune, a fact whose importance will appear
later.) This is a modern condition, and quite unlike that of older times,
in which the fledgling ``hard'' scientists were held in contempt
by those who did their work entirely in the mind without the help of apparatus,
proper only to artisans. It seems only fair; it's the alchemist's revenge.



Wundt, with his laboratory and machines, was certainly trying to better
himself and win for his discipline a new kind of legitimacy. It was just
for that reason that he attracted so many students, many of them Americans
who came home to found schools of educational psychology and psychological
testing and to impress upon our whole system of schooling the indelible
mark of clinical practice. One of them was a certain James Cattell, who,
while playing with some of Wundt's apparatus, made a remarkable and portentous
discovery. Here, in brief, is the story, as told by Lance J. Klass in {\itshape The
Leipzig Connection} (The Delphian Press, 1978), a useful little book
on the influence of Wundt in the history of American educationism:


\begin{quote}

  
One series of experiments Cattell performed while at Leipzig examined
  the manner in which a person sees the words he is reading. By testing adults
  who knew how to read, Cattell ``discovered'' that individuals can
  recognize words without having to sound out the letters. From this, he
  reasoned that words are not read by compounding the letters, but are perceived
  as ``total word pictures.'' He determined that little is gained
  by teaching the child his sounds and letters as the first step to being
  able to read. Since individuals could recognize words very rapidly, the
  way to teach children how to read was to show them words, and tell them
  what the words were. The result was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic
  method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method
  in use throughout America.

\end{quote}



The consequences of Cattell's ``discovery'' have surely been
enormous, for they include not only the stupefaction of almost the whole
of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative
industry devoted first to assuring that children won't be able to read and
then to selling an endless succession of ``remedies'' for that inability;
but Wundt in fact brought us much worse. He brought us the very atmosphere
in which such silliness can thrive. Out of the internal exigencies of his
``science,'' he was led to consider ``education'' a human
phenomenon similar to other human psychic conditions, a conditioned response
to stimuli. ``Teaching'' had to be seen as the application of stimuli
that will elicit whatever response we choose to call ``learning.''
Contrariwise, anyone who has learned something, to read or cipher, for instance,
must obviously have done so as a result of being exposed not simply to the
  {\bfseries substance}  of his learning, the reading or ciphering, but to
some stimulus that probably, but by no means certainly, was visited upon
him somewhere in the vicinity of reading and ciphering.



The widespread acceptance of the teaching of reading as inspired by Cattell
was possible only where there was already a predisposition to concentrate
not on the substance of what can be learned but on some attribute that can
be detected in the supposed learner. Exactly that predisposition was provided
by Wundt's view of teaching and learning as psychological stimuli and responses,
an arrangement presumed to have its own validity without reference to   {\bfseries what}  was taught and learned. This view was gladly received in the United
States, where, as we will see, a growing educationistic establishment made
up mostly of people with little or no academic expertise was looking for
attractive alternatives to the constricting demands of ``subjects.''



Thus it is that our educationists prefer not to treat the multiplication
table as something that just has to be learned. They rather think of multiplying
as a desirable ``student outcome,'' a ``behavioral modification''
of one who does not know how to multiply. This would be only a harmless
playing with words if it weren't for the fact that not all students learn
to multiply with equal ease. If we simply think of the multiplication table
as a set of numbers that must be learned by brute force, we can demand more
force of those who fail to learn. If we think of the ability to multiply
as a ``behavioral objective,'' an appropriate response to stimuli,
then the student who doesn't learn to multiply must drive us to seek   {\bfseries other
} stimuli and perhaps, in stubborn cases, to decide that learning the
multiplication table has only limited value for the student outcome of multiplication.
From such a view, other follies may  {\bfseries }  flow.



The folly at hand, the word-recognition teaching of reading, is the result
of just such tormented thinking. It   {\bfseries is}  perfectly true that people
who can read do not stop to sound out letters. That, therefore, is an attribute
of readers. So, to the mortally wundted, the path to reading requires the
  {\bfseries not}  sounding out of letters as a student outcome, and student behavior
must be modified accordingly. Thus, the rare and pesky student who has learned
the sounds of some letters must be discouraged, which stimulus will elicit
a response characteristic of those who do in fact know how to read. Simple,
no?



Leaving aside the incidental, if momentous, destruction of a whole nation's
ability to read, we have still two far more important and ominous legacies
from Wundt. We can afford to leave the reading problem aside because it
is only a practice, a practice that can change, and, in fact, does show
signs of changing. But the major principles that generated and maintained
that practice show no signs of changing, and those principles generate and
maintain numerous other unnatural practices and will yet bring us more.
They can be put thus:


\begin{quote}
1. Mental and emotional conditions and events are natural phenomena
  subject to natural law and fully subsumable in a rigidly scientific system.

2. Teaching and learning are mental and emotional conditions and events.
\end{quote}


In another context, of course, there would be no need to make of the
second a ``principle'' equal in weight to the first, but here it
seems useful. These principles are ominous legacies not because they are
false. For all I know, and for all   {\bfseries anyone}  knows, they may be true.
But that wouldn't make them ominous either, although it certainly would
lead me to drop this project, and all others, here and now. What makes them
ominous is that they are utterly, for humanity in its present state at least,
beyond our powers to test. They require what we seem unable to achieve,
the total understanding of human beings   {\bfseries by}  human beings. We lack
that. And, for all the promises of our Freuds, Marxes, and Wundts, we seem
no closer to it then ever before. We may assume what suits us, of course,
about the nature of humanity, and when we act on our assumptions, consequences
will flow accordingly. American educationists have assumed the truth of
Wundt's principles, in spite of the fact that few of them have ever heard
of Wundt, and the consequences are what we see.



It is possible to imagine --- in fact, you don't have to imagine, for
Marx makes a good example --- some meticulously logical and disciplined
thinker who, having made assumptions something like Wundt's, could derive
from them an iron system, complete and internally consistent. Such might
have been the nature of American education today had Wundtian psychology
been adopted by expert and learned thinkers. But it was in fact adopted
by the educationists, who already saw themselves as the appointed democratic
supplanters of learned and expert thinkers, remnants of an elitist authoritarianism.
When the principles of Wundt are taken up by people actually hostile to
academic learning and traditional intellectualism, strange consequences
will flow. Thus it is that educationistic thought and language have a disconcerting
hermaphroditic quality, for the educationist is committed on the one hand
to the proposition that human qualities are quantifiable and predictable
(through the work of the intellect, presumably, for how else can we quantify
and predict?), and on the other hand to the proposition that the practice
of the intellect is of less significance and ``value'' than the
possession of certain human qualities.



Here is an excerpt from {\itshape The Underground Grammarian} that shows
how the automatic if unknowing adherence to Wundt's principles, in combination
with the disorder of the intellect enforced by anti-intellectualism, causes
things to happen in the schools and teacher academies:


The Most Unkindest Cutting Edge of All

In March of 1979, we printed some gabble by a then-unidentified doctoral
candidate at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. It was about ``a
short extrapolation to the prediction of transpersonal innovations from
self-actualization traits.'' Ten months later, the writer was identified
as Robert D. Waterman. The man who fingered him was a colleague, James Dyke,
who wanted not the handsome reward we had offered, but rather to rebuke
us for our treatment of Waterman.



Having pointed out, as though it made a difference, that Waterman's degree
was not in guidance but in Educational Management/Development, Dyke said
further:


\begin{quote}

  
I hold little faith in your critical abilities with respect to Bob Waterman
  until such time that you can demonstrate that you can handle the cutting
  edge of the exploration of ideas without bleeding.

\end{quote}



And he even sent along an actual   {\bfseries piece}  of the cutting edge,
Waterman's complete abstract and a thin slice from Chapter II of the dissertation,
``Value and Philosophical Characteristics of Transpersonal Teachers.''



We admit that we have no ``critical abilities with respect to Bob
Waterman,'' but Dyke may have meant something other than what he wrote.
The critical abilities that we {\itshape do} seek are those that enable us to
write   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries be}  the cutting edge.
So let's take up his challenge and try to handle the edge itself. We'll
start with the very   {\bfseries edge}  of the edge, Waterman's first paragraph.
Mind your fingers:


\begin{quote}

  
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.

\end{quote}



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


\begin{itemize}

\item
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   {\bfseries that}  later.)

\item
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.

\item
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?

\item
Are those ``public school oriented teachers'' actually teachers
in public schools, or could they be teachers   {\bfseries 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?

\end{itemize}

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   {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 
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 do  {\bfseries  serious}  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
will  {\bfseries  remain}  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


\begin{quote}

  
the personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching are:
  (1) 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.

\end{quote}



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   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries say}  about those girls. Nevertheless, the   {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries 
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   {\bfseries called}  ``transpersonal,''
but the term distinguishes them only from the nontranspersonal teachers,
who, presumably, do  {\bfseries  not}  have those beliefs. And a surly pack
of misanthropes and defeatists  {\bfseries  they}  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   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries know}  that,
and how can we decide which are the   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries 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 answered in publicly verifiable measurements. But it is
not an answer that a prudent educationist would want, and it would probably
not win you a doctorate in any graduate school of education in America.
Your committee will throw you out for several reasons: Since the teaching
of   {\bfseries anything}  is the design and application of appropriate stimuli,
the teacher's   {\bfseries knowledge}  of mathematics, although there ought
to be some, is   {\bfseries not}  what makes him a teacher. We do not teach
mathematics just so that students can   {\bfseries do}  mathematics, but
for a higher purpose, for the inculcation, perhaps, of an appreciation of
Logic and Rationality; so you would be better to seek findings about Logic/Rationality
Appreciation, which is exactly as easy to measure as Existentiality. Your
research is, in any case, likely to give a false impression, since many
private school teachers, to the detriment of their professionalism, are
not legitimately certified and have probably taken more courses in mathematics
than in education, which makes their possibly superior knowledge of mathematics
a matter of no consequence.



In other words: Measurable things are not important; unmeasurable things
are paramount. Let us therefore measure only the unmeasurable. Of course,
Wundt never dreamed of measuring the unmeasurable. He claimed rather that
the psychological conditions and events of humanity were not unmeasurable
at all, and that the task of psychological science was to discover   {\bfseries how}  to measure them. He did not suggest that we go around asking people
how they felt, however, for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anyone
with any rudimentary understanding of science. But he did hold, for equally
obvious reasons, that the study of human psychology required the direct
observation of human beings. That tenet of Wundtianism, hardly startling,
has been happily accepted by educationists, for if there is one thing they
have always at hand it is a large collection of captive human beings.



You have surely heard of ``child-centered'' education, that process
that will educate the ``whole child.'' It sounds so decent. What
could be better than centering on the child, the whole child, no less? But
what, exactly, do half-baked neo-Wundtians mean when they speak of ``child-centered''
education? Here is an article that provides some evidence toward an answer
to that question:




\begin{quote}
The Nonredundant Interactive Relationship of Perceived
Teacher Directiveness and Student Personological
Variables to Grades and Satisfaction
\end{quote}


Recent research has shown that a number of student variables --- authoritarianism,
dogmatism, intelligence, conceptual level, convergent-divergent ability,
locus of control, anxiety, compulsivity, need for achievement, achievement
orientation, independence-dependence, and extraversion-introversion ---
may moderate the relationship between teacher directiveness and grades and
satisfaction. There is a fair degree of moderate intercorrelation among
these student variables and such intercorrelation suggests that some of
the found interactive relationships may be overlapping or redundant. The
purpose of the present research is to develop multivariate mathematical
models of the interactive relationships using stepwise regression strategies.
Such models should facilitate a more parsimonious interpretation of the
interactive relationships which are\ldots 



We were going to show you   {\bfseries all}  of that mess and even give
you the name and address of the chappie who made it, but we can't. Before
our typesetter was able to finish, a member of our staff borrowed the original
(and only) copy and took it to Texas. There, while fumbling for his entry
permit at the Immigration Control Office, he lost the evidence. Maybe it's
just as well. There's no telling what those Rangers might have done had
they caught him with a smoking dissertation abstract. They don't cotton
much to that kind of stuff down there.



We   {\bfseries can}  tell you, at least, that the original came from
Calgary, Alberta, and we have to hope, if justice is ever to be done, that
the Mounties don't want any of this stuff in their country either. They
shouldn't have much trouble getting their man ---   {\bfseries and}  his
sidekick --- in this case. The author and his dissertation adviser were
so proud of themselves that they had their photographs printed right on
the page with the evidence. Perfectly decent and respectable young fellows
they seemed, too. Who would have thought it?



Since personology must be too subtle a science for the likes of us, we
cannot explain how ``personological'' variables might be different
from differences in persons. We would guess, though, that ``student''
variables are young variables studying to become teacher variables. And
we're a little disappointed by that list of student variables, a measly
twelve items. In the better teacher academies, you'd never get a doctorate
for such a skimpy, or ``parsimonious,'' elaboration of the obvious
commingled with the incomprehensible.



The most instructive thing about the passage is that its pretentiousness
is eloquently, although inadvertently, undone by its timidity. Notice that
all those nifty variables  {\bfseries  may}  ``moderate the relationship.''
Educationists won't take chances, even on the obvious and simple. After
all, how can we be sure, without multivariate mathematical models of the
interactive relationships, that different people feel different about different
things?



Of course, should this research achieve its goal, we might have to change
our opinions. A ``parsimonious interpretation'' of a ``fair''
degree of ``moderate'' intercorrelation is not to be sneezed at.
Before such an awesome discovery, we'd just have to back off, treading cautiously
in our best stepwise regression strategies.






Let's try to imagine some possible facts and events that might incite
such an undertaking, that is, the development of multivariate mathematical
models of interactive relationships. First, be careful to remember something
that might easily blow away in the storm of jargon --- all of this has
something to do with children in school. So we can imagine: There are some
children in school. They are, in some ways, different from each other, that
is, they have (could that be the right word?) different student variables.
They get grades in school, probably some good, some bad, some indifferent.
They are, or are not, as the case may be, ``satisfied,'' either
by school, or by their grades, or by both, in various degrees. They ``perceive,''
or not, maybe, something called ``teacher-directiveness.'' How can
these things be seen as functions of one another?



Before we can begin this research, we have to be clear about some things
that might confuse mere laymen. Notice first that whether a teacher actually
  {\bfseries is}  ``directive'' or not is not at issue; all that matters
is whether a student ``perceives'' a teacher as ``directive.''
This is child-centered research. Although grades do go into the hopper,
it's not because we are interested in what a student has learned or how
that can be measured, but because we want to know about the student's ``satisfaction,''
which depends only in part on his grade, which must be factored in with
his own perception of directiveness and his own student variables. This
is still child-centered research.



Bearing in mind those warnings, we can now proceed with our research.
If we are successful, we can expect to be able to answer questions like
this:


\begin{quote}

  
Who will be more satisfied with a B plus, a moderately intelligent student
  with better than average convergent-divergent ability but little if any
  locus of control, or a very bright, dogmatic student who shows normal achievement
  orientation but no compulsivity to speak of and does not, unlike the first
  student, perceive the teacher as directive ?

\end{quote}



You can devise other such examples for yourself. The possibilities are
probably infinite. None of them, however, will have any objective meaning,
which would require a precise numerical evaluation of hosts of human traits,
beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and emotions. In fact, that kind of study
must end exactly where it begins, in a vague generalization. You and I,
if asked and forced to answer, could also have said that there   {\bfseries may}  be a   {\bfseries fair}  degree of   {\bfseries moderate}  intercorrelation
between a person's characteristic traits and the way he feels about things.
This is the kind of revelation that educationistic research provides.



It does that useless work, obviously more for profit than for fun, since
it is impossible that even the dullest educationist can find the ecstasy
of discovery in such an enterprise, precisely because it   {\bfseries is}  child-centered.
Here in the shadow of Wundt, education and the presumable content of an
education are not the objects of the educationist's concern. It is the children,
the students, who are to be studied, for the education is something that
is being done to them with certain modifications in mind. While the originally
intended modification may be nothing more than changing children who can't
add into children who can, the process of modification itself is obviously
more likely to produce a ``scholarship'' of the kind just cited
than a mere counting of those who can add and those who can't. That scholarship,
you surely noticed, is   {\bfseries not}  about what children may have learned
and how, but about how they feel; and it isn't even about how they feel
about what they may have learned, but about how they feel about their   {\bfseries grades}  and their   {\bfseries teacher{\itshape .} } If we could hope to learn anything
from such research, it would be not about education but about children.
But, following Wundt, that is exactly what we need to know, for ``education''
is the psychologically appropriate manipulation of learners. If that is
so, the more we know about the manipulee the better.



That view of ``education'' is not entirely without merit. Some
things can be taught to some people just that way, although the system works
far more dependably with horses and dogs. But human beings are immensely
different from one another even while they are very much alike, and even
the most avidly child-centered educationists have not yet suggested an educational
system in which every child, after a stupefying battery of psychological
tests, is assigned a perfectly matched teacher, who has also had all those
tests. Therefore, the teaching of anything has to be a compromise, a generalized
set of stimuli aimed at producing the desired responses in   {\bfseries most}  of
the children. In some cases, therefore, it is bound to fail.



Several things can happen when education fails, none of them good. No.
I will be more precise. None of them can be good as long as we think of
education as the design of appropriate stimuli to produce certain behavior
in an individual human being. If we do think that, then there are three
things we can think of doing when some students fail to learn, since there
are three factors in our equation --- the stimulus, the student, the response.



We can change the stimulus. This is a big job, for it requires changing
an already institutionalized compromise designed to elicit the right response
from as many children as possible, a massive system. Nevertheless, it has
been done. Every simplified revision of some already simplified text is
just such a change, and so is the widespread use of films and even television
programs in place of books. When such a change is made, of course, it is
made in the supposed interests of those who have failed to respond appropriately.
That accounts for the fact that methods of instruction are designed to accommodate
not the most ordinary children, but those who learn most slowly.



We can also change the expected response. If some children do not seem
to learn history, we can decide to teach them civic pride and responsibility
instead. This is especially attractive if we have already decided that civic
pride and responsibility might well be the proper student outcomes of the
study of history anyway. This is a common device, of which I will have more
to say in the next chapter.



We can even   {\bfseries try}  to change the student. This is hardest of all,
but educationists never give up. On this matter, too, there is much to say
later, but for now we must look at what happens in the Wundtian system before
or unless such a change can be made. What follows, along with some notably
ghastly language, is a display of one of the educationist's most cherished
devices, the psychological manipulator's last resort:



Nobody Here But Us Professionals



The works of Weischadle, associate professor of education at Montclair
State College in New Jersey, can be studied at length in the New Jersey
section of {\itshape The New York Times} for July 16, 1978. His piece   {\bfseries is
} called, naturally, ``Educating the Parents.''



Mass illiteracy he easily dismisses as a matter of ``problem youngsters,''
but those uppity parents who are beginning to complain about illiteracy
--- they need to be taught a lesson. They can vote! If we don't straighten
those malcontents out right away, they might end up listening to demagogues
and voting against some of our favorite monies. Worse yet, and it's with
this fear that Weischadle begins his finger-wagging, some of them might
  {\bfseries win}  those malpractice suits that they're discussing with their lawyers.



Weischadle protests that even if illiteracy   {\bfseries were}  the fault
of the schools, that wouldn't mean that the schools were to blame. Here's
the delicate way he puts it:


\begin{quote}

  
Have the critics been fair to the schools? To the extent that schools
  are responsible for a youngster's educational growth, the critics have
  dealt with the right party. However, it does not necessarily mean that
  professionals in the schools are inept. It does mean that educational leadership
  has failed to articulate the problem effectively and carry out the necessary
  programs.

\end{quote}



It's hard to know exactly what Weischadle means by that ``articulate.''
First we thought that the ``professionals'' had been unable to utter
intelligible sounds, for that reading does reflect experience. However,
in this kind of writing, no ``professional'' would ever waste a
nifty word like ``articulate'' on such a simple thought. Next we
guessed that the man might be saying that the ``professionals''
had been unable to define the problem thoroughly and accurately. That, too,
we had to reject. Such inability would be remarkably similar to ineptitude
in ``professionals,'' surely, but Weischadle says they're   {\bfseries not} 
inept. Only one possibility remains: ``To articulate the problem effectively''
must mean to find some description that will keep irate parents from thinking
that the ``professionals'' are inept. Of course! That's just what
Weischadle's is up to in this piece ---   {\bfseries educating}  the parents.



He does some pretty fancy articulating as well. Where do they learn that
language? In the ordinary graduate school, candidates are expected to be
competent in a couple of foreign languages, but in those education places
they know that skill in language will cripple the budding ``professional''
by enabling him to say things plainly. You get no monies that way. Straight
talk would mean the end of effective articulation as we know it.



Here are some examples of bent talk from Weischadle's little piece. He
won't say that people are talking about something; he says that ``much
recent discussion has focused on'' it. He can't say, ``Hurry'';
he says that ``delay should not be allowed to take place.'' He can't
say that people should use wisely what they have; he says that ``an
enlightened utilization\ldots must be present.'' He can't say that the
people who deal out discipline should be consistent; he says that ``the
haphazard application of disciplinary action\ldots must be eliminated.''
He can't say, ``Don't worry.'' He says that ``uneasiness should
be settled.''



Still, we worry. For one thing, there is no clear meaning in the settling
of uneasiness. In fact, it sounds ominous. If the settling of uneasiness
has the same effect as the settling of terms or plans, we don't want any
part of it. For another, how can we take any comfort from a teacher of teachers
who condescends, in broken English, to explain why we should have ``complete
confidence'' in him and other ``professionals,'' so that they
may get on, unhampered by our ill-informed and amateurish complaints, with
the ``acquisition\ldots of monies to enact better programs'' that
will,   {\bfseries this}  time around, solve the illiteracy problem ?



In these examples of Weischadle's tortured English, the grammatical subjects
are things, not persons, and abstract things at that. All things that must
be done by people, but we see no people. This language suggests a world
where responsible agents, the doers of deeds, have been magically occulted
by the deeds themselves. A weird structure of that sort, ``utilization
must be present,'' for example, has the merit (?) of excusing somebody
from an obligation to use something. If things go wrong, therefore, it's
not any   {\bfseries person's}  fault; it's just that utilization wasn't
present.



Such structures, furthermore, often generate certain morally flavored
auxiliary verbs: ``delay should not'' --- ``application must,''
etc. This is another grammatically symbolized cop-out which implies that
moral obligation falls upon deeds rather than doers. It is up to those negligent
deeds to get themselves done. This is convenient for those ``professionals''
who won't be able to do them.



Normal English, in its typical structure, a simple sentence in the active
voice, implies a world where agents perform acts. There are times when we
would wish it otherwise, and in our minds we can devise subterfuges that
will make it seem otherwise. We do the business of the mind in language,
and we make our subterfuges of the same stuff. Weischadle, in his grammatical
gyrations, is not just writing bad English; he is positing a certain kind
of world. In that world, one can {\itshape parler sans parler} like Castorp
and reject in advance all responsibility for what one says. Here's how Weischadle
does it --- indeed, how almost anyone of those ``professionals''
would do it: ``The pre-school years have been recognized as being important
formulative years.''



He probably means ``formative,'' although he may be thinking
that the pre-school years are the years spent sucking a formula from bottles
--- but no matter. The important thing is the grotesque contortion by
which he escapes having to say that the pre-school years   {\bfseries are}  formative,
or, if you like, formulative. It matters not at all to the ``professional''
that what he has to say is obvious and banal and widely enough known that
it needs no saying; he still finds a way to evade responsibility for having
said it. In this timid language of misdirection and abdication, no one would
dare stand forth and proclaim that a turkey is a turkey. He might mutter,
tentatively, that a turkey has been recognized as being a turkey --- although
not necessarily by   {\bfseries him}. 



Into such prose, human beings vanish. No wonder we couldn't discover
Weischadle's salary. He has withdrawn into the precincts of the passive
voice. He has given over all doing of deeds and drawn up about him the mists
of circumlocution. Far from our ken, he has sojourned in the land of the
self-eliminating application and followed the spoor of the place-taking
delay. He is, by now, by gloomy night and periphrastics compassed round.
He is, in short, or sort of short, no longer recognized as being Weischadle.
Now we see the truth. There   {\bfseries is}  no Weischadle.






What could be more obvious? When the object of a psychological manipulation
fails to respond in the usual way, there must be something wrong with him.
This conclusion is the same as the neurologist's, for whom the failure of
a knee to jerk has one ominous significance. In Wundt's psychology, the
mind itself is held to be,  {\bfseries  must}  be if the system is to be concretely
scientific, a neurological phenomenon, and a predisposition against arithmetic
must be a psycho-neurological aberration. Thus we must conclude, when children
fail to respond appropriately to tested stimuli, that they have learning
problems. That being so, it becomes the aim of educational research to find
out all about learning problems and to discover, naturally, that the schools
are full of ``problem youngsters'' harboring hosts of hitherto unsuspected
``learning disabilities.'' From this preoccupation with pathology,
the teacher-training profession takes many benefits.



One of them, of course, is simply the opportunity to do what can pass
for scholarship or research, which leads to promotion and pay and to government
grants. There would be little hope of such things in a simpler calling like
plumbing. Plumbers install plumbing, and, when something goes wrong with
the plumbing, they fix it. They don't care how the pipes feel about it.
Teaching reading and arithmetic is much more like plumbing than you probably
think. If you know how to read and cipher, you can, if you want to, teach
those skills to almost any child in America. The chances are, too, that
you will do a better job of it, and in a shorter time, than the schools.
If you know  {\bfseries  a lot}  about mathematics and have paid thoughtful
attention to language, you can do a   {\bfseries much}  better job, and better
by far, probably, than anything you can manage with your plumbing. But if
the teaching of children were handled that way, simply by people who knew
the skills and knowledge they were teaching, and who wanted simply to teach
them, then a vast and comfortable empire would fall.



That empire is not, however, the empire of the schools. It is the empire
of the teacher-training establishment. Most of what is taught and studied
in the teacher academy has nothing to do with the subject matter that the
teacher-trainees will someday teach. Teacher-training is itself ``child-centered,''
and the teacher-trainees are themselves among the children. That's why so
many education courses are devoted either to ``enhanced self-awareness''
or to a clinical scrutiny of children as psychological entities. The training
of teachers is thus a miniature lampoon of the training of the psychoanalyst,
who must first be analyzed so that he may do unto others as has been done
unto him. The incipient teachers are to be, in fact, therapists, keen to
discover, if unable to treat, vast arrays of ``learning disabilities''
and ``problem youngsters.'' Teacher-training, therefore, is a colossal
and terribly serious enterprise. It calls for more and more courses and
workshops and ``hands-on'' laboratory ``experiences'' and
in- and pre-service training, all of which require larger and larger faculties
and counselors and facilitators and support services and more and more money.
Without Wundt, none of this would be possible, and the teaching of children
would be degraded into nothing more than an honest, honorable, skilled trade.



Wundt may have been wrong, but he was honest. He just wanted to know
what he thought could be known. His bequest to us, marvelously transformed,
is essentially a metaphor, an ideal paradigm of the process of education.
We seem to imagine that there is something ``wrong'' with children,
and that we must fix it. But by that ``wrongness'' we don't mean
something simple to fix, like the perfectly normal ignorance of arithmetic
in one who has not been taught arithmetic. We mean something more like a
perverse bias against arithmetic, an innate predisposition whose remedy
lies in some ``treatment'' or other. We can see that the treatment,
therefore, must take priority, for the arithmetic depends on the treatment,
the modification of behavior. Thus we will first make the student whole,
through devising and applying appropriate stimuli, so that he can, if it
still seems desirable, learn his arithmetic. This paradigm does not include
the proposition, certainly questionable but just as certainly intriguing,
that we can make the student whole by   {\bfseries teaching}  the arithmetic.



\chapter{The Seven Deadly Principles}




After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against
another in the interests of reasonable compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded
that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education required
only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically
moderate proposal was not adopted. Those who actually knew more about education
than Mencken did could see that his plan was nothing more than cosmetic
and would in fact provide only an outward appearance of improvement. Those
who knew less, on the other hand, had somewhat more elaborate plans of their
own, and they just happened to be in charge of the schools.



Those who knew less, to be specific, were the members of the National
Education Association's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education,
a.k.a. The Gang of Twenty-seven, now long forgotten but certainly not gone.
They builded better than they knew, and their souls go marching on in every
school in America today. The Commission was established in 1913, the year
that also brought us the income tax. Many of its members were functionaries
of school bureaucracies, from the United States Commissioner of Education
himself down through supervisors and associate superintendents and principals
and even a high school inspector, whatever that was, to no less a personage
than a senior educational secretary of the YMCA. Professors and assistant
professors of education represented the higher learning. One of   {\bfseries them
} was chairman of the committee on mathematics, naturally, while the committees
on lesser disciplines, notably classical and modern languages, were directed
by high school teachers. The stern sciences were served by a professor of
education, while the smiling sciences like social studies and the other
household arts were overseen by federal bureaucrats. In the whole motley
crew there were no scientists, no mathematicians, no historians, no traditional
scholars of any sort.



That was surely no accident, for it seems to have been an article of
the Commission's unspoken agenda to overturn the work of an earlier NEA
task force that   {\bfseries had}  been made up largely of scholars, the Committee
of Ten, called together in 1892 and chaired by Charles W. Eliot, then president
of Harvard University. That committee had come out in favor of traditional
academic study in the public schools, which they fancied should be devoted
to the pursuit of knowledge and the training of the intellect. But what
can you expect from a bunch of intellectuals? The Eliot Report of 1893 was
given to things like this:


\begin{quote}

  
As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted
  to cultivate the habits of observation; as mathematics are the traditional
  training of the reasoning faculties; so history and its allied branches
  are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental
  power which we call judgment.

\end{quote}



Obviously, the Eliot committee did its work in the lost, dark days before  {\bfseries 
} the world of education had discovered the power of the bold innovative
thrust. All they asked of the high schools was the pursuit of knowledge
and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment.



The Gang of Twenty-seven, unhampered by intellectual predispositions,
found that proposal an elitist's dream. They concluded, in other words,
that precious few schoolchildren were capable of the pursuit of knowledge
and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment. That, of course,
turned out to be the most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy of our century.
It is also a splendid example of the muddled thought out of which established
educational practice derives its theories. The proposals of the Eliot report
are deemed elitist because they presume that most schoolchildren are generally
capable of the mastery of subject matter and intellectual skill; the proposals
of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, on the other
hand, are ``democratic'' in presuming that most schoolchildren are
  {\bfseries not}  capable of such things and should stick to homemaking and the
manual arts.



This bizarre principle is still very much with us as a generator of educationistic
theory and practice. It shows, among other things, the immense power of
words, especially nasty ones like ``elitism,'' notably abhorrent
to our egalitarian society. It is certainly true (and puzzling as well,
since the men who made us this egalitarian society were indubitable intellectuals)
that we distrust intellectuals. They   {\bfseries do}  seem to be an elite, although,
thank goodness, a powerless elite. They butter little bread. Nevertheless,
when we ask those intellectuals what we should do in the schools, they tell
us to do everything we can to bring forth swarms of other intellectuals,
which must lead us to conclude that the intellectual elitists can't be too
smart. What kind of an elitist can it be who wants to generate his own competitors,
and lots of them at that? But the champions of a ``democratic''
public education, righteous enemies of elitism, rejoice in the profitable
belief that hardly any of the children in their charge can expect to rise
to the level of curriculum facilitator, to say nothing of superintendent
of schools.



In the cause of ``democratic'' public education, the Gang of
Twenty-seven compounded illogic with ignorance by deciding that the education
proposed by the Eliot committee was primarily meant as ``preparation
for the college or university.'' True, relatively few high school graduates
of 1913 went on to college; but even fewer had done so in 1893. Indeed,
it was just   {\bfseries because}  so few would go on to more education that the
Eliot committee wanted so many to have so much in high school. But the Gang
of Twenty-seven decided that since very few students would go on to the
mastery of a discipline and the rigorous training of the mind in college,
which colleges were still fancied to provide in those days, there was little
need to fuss about such things in high school. They had far more interesting
things to fuss about in any case,   {\bfseries their}  kinds of things. They enshrined
them all, where they abide as holy relics of the cult of educationism to
this day, in their final report, issued in 1918 (and printed at government
expense, like all the outpourings of educationism ever since) as {\itshape Cardinal
Principles of Secondary Education.}



{\itshape Cardinal Principles} was a small pamphlet, not much larger than
{\itshape The Communist Manifesto} or a man's hand. It rejected the elitist
and undemocratic education of the dark past and provided in its place ``preparation
for effective living.'' It made us the effective livers we are today,
and it sends forth every year from our public schools and colleges all those
effective livers who will make the future of the nation.



The seven cardinal principles were put forth as the paths to the seven
``main objectives of education,'' which had finally been discovered
once and for all after twenty-five hundred years of intellectual floundering.
The first of those main objectives was   {\bfseries Health}.   {\bfseries  Health}.   {\bfseries 
} Its primacy is justified by that firm grasp on the obvious that was
to become the very foundation stone of educational theorizing: ``Health
needs cannot be neglected during the period of secondary education without
serious danger to the individual and the race.'' How true. You can't  {\bfseries 
} make effective livers out of dead children. And think of the race! Suppose
they   {\bfseries all}  die! How then will we get the taxpayers ``to secure
teachers competent to ascertain and meet the needs of individual pupils
and able to inculcate in the entire student body a love for clean sport?''



(It is interesting to notice that, like this one, all of the proposals
in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} will call for vastly increased faculties and
administrative bureaucracies both in the high schools and in the teachers'
colleges. This has since become the Eighth Cardinal Principle, which you
can see doing its work in your local school system whenever any remedy to
any problem or shortcoming is proposed: Whatever we do will require more
money, more teachers, more administrators, and more mandated courses in
education.)



{\itshape Cardinal Principles} even proposed that there be in each school
a kind of health officer, whose job would range from looking around for
insanitary conditions in the building to inquiring into the social lives
of the students, who might well be risking their health in the streets and
in ice-cream parlors. It was in the cause of health, I believe, that my
own first-grade teacher used to hold fingernail inspection every morning
and cry out now and then to some slouching young reprobate: ``Posture!''
It was in this cause, too, that what was called ``physical education''
became the oppressive monster that it is today and, by the very power of
its name, compounded beyond remedy the educationistic delusion that ``education''
and ``training'' are the same thing. It is not a coincidence, nor
is it without large consequences, that so many of America's high school
principals were once phys. ed. teachers.



The second ``main objective'' is, at first, slightly surprising:
{\itshape Command of Fundamental Processes}. In 1918 that meant just about what
Basic Minimum Competence means today. Although it certainly did not mean
anything   {\bfseries more}  than Basic Minimum Competence either, it did at least
mean a higher minimum. Nowadays we count ourselves lucky if the students
can read and write at the ninth-grade level, whatever that means this year.
{\itshape Cardinal Principles} says that such a level of competence, even in
1918, ``is not sufficient for the needs of modern life.'' (I must
say, too, that {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} although stilted and dull, is
not written in the self-serving, mindless jargon of today's educationists.
This credit, however, must be balanced against a large debit. It was in
the ensuing scramble of silly, pseudo-scholarship required for the justification
of the cardinal principles that our educationists discovered the power of
mendacious gobbledegook and adopted it as their native tongue.)



Furthermore, it is clear that, while the drafters of {\itshape Cardinal Principles}
do put Command of Fundamental Processes second only to Health, they do so
apparently as an involuntary bend of the knee to that discredited old elitism.
About the other ``main objectives'' they have a lot to say, and
many suggestions as to how curriculum might be manipulated in their accommodation
and many new people hired in their cause. When they have called for Command
of Fundamental Processes, that's it. They proceed at once to   {\bfseries Worthy Home-membership}, a main objective much more to their liking.



{\itshape Cardinal Principles} admits, affirms, in fact, that ``In the
education of every high-school girl, the household arts should have a prominent
place because of their importance to the girl herself and to others whose
welfare will be directly in her keeping.'' It presumes, too, that even
girls who do idle away a few more years in college or in ``occupations
not related to the household arts'' will someday have to face their
``actual needs and future responsibilities'' and ``understand
the essentials of food values, of sanitation, and of household budgets.''



Although Worthy Home-membership obviously has a lot to do with cooking
and sewing, it also provides for the dilution of whatever may persist of
the old elitist curriculum:


\begin{quote}

  
The social studies should deal with the home as a fundamental social
  institution and clarify its relation to the wider interests outside. [That
  will disqualify history, a discipline notably unconcerned with ``the
  home,'' as a worthy study.] Literature should interpret and idealize
  the human elements that go to make the home. [That knocks out the study
  of literature, which is remarkably unlikely to do what some educationists
  decree that it ``should'' do.] Music and art should result in more
  beautiful homes and greater joy therein. [They really had to stretch for
  that one, but it will call to order pretentious art and music teachers
  who peddle their subjects as intrinsically worthwhile, and it will even
  justify the inclusion of interior decorating in the high school curriculum.]

\end{quote}



It is exactly that, the dilution of ordinary academic study, that makes
this kind of ``education'' so pernicious. Obviously no one can object
to housekeeping skills or to beautiful homes and joy therein. But beauty
and joy, and even housekeeping skills, are either diminished or destroyed
by ignorance and stupidity, which are likely to flourish in a place where
history is subordinated to a ``social study'' of the home as an
institution and where literature is chosen for study if it does what it
``should'' do.



Those funny ``educations'' are all the more powerful and long-lived
because they are designed to grow fat and sassy through eating the bodies
of their victims. When we embark on an ambitious program of Worthy Home-membership
Education, we justify ourselves by naming some indubitable benefits we intend
to bestow: an understanding of ``the essentials of food values, of sanitation,
and of household budgets,'' for instance. Those benefits, of course,
can be had, along with a great deal more, by those who study and learn such
things as biology, chemistry, and mathematics, but those stern old disciplines
offer little scope for the bold, innovative thrust and the increased budget.
So we pretend, or some of us may actually believe, that home budgeting,
which is a skill all these girls need, can be learned in the   {\bfseries absence}  of mathematics, which is an elitist skill useful only for a few.



And sure enough --- little by little the study and practice of such
subjects as science and mathematics decline, and fewer and fewer students
take such courses. We have helped this decline by providing easy and ``democratic''
options for those who seem to have a little trouble with the demanding elitism
of traditional academic study. Now the day has come when very few high school
girls can do any arithmetic at all. Now is our triumph. We can redignify
Worthy Home-membership Education with a trendy new name, Consumer Education,
and teach nutrition and wary shopping to girls who are innocent of science
and unable to figure out the price of an ounce of macaroni. Those deficits,
which flow from our very existence, we can now put forth as arguments for
our continued existence. This pattern, of course, can describe the growth
and triumph of any of those ``educations.''



Another such education was the fourth main objective in {\itshape Cardinal Principles:
Vocation}. The Commission's proposals for a vocational education program
that would take up ``much of the pupil's time'' derive from its
own cardinal principles: that few students can do academic work and would
best spend their time in learning homemaking skills and trades, and that
the larger purpose of public education was to bring about a certain social
order. They urge vocational education not only to ``equip the individual
to secure a livelihood for himself and those dependent on him,'' but
also so that he may ``maintain the right relationships toward his fellow
workers and society.'' The Commission does not, of course, explain what
``right relationships'' might be, perhaps presuming that all the
other educationists who read their report would surely favor right relationships
over wrong relationships without giving the matter any thought. As usual.



But vocational education, as imagined in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} was
not to be a separate program within the schools; it was intended that even
those students who did not spend ``much of their time'' in the wood
shop would nevertheless ``develop an appreciation of the significance''
of vocations ``and a clear conception of right relations [there they
are again] between the members of the chosen vocation, between different
vocational groups, between employer and employee, and between producer and
consumer.'' All such things can be studied, of course, in the context
of several well-known disciplines, but study can provide only knowledge.
{\itshape Cardinal Principles} does not call for   {\bfseries knowledge}  of these matters,
however, but for ``appreciation'' and a ``clear conception of
right relations.''



It is a thematic illusion of our educational enterprise that understanding
can be had without knowledge, that the discretion can be informed without
information, that judgment need not wait on evidence. Before we can ask
what   {\bfseries are}  the right relations between producer and consumer, for instance,
we must know what are all the   {\bfseries possible}  relations between producer
and consumer. We must know antecedents and consequences; we must know functions
and contexts. We must, in fact, know more than we can hope to know, which
is why thoughtful people only reluctantly and armed with as much knowledge
as possible leap from knowing into judging and decide to ``hold''
some truths self-evident.



On the other hand, {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} in speaking of its fifth
main objective, {\itshape Civics Education,} leaps blithely into: ``Too
frequently, however, does mere information, conventional in value and remote
in its bearing, make up the content of the social studies.'' Mere information.
What the Commission might mean by ``conventional in value'' I just
don't know, but I do know, along with all who have ever studied, that only
a fool is willing to take the risk that this or that bit of mere information
is ``remote in its bearing.'' Facts seem unrelated only to those
who know few facts.



As you might expect, Civics Education --- what a noble cause! ---
is given enormous power to alter and dilute the content of traditional academic
subjects:


\begin{quote}

  
History should so treat the growth of institutions that their present
  value may be appreciated. Geography should show the interdependence of
  men while it shows their common dependence on nature. Civics should concern
  itself less with constitutional questions and remote governmental functions,
  and should direct attention to social agencies close at hand and to the
  informal activities of daily life that regard and seek the common good.
  Such agencies as child-welfare organizations and consumers' leagues afford
  specific opportunities for the expression of civic qualities by the older
  pupils.

  
The work in English should kindle social ideals and give insight into
  social conditions and into personal character as related to these conditions.
  Hence the emphasis by the committee on English on the importance of a knowledge
  of social activities, social movements, and social needs on the part of
  the teacher of English.

\end{quote}



And, not content with prescribing an ``appreciation'' of institutions
that would satisfy Lenin, ignorance of the constitution in the name of responsible
citizenship, and literature as an instigator of social compliance, the Commission
decides also that ``  {\bfseries all}  subjects should contribute to good citizenship.''
(My italics.) While they would probably not suggest, in that cause, that
the binomial theorem be put to a vote in class, their descendants and adherents
  {\bfseries will}, in fact, suggest that mathematics, obviously ``remote
in its bearing'' on good citizenship, is not really at the heart of
the educational enterprise.



While its concrete proposals for Civics Education are very much like
its proposals for all the other educations, {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} in
the name of ``attitudes and habits important in a democracy,'' goes
an extra step and prescribes what should actually happen in the classroom.
It urges ``the assignment of projects and problems to groups of pupils
for cooperative solution and the socialized recitation whereby the class
as a whole develops a sense of collective responsibility. Both of these
devices give training in collective thinking.'' Here we can see the
theoretical foundations of the rap session, the encounter group, the values
clarification module, and the typical course in education, but also something
far worse.



For thousands of years, many decent, knowing, and thoughtful people have
hated and feared democracy, and with good reasons. We don't think of it
that way any longer, probably because we have all been to schools devoted
to the cardinal principles, but the framers of our society took great pains
to guard us against the obvious (to them) dangers inherent in majority rule.
It was precisely to commend and elucidate the constitution's ability to
protect the few from the ignorance or self-interest of the many that Madison
wrote the tenth Federalist Paper; which is, of course, not included in the
Civics Education curriculum. The children who are to generate ``cooperative
solutions'' and ``socialized recitations'' are to do so without
concern for, or even any knowledge of, ``constitutional questions and
remote governmental functions'' like checks and balances. They will
do their ``collective thinking'' unencumbered by ``mere information.''



It is another of the educationists' self-serving delusions that if enough
of the ignorant pool their resources, knowledge will appear, and that a
parliament of fools can deliberate its way to wisdom. This delusion is not
entirely groundless. It is grounded in another delusion, the one
that flows from a half-baked adaptation of the work of Wundt.



You will recall Cattell's curious conclusion that learning the sounds
of letters was not useful in learning to read because those who could read
did not sound out the letters. Recall also that Wundt saw   {\bfseries learning}  (he
did   {\bfseries not}  say ``education'') as a conditioned response to stimuli.
For American educationists, such ``facts'' were absorbed into a
generalized notion that might be put something like this: We notice that
educated people, whatever that might mean, have certain attributes and that
they do things in certain ways, or, since we are educationists, that they
``exhibit certain behaviors.'' So, if our students come to have
those attributes and exhibit those behaviors, they will be educated, and
we will be educators.



Educated and thoughtful people have indeed often met and deliberated
together and solved problems and found wisdom. Just look at the Constitutional
Convention, for example, or, if you're a little short on mere information,
consider the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. Therefore,
if we assign projects and problems to groups of students we will instill
in them the same ``sense of collective responsibility'' that we
see so often among the educated and thoughtful. In that fashion, furthermore,
we will engender in them an appropriate appreciation of ``the ideals
of American democracy and loyalty to them,'' as {\itshape Cardinal Principles
}recommends.



An analogous line of reasoning would begin with the observation that
musicians have been known to play ``Lady of Spain'' and end with
the determination to train seals to play ``Lady of Spain'' on bicycle
horns and turn them into musicians.



And there is another ominous and far-reaching implication in the Commission's
assignment of projects and problems hidden, not very deeply, in ``collective
thinking.'' This phrase reveals an appalling ignorance and thoughtlessness
out of which terrifying educationistic malfeasances have been growing for
decades.



Schooling is done in public places, but the roots of an education can
grow only in the hidden ground of the mind. Lessons are taught in social
institutions, but they can be learned only by private people. The acts that
are at once the means and the ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding,
judging, are all committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work
of the mind can be done. There is no such thing as ``collective thinking.''
Our schools can be an instrument for socialization or an incentive to thoughtfulness,
but they cannot be both.



Thus it is, for instance, that such elementary skills as reading and
writing, public analogues of private thinking, are so ill taught in the
schools. It is not sufficient explanation of this failure to point out that
the educationists who design the schools are themselves notoriously poor
readers and writers, although they are. That leads us only to ask in turn
why   {\bfseries that}  should be so. At the root of our widespread and institutionalized
illiteracy is a fevered commitment to socialization and an equally unhealthy
hostility to the solitary, and thus probably antisocial, work of the mind.
In school, the inane and uninformed regurgitations of the ninth-grade rap
session on solar energy as a viable alternative to nuclear power are positive,
creative, self-esteem-enhancing student behavioral outcomes; the child who
sits alone at the turning of the staircase, reading, is a weirdo. The students
did not bring that ``appreciation'' to school; they learned it there.



Somewhat later in their history, the educationists will  {\bfseries }  justify
and formalize their hostility to the intellect, with which they never   {\bfseries did
} feel comfortable, by inventing the ``affective domain'' of feelings
and attitudes and appreciations and setting its gracious virtues over against
the tedious and unimaginative ``rote'' learning of the merely ``cognitive
domain.'' But they will only raise walls where the Gang of Twenty-seven
has dug the foundation. We can see the marks of their shovels in all those
appreciations and attitudes and values and ``worthy'' attributes
of this and that. And when they come to their sixth main objective of secondary
education, {\itshape Worthy Use of Leisure,} they outdo their successors in
a sublime presumptuousness possible only to the happily and profoundly ignorant.



As to the Worthy Use of Leisure, they counsel thus:


\begin{quote}

  
Heretofore the high school has given little conscious attention to this
  objective. It has so exclusively sought intellectual discipline that it
  has seldom treated literature, art, and music so as to evoke right emotional
  response and produce positive enjoyment. Its presentations of science should
  aim, in part, to arouse a genuine appreciation of nature.

\end{quote}



So. Intellectual discipline is not compatible with ``right emotional
response'' and ``positive enjoyment.'' And a pack of manual
arts teachers, educationists, and bureaucrats can tell us what a right emotional
response would be, presumably. They can clarify for us, without any tedious
attention to inorganic chemistry or the laws of motion, not only an appreciation
of nature but a   {\bfseries genuine}  appreciation of nature. They are bestowers
of blessings on the benighted. Their discoveries, however, would probably
come as a sad surprise to Jefferson, who, in spite of his command of intellectual
disciplines, labored all his life under the delusion that he   {\bfseries did}  take ``positive enjoyment'' from literature, art, and especially
from music.



One of the characteristics of the mind of educationism, just as much
now as in the days of {\itshape Cardinal Principles, is} an apparent inability
to follow paths of thought far enough to discover contradictions in logic.
If scientific research, or technological craftsmanship, for that matter,
were as little given to self-examination as educationistic theory, we would
have practically nothing that worked. The notion that intellectual discipline
is somehow an impediment to ``right response,'' a notion that we
find not only in the context of the arts but everywhere in {\itshape Cardinal Principles
}and in subsequent educationistic theorizing, must eventually lead us
to the conclusion that those who hold it cannot be believed. It is, after
all, by virtue of some fancied ``intellectual discipline'' in themselves
that educationistic theorists claim to prescribe the ``right'' responses,
attitudes, and appreciations that are precluded by intellectual discipline.



This is not only illogical but even antisocial, which is another disabling
contradiction in a theory proposing schooling as a means of socialization.
They say, in effect, that   {\bfseries students}  who are needlessly led
into intellectual discipline will not achieve right emotional response,
but that educationists are   {\bfseries not}  thus handicapped. It is a strange
sort of teacher who says in his heart that his students need never know
what he knows. That goes far beyond elitism; it is cultism. If a teacher
is dedicated to knowledge and thought, he works in the hope that his students,
some of them, one of them, will come to know and think more than he does,
for only thus can knowledge and thought be served. To treat his students,
or some of them, or even one of them, as though they could never know and
think what he knows and thinks, suggests a dedication to something else.
Perhaps to his job. Perhaps he fears to raise up what such a teacher would
surely think of as competition. While an individual teacher, of course,
need have no realistic fears that some student will supplant him, the same
is not true of the ideologues who claim to define the whole system of teaching
and learning. How convenient it is, we notice, for the future welfare of
the commissioners that   {\bfseries they}  are immune to the nasty side effects
of intellectual discipline from which they will magnanimously shelter the
children.



I must note, at this point, that the Commission on the Reorganization
of Secondary Education was assembled by the National Education Association,
a widely misunderstood outfit. The ordinary citizen reads its pronouncements
in the newspapers from time to time and notices that it gives its seal of
approval to treacly television shows and elementary dramatizations of popular
``classics.'' He has the impression that the NEA is something ``official.''
But it is, of course, as it was in 1918 and long before, a trade union.
That it should be called on to set national policy in the public schools
is like putting the teamsters' union in charge of traffic laws and the licensing
of drivers, but even more so. We have accepted the determinations of a teachers'
union as to how America should be educated only because the job of designing
an educational system is so hideously boring that only those whose self-interest
is clearly at stake will undertake it. Our corporate self-interest, to be
sure, is also very much at stake, but not   {\bfseries clearly} {\itshape ,} at least
not clearly enough for the ordinary citizen, who cannot see beyond the fact
that all questions of education and schooling are hideously boring.



The self-interest of a massive educationists' trade union is evident
on every page of {\itshape Cardinal Principles.} Whether that self-interest
influences the document in partnership with shabby habits of thought, or
whether those habits are themselves the consequences of the self-interest,
who can say? But the result is the same. In every ``main objective''
we can find generous provision for the employment of growing hosts of dues-paying
members of the NEA. It is also assured that much room will be made in the
academic world for a new class, the arrivistes of educationism, the guidance
counselors and curriculum facilitators, the physical education and typing
teachers, the appreciation experts and the right emotional response imparters,
the fingernail inspectors, and the right relationships inducers, who can
launch themselves easily into secure and respectable careers without worrying
about the burdensome demands of mere information and intellectual discipline.



In the world projected in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} there is no place
for scholars or scholarship. The whole, vast enterprise of training the
minds that will shape the thought and knowledge of the future is dealt with
in exactly one sentence: ``Provisions should be made also for those
having distinctly academic interests and needs.'' Exactly what provisions
the Gang of Twenty-seven might have had in mind, we'll never know, although
their provisions for the supervision of habits of hygiene and social events
are detailed at length. We have to wonder, too, how such provisions could
be made at all, given that ``Each subject now taught in high school
is in need of extensive reorganization in order that it may contribute more
effectively to the objectives outlined herein, and the place of that subject
in secondary education should depend on the value of such contribution.''
By that principle, any course of study that might attract those wretched
misfits with academic interests, an intellectual discipline clogged with
mere information, would have to be either diluted into the pursuit of appreciation
or simply eliminated. That, of course, has happened.



(All is not lost, however. In any school there are a few teachers who
didn't know what they were getting into when they went to the teachers'
college and have stoutly --- and usually silently --- retained their
devotion to intellectual discipline and even improved their stores of mere
information in spite of having to give most of their time to education courses.
They are the unintended ``provision\ldots for those having distinctly
academic interests and needs.'' That's why every educated person you
know will give special credit to this or that certain teacher. Such teachers,
however, are seldom popular with their colleagues, and never with the administrators,
so they often have to work underground. No matter. Those weird students
will find those weird teachers and will learn from them, in any subject
at all, something of the work of the mind.)



In fact, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education
was simply not interested in students with ``distinctly academic needs
and interests.'' It began by assuming that there were few of those in
any case, and ended by projecting an ``education'' that would make
them even fewer. In the Commission's plan there was as little concern for
academic talent as there was space on the page for naming the provisions,
for the commissioners were, deep down where it really counted, not teachers
at all but Sunday-school supervisors {\itshape manqu\'{e}s,} officious and
ill-informed laymen busily hastening to good make-works and armed with the
serene self-confidence that only ignorance can provide. They wanted to be
not teachers but preachers, and prophets too, charging themselves with the
cure of the soul of democracy and the raising up in the  {\bfseries }  faith of
true believers. They made concrete and formal the anti-intellectual dogmatism
that characterizes our schools today.



The seventh and last of the Commission's main objectives of secondary
education was nothing less than {\itshape Ethical Character,} which they pronounced
``paramount'' in a   {\bfseries democratic}  society, as if Plato, Epictetus,
Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Kant, Spinoza, and so on, for countless thinkers
who lived under all sorts of governments, had somehow missed the point now
perfectly clear to certain manual arts teachers and associate superintendents.
They were as smugly confident of their ability to engender Ethical Character
through ``the wise selection of content and methods of instruction in
all subjects of study'' as they were of their ability to tell right
emotional response from wrong. All it takes, after all, is what they are
certain they have: wisdom.



I have more to say later on the vexatious question of the role of public
education, all too accurately described in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} as
``the one agency that may be controlled definitely and consciously,''
in the supposed formation of Ethical Character. For now, it is useful to
point to the obvious fact that you will have a hard time finding a citizen
who is opposed to the formation of ethical character. Or to worthy use of
leisure time. Or to health, or any of the ``main objectives'' of
secondary education as discovered in {\itshape Cardinal Principles.} Those objectives
can be seen to constitute what is essentially a political platform eminently
acceptable to all those who are in favor of good and against evil. Public
acceptance of that platform was all the more certain because there was,
after all, no opposing party.



And how could there be? In this case, opposition could hardly be the
simple recommendation of contrary ``main objectives.'' No one would
vote for some educational splinter group calling for sickness and degeneracy.
The opposition, if there were to be any, would require in its adherents
a precise and thorough attention to detail, the pursuit of logical argument,
the formulation of hypotheses as to consequences, an underlying theory as
to the means and ends of education, and some considerable knowledge of the
history of human thought. Such a constituency will never be large. There
was such a constituency, of course, as there always is, made up of thoughtful
and educated people of all kinds, some of them actually in schools. But
the scholarly, academic wing of that small party was not asked to the table
with the members of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education,
who didn't want to hear any more of that ``traditional training of the
reasoning faculties'' stuff in the report of the Eliot committee. And
the other political dissidents, the ones you might call the civilians in
the school war, had other and far more important things to do. Most of them
had probably never heard of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} and those who had
would surely have found it of little interest. The theorists of American
public education, actually feeble and helpless creatures, have evolved an
amazing power to protect themselves against predators by emitting an unbearable
cloud of dullness and boredom.



If there is such a thing as an intellectual and cultural elite  {\bfseries }  in
America, and there may well be a far larger one than even its detractors
imagine, it is surely worthy of condemnation, for it is selfish and lazy.
Jefferson and his friends indubitably thought of themselves as an elite,
a natural aristocracy of talent. So thinking, they saw themselves not as
privileged but as obliged by their gifts, obliged to serve the common good
by the simple fact of their ability to do so. This attitude is not rampant
among us. It is especially unrampant in the academic community, where those
who more or less secretly   {\bfseries do}  think of themselves as an elite have
trained themselves to imagine that the dull business of public education
has nothing to do with their high endeavors.



The underlying attitudes and beliefs in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} have
not been mitigated by the passage of time or the pressure of momentous events.
Quite to the contrary, they have been regularly  {\bfseries }  reaffirmed and reinvigorated,
both in theory and practice. The devisers of the Seven Deadly Principles
set out not to teach certain skills and knowledge to hosts of children but
to change the nature of American society. They succeeded. They didn't, of
course,   {\bfseries make}  the vast mass of the people stupid and uninformed, for
that happens in the course of nature without any need for deliberate effort,
but they did arrange that fewer and fewer would reach escape velocity and
rise out of the vast mass of the stupid and uninformed. As the consequences
of the deadly principles become evident, sometimes one by one and sometimes
in whole hosts of troubles, the descendants of the Gang of Twenty-seven
point them out as justifications for even more of the same, more schemes
to alter a society already suffering from all the earlier alterations.



The seven ``main objectives of education'' are still the main
objectives of education, although one of them, Command of Fundamental Processes,
was always somewhat less main than the others and remains so now that it
has been renamed Basic Minimum Competence, in which term the important word
is ``minimum.'' And it is exactly toward the achievement of those
objectives, especially the greater six, that the training and indoctrination
of schoolteachers is directed. Earnest attention to the seventh is just
not possible in this scheme, for it would require precisely those things
that {\itshape Cardinal Principles} finds inimical to ``right'' and
``worthy'' values: stringent intellectual discipline and great stores
of mere information. The professors of education are not interested in those
things, for their own training and indoctrination are no different from
what they visit upon their students. After all, what else have they to bestow?
And the professors of everything else just don't want to be bothered, and
what they   {\bfseries do}  have to bestow they save for a few favored students
who will in turn become the professors of everything else who just don't
want to be bothered. Mencken was right.




\chapter{The Principles March On}



The educationism that now informs our schools and teacher academies is
an amalgam of post-Wundtian misunderstanding and the Sunday-school do-goodism
of {\itshape Cardinal Principles.} From the former it takes its characteristically
therapeutic and manipulative methods and devices, and from the latter its
pious pretensions as an agent of social harmony and guardian of the public
virtue. In one way, therefore, it is pseudo-scientific, and in the other,
pseudo-religious. It is the devotion to contradictory principles of dubious
validity that generates the mental climate of educationism and leads to
that special fatuousness so typical of American educational thought, a vexing
blend of the illogical and the sentimental.



As recently as 1971, the National Education Association undertook a project
called ``Schools for the 70's and Beyond.'' The ensuing ``main
report,'' ``written primarily {\itshape [sic]} by Warren T. Greenleaf
and Gary A. Griffin,'' was published as a slim volume: {\itshape A Call to
Action.} Although it was clearly written in the shadow of growing discontent
about schools, it urged at least consideration of ``the thesis that
school   {\bfseries excellence}  narrowly defined, not school   {\bfseries failure}  narrowly
defined, has given us most of the problems that divide our nation in 1970''
--- an entertaining proposition, and one that would surely confirm the
assertion in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} that too much attention to intellectual
discipline inhibits right understanding. And the ``argument'' put
forth in support of that thesis is itself a dramatic example of worthy disregard
for mere information:


\begin{quote}

  
It was not illiterate, backward men who spiked our residential skylines
  with steel forests of television antennas, spoiled our rivers with the
  defecations of a hundred ``growth'' industries, fouled our air
  with the sooty contrails of a thousand jet planes taking off daily, or
  choked our cities with automobiles that cost as much to park as to buy.
  That work was accomplished by men whose schooling enabled them to develop
  transistors, no-deposit-no-return bottles, pressurized cabins, and a 36-months-to-pay
  economy.

\end{quote}



You say you want to understand how a modern technological society works?
Well, now you know. Men with schooling cunningly trick the multitudes into
buying television antennas and driving expensive cars. Educated elitists
force decent citizens to travel in airplanes and callously require them
to dispose of bottles at their own expense. It isn't the ``illiterate,
backward men'' who visit these horrors on us; untainted by ``excellence
narrowly defined,''   {\bfseries they}  can manage only rape, murder, arson,
and an occasional gas-station stickup.



This amazingly stupid oversimplification is perfectly typical of educational
theory. It is typical, too, in its confusion of ``education'' with
the ability to design transistors and to pressurize cabins, which is precisely
the sort of thing {\itshape Cardinal Principles} had in mind when it spoke of
vocational training. Such a confusion is inevitable, however, when the pursuit
of intellectual discipline is seen as hostile to right and worthy understanding.
Even a fairly elementary technology, that of the electrician or plumber,
for example, depends on certain disciplined habits of mind and a suitably
large mass of information. The designing of transistors may be more complicated,
but it is essentially the same   {\bfseries kind}  of enterprise as plumbing. A
distrust of intellectual discipline must eventually become a distrust of
  {\bfseries any}  disciplined habits of mind and any traditional store of ``mere
information.'' Logically, therefore, the writers of a {\itshape Call to Action
}might also have indicted plumbers and electricians, the plumbers for
having connected us to sewage systems and thence to the spoiling of rivers,
and the electricians for making it easy to plug in the television sets for
whose sake we have bought all those antennas.



Anti-intellectualism is like anti-Semitism, which only   {\bfseries begins}  with
the hating of Jews. From there it goes on to the ferreting out of hitherto-unsuspected
manifestations of Jewishness, and anti-intellectualism goes on even to the
denigration of technology, and thus of the very vocational training that
schools offer as one of many antidotes to intellectualism. One could reasonably
expect, therefore, that vocational training in the schools must become a
halfhearted and half-baked enterprise, whose obvious purpose is not the
teaching of even a relatively simple technology but the segregation of students
for whom even ``appreciation'' seems too difficult. That, as it
happens, is the case.



The writers of {\itshape A Call to Action} do not rest their case on the
malefactors who brought us industrial waste and installment payments, outrageous
impositions probably dating from neolithic elitism. They go on to say that
``It was not ignorant men who designed a rifle bullet that could spin  {\bfseries 
} end over end to increase its flesh-tearing capacity.'' That, they
remind us, was done by men with ``schooling in the far reaches of physics.''
Well, maybe to an educationist a tumbling bullet, like the barb on a spear
or the juice on an arrowhead, really   {\bfseries does}  seem to come from the far
reaches of physics. That would make sense.



They name also those devious ``men sufficiently well educated to
cite precedents from 200 years of American law'' as the ones ``who
juggled school boundaries\ldots to keep black children separate from white.''
It was   {\bfseries not}, they assure us, ``back-country bumpkins''
who evilly studied law in order to ``manipulate city ordinances.''
The back-country bumpkins left that sort of thing to the overeducated gentry
and just went on about the business of beating and shooting and lynching.



It is fascinating, of course, to hear those who operate the schools argue
that because there are people who can build aircraft for profit and cite
law in their own cause we may conclude that the schools have actually provided
too much ``excellence.'' What is even more fascinating is that this
bewildering and ignorant line of reasoning should find, apparently, no detractors
among the vast membership of the National Education Association, many thousands
of whom must have read and taken comfort from {\itshape A Call to Action.}



When I still fancied that the mindless and illogical utterances so common
in Academe were the results simply of haste or carelessness, and long before
I began to study the educationists' self-justifications in works like {\itshape Cardinal
Principles} and {\itshape A Call to Action,} the following ominously suggestive
article appeared in {\itshape The Underground Grammarian:}



Prostrate Trouble at NJEA



There is a kind of thoughtlessness that is not exactly stupidity. It
is a failing seen in ordinarily intelligent people who, under the influence
of self-interest, prefer to evade clarity of thought in precise language,
giving themselves instead to recitation of the vague and comfortable. They
write prostrate prose in which they let themselves be walked all over by
verbal inaccuracies and the failures of logic that those inaccuracies always
cause. Such prose is especially dangerous because it often sounds like common
sense around the old pot-bellied stove. We will consider a case of cracker-barrel
cant from the ruminations of one James P. Connerton.



Connerton is the new executive director of the New Jersey Education Association.
All we know of him is what we read in the NJEA{\itshape  Review} of January,
1979, to wit, that he has now returned to New Jersey after ten years spent
in unspecified enterprises ``in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Iowa, Michigan, and other states.'' How   {\bfseries many}  other states,
deponent saith not, but he   {\bfseries doth}  say: ``His goals are our goals.
Our aspirations are his aspirations. Our joy and our pain are his joy and
pain.'' The pain probably has to do with moving expenses.



Deponent is Frank Totten, the president of NJEA. Here's more of what
he writes:


\begin{quote}

  
Together we are the NJEA. All of us have made us what we are today.
  What we will be in 10 or 20 years depends on our determination, our forsight,
  our hard work, and our togetherness.

  
Jim Connerton is determined, farsighted, hardworking and one of us.
  As in the past, we'll do it together. We will determine our future and
  the future will be better because we have worked together.

  
Welcome home Jim. We need you. The present and the future will be better
  for us because we'll work through them together.

\end{quote}



That has a quaint charm, no? It sounds like the language in which invocations
are spoken at the firemen's annual clambake and certificates of achievement
awarded at Little League banquets. Very American. However, we'd be readier
to accept it --- even to applaud it --- if only it had begun with the
traditional Unaccustomed As I Am. In this case, though, we might feel more
confident about the future of civilization if one of the state's best-known
schoolteachers seemed more accustomed to written English, even to such trivia
as comma splices and paragraph logic.



Never mind. Totten is only a harbinger. The har that he binges is an
article in which Connerton speaks   {\bfseries his}  mind: ``Our 'top' priorities.''



Strictly speaking, we can not name more than   {\bfseries one}  priority, or
  {\bfseries first thing} {\itshape ,} but the plural is irresistible to those who want
to dignify anything they think they may someday prepare to begin to get
ready to do something about or even just to think about. When a word means
almost anything, it means almost nothing. To name something is to distinguish
it from all the other things.



At the NJEA, they seem to have so many priorities that they have to distinguish  {\bfseries 
them}  from one another, calling   {\bfseries some}  of them ``top'' priorities.
We must assume that they have also some middle priorities and bottom priorities.
Of top priorities, Connerton explores a mere twelve. Here's what he says
about a vexatious top priority indeed:


\begin{quote}

  
Every reasonable person concedes that we can't hold the parent accountable
  for the color of a child's hair, that we can't rate the minister by the
  number of parishioners who break the Commandments, and that we can't blame
  the coach when a linebacker misses a tackle. Most people also concede that
  we can't judge teachers by the scores their students make on tests ---
  especially on tests approved by some state office in Trenton that does
  not mesh with the local curriculum. Students should be evaluated by a variety
  of relevant measures, and so should teachers.

\end{quote}



That ``every reasonable person'' is a rhetorical gimmick similar
to a speaker's promise to make no mention of the well-known fact that his
opponent is a thief and a pederast. In this case it is less effective, for
it introduces either a shocking inanity or some hitherto unimagined cataclysm
in genetics. But Connerton knows his audience. His pains are their pains,
you'll recall, and they feel an almost intractable pain whenever they hear
``accountable.'' By using the word in this context, he deludes readers
into swallowing his absurdity, because they are predisposed to think that
to hold parents ``accountable'' for attributes passed on to offspring
is to castigate them for dereliction. If Connerton had said   {\bfseries that}  in
plain English, he would have avoided the absurd only to fall into the irrelevant.
``Every reasonable person,'' and even some members of the NJEA,
would have asked, So what else is new, Jim?



Having grounded his argument firmly on a proposition that is either preposterous
or pointless, depending on how we understand ``accountable,'' but
having thereby won the hearts and minds of thoughtless readers, Connerton
offers two further propositions meant to be analogous to the first. However,
if they were plain statements of fact, which they are not, they could be
analogous only to the irrelevant version of the first proposition. In order
to be analogous to the   {\bfseries other}  possible version, the absurd one, they
would have to be obvious misrepresentations of fact, which they also are
not. Therefore they are   {\bfseries not}  analogous to the first proposition. In
one way, that's lucky for Connerton, since even schoolteachers might be
able to spot three logical monstrosities in a row. In another way, it's
unlucky. His second and third propositions   {\bfseries are}  analogous to the business
of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, and they suggest the opposite
of what Connerton wants to say.



We can expect some normal amount of ox-coveting and idolatry in any congregation;
but, should sinning increase inordinately and persist obstinately, as illiteracy
has in the schools, we might indeed think to ``rate'' the shepherd
of the flock. Furthermore, meek as they are, ministers would probably reject
the implication that their work can be presumed to have no effect at all.
Are teachers defending themselves by claiming that what   {\bfseries they}  do cannot
be presumed to have any effect? Why else would Connerton imply as much about
the ministers? Maybe that's why we don't see those cute billboards anymore,
the ones that used to say, ``Teachers make the difference.''



And those hard-eyed entrepreneurs who invest in football teams do indeed
blame coaches --- and fire them, too --- when more and more linebackers
miss more and more tackles. It's only amateurs who want to talk about ``how
you played the game.'' Does this analogy tell us that schooling should
be judged as leniently as amateur athletics, and that we should be good
sports, saying of each newly graduated illiterate, Well, that's how the
ball bounces? If we were willing to concede that, do you suppose that Connerton
would then concede that teachers should get the same salaries as those guys
who coach the Little Leagues?



We have to presume, having heard of no mass defection from the NJEA,
that most of the schoolteachers in New Jersey read this passage and
found no fault in it. They were apparently content to find themselves
defended in a ragged mishmash of non-sequiturs and false analogies that
would earn a big fat F in any freshman logic course in the country. It must
have reminded them of the papers that always guaranteed a big fat A, and
perhaps even a cheerful, rubber-stamped smiling face, in all their education
courses.



Whether or not Connerton knew what he was doing, who can say? But we
  {\bfseries can}  say that if he did he is an exceedingly clever writer, who knows
that teachers are not too good at noticing fallacies. If he did   {\bfseries not}  know
what he was doing\ldots well, that's not our problem. He is paid for the
work of his mind not by taxpayers but by schoolteachers.



This tiny passage raises colossal questions: Does it reflect accurately
the intelligent power of the average teacher in New Jersey? If so, we have
given the teaching of our children into the care of the slow-witted. Or
can it be that our teachers   {\bfseries can}  see through this stuff but choose
to let it stand because they   {\bfseries like}  it, presuming (oh, so correctly)
that it will prove effective in persuading a slow-witted public? Must we
choose between dullness of mind and self-serving cynicism? What can we hope
for where the interest of teachers is best served by the stupidity of the
people? Do you   {\bfseries want}  a world in which reasoning like Connerton's is
accepted without question?



This is the most depressing text we have ever examined. It suggests a
horrifying hypothesis, to wit, that, far from   {\bfseries failing}  in its
intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently,
because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go
on supporting the system. What educationists may   {\bfseries say}  or even   {\bfseries believe
} that they are doing is not to the point. Their self-interest is evident,
and the cogency of their thinking is at least questionable. A hypothesis
must be tested by reference to facts and its ability to account for the
facts.



Now do your homework. Find some facts to test that dismal hypothesis.
Brace yourself. You're going to have a bad day.







It may be only a coincidence that the passage cited is the work of a
man who is in charge of an affiliate of the National Education Association,
the people who brought us not only {\itshape Cardinal Principles} but our new
Department of Education, but I don't think so. His pretense at argument
is remarkably like that earlier bit about the wicked antenna-mongers. His
audience is the same. His intention is the same: corporate self-justification.
And, like the writers of {\itshape A Call to Action}, he can obviously write
utter nonsense without any  {\bfseries }  fear that his fellow educationists will
expose him and call him to account. He is exercising the privileges of his
membership in an extremely unusual sort of conspiracy, an unconscious conspiracy,
if you can imagine such a thing, whose members are, in a very special sense,
indubitably ``innocent.'' They have no idea at all of what they
are doing.



I want to repeat now a passage that appeared earlier and that may have
seemed to you a trifle rash:


\begin{quote}

  
We are people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when
  we exchange generalizations and well-known opinions. We decide how to vote
  or what to buy according to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which
  is easily engendered in us by the manipulation of language, which we have
  neither the will nor the ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach
  conclusions without having the faintest idea of the difference between
  inferences and statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there
  are such things and that they   {\bfseries are}  different. We are easily persuaded
  and repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those
  attitudes and abilities that characterize authority. We do not notice elementary
  fallacies in logic; it doesn't even occur to us to look for them; few of
  us are even aware that such things exist. We make no regular distinctions
  between those kinds of things that can be known and objectively verified
  and those that can only be believed or not. Nor are we likely to examine,
  when we believe or not, the induced predispositions that may make us do
  the one or the other. We are easy prey.

\end{quote}



Well, perhaps that sweeping ``we'' was rash, but the rest of
it seems to me a fair description of people who can read about the antenna-mongers
or Connerton's clergymen and coaches without dismay and fury. There is no
evidence whatsoever that reasoning of that sort, which can be found wherever
educationism is preached, arouses either fury or dismay or even a mild discontent.
That fact, intriguing in itself, suggests some further facts about educationism,
where the blind are led about by the one-eyed king.



It can lead us to take a closer look at educationistic ``humanism,''
which, as you will remember, is the virtue for whose sake the educationists
can hold that curious article of faith that finds intellectual achievement
an inhibitor of effective teaching. In 1918 the Commission on the Reorganization
of Secondary Education concluded, as we have seen, that the high schools
had ``so exclusively sought intellectual discipline'' as to preclude
``right emotional response.'' Although that inappropriate emphasis
on intellectual discipline was soon replaced by hundreds of easy electives
intended to ensure a satisfactory adjustment to life, the writers of {\itshape A}
{\itshape Call to Action} discovered, in 1971, that there was still far too
much of it. ``We have,'' they say, speaking presumably for the NEA
members who could read with gladness about those innocent back-country bumpkins,
``overemphasized the intellectual development of students at the expense
of other capacities.'' They called for less intellectual development
and more attention to ``other categories of human potential --- emotional,
social, aesthetic, spiritual, and physical --- which suggest other directions
for curricular reform.''



There you have the beginnings of an understanding of the educationistic
concept of ``humanism.'' It has to do with those ``other categories
of human potential,'' other than intellectual, that is. This is a drastic
transformation of a more well-known kind of humanism, in which it was quite
specifically the human mind and its power of reason that gave the idea its
name. Educationistic humanism is, in fact, so utterly unlike the system
of thought ordinarily called by that name that I prefer to call the former
by the name given it, although not   {\bfseries exclusively}  in the cause
of clarity, in the pages of {\itshape The Underground Grammarian:} ``humanisticism.''
In humanism, it is the mind of man that is the type and discoverer at once
of knowledge and understanding. In humanisticism, various feelings, or,
as {\itshape Cardinal Principles} called them, ``right emotional responses,''
seem to be thought of as the quintessential signs of being human. If we
say of someone that he is a humanist, we suggest that he does the work of
his mind in the expectation that he can devise knowledge and discover truth.
The humanisticist, on the other hand, distrusts the work of the mind and
seeks rather to   {\bfseries be}  a certain kind of person than to   {\bfseries do}  a certain
kind of thing, expecting, it would seem, that knowledge and truth, relative
things in any case, will become visible to the right kind of person.



The passage cited above, the one about the television antennas, is a
splendid example of humanisticism, but certainly not of humanism. The humanist,
too, would be repelled by filth and ugliness, but he would not find in it
evidence of the inhumanity of the intellect in the ``men whose schooling
enabled them to develop transistors.'' On the contrary, he might lament
the plight of the millions in whom the inadequately schooled intellect makes
possible and profitable all those expensive automobiles and the forests
of antennas. He would find in all our ugliness and filth a sad comment on
the meagerness of mind out of which we so prize material comfort and convenience
that we transform perfectly human and ingenious technological achievements
into common nuisances. He would even be able to suggest a remedy in the
form of a populace sufficiently skilled in the work of the mind so as to
consider the probable consequences of materialistic appetite and thus make
such public nuisances less profitable.



The humanisticist sees that ugliness and filth as the work of those in
whom the work of the mind has engendered wrong feelings or, just as bad,
an absence of feelings. In this he finds the baleful influence of ``excellence
narrowly defined,'' by which he seems to mean the development of intellectual,
or at least, technical, skills without the simultaneous development of right
feelings. He may also imply, but who can be sure, that intellectual discipline
is hostile to the development of right feelings. That would seem to be the point in the later passage, where ``other categories of human potential''
are urged as an antidote to intellectual development. In effect, where the
humanist says, If only we were thoughtful, the humanisticist says, If only
we all felt the same way!



Humanisticism is sentimental, and in both senses of the word. The humanisticist
sees the sentiments, or perhaps the human propensity to feel sentiments,
as the quintessentially human attribute. He also puts faith, itself a sentiment,
in what he considers either the evidence or even the conclusions of feelings,
provided, of course, that they are ``right'' feelings. The delicious
glow of sated greed, for instance, which might well have been the portion
of those who   {\bfseries sold}  all those antennas, although not of those who developed
the theoretical understanding out of which they come, can   {\bfseries not}  be
trusted. It is not, in the language of {\itshape Cardinal Principles}, ``worthy.''



We can now reconsider a passage cited above, in which an educationistic
``researcher'' names ``the personal characteristics related
to transpersonal teaching'':


\begin{quote}

  
(1) 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.

\end{quote}



Those are surely decent sentiments, and they were almost certainly accepted
and even applauded as such by the committee that granted the man who approved
them a doctorate in education. They are also, of course, for what other
kind can there be, ``received'' sentiments, often expressed, often
approved, and sometimes even   {\bfseries felt}, at least in certain moods,
by some human beings.



As a program for the practice of ``transpersonal teaching,''
however, they may fail to satisfy. The goodness of man ``at his core''
needs some defining, and even some thought. Many will surely profess a belief
that man is good at his core without having any idea what they mean by those
terms and without any knowledge of the great history of human attempts to
understand exactly what those terms might be taken to mean and whether such
a belief could be justified by anything more than sentiment. Nevertheless,
one who holds such a belief is free to hold it, of course, in a total absence
of knowledge and thought. But what about one who not only holds that belief
but even recommends it to others, or, as in this case, puts it forth as
a belief that teachers should have if they want to be good, i.e., transpersonal?
Or, to put it more practically, how can the teacher-trainers provide their
students with ``a view of man as essentially and inherently good at
his core?''



Let's leave aside for now the question of   {\bfseries why}  they should want
to do that and ask only how it might be done. The intellectual study of
the history of that belief will not suffice, for it is simply a fact that
many who have pondered the proposition have concluded that it was either
false or meaningless. In any case, the teacher-trainers are little likely
to turn to intellectual study, which they already know to interdict right
emotional response and to encourage the skepticism out of which men design
transistors with no concern at all for the fact that transistors can be
used in weapons. Where study will not serve, only precept and example remain.
That's why the teachers of teachers, and then, of course, the teachers themselves,
give much attention to the skill of ``exhibiting behavior'' of a
certain kind. (That girl in the bunny outfit, whom you have probably forgotten,
but I have not, was practicing just that --- exhibiting a behavior calculated
to arouse appropriate sentiments in little children.) If you behave like
one who believes in man's good core, although exactly what deeds that might
require I can't begin to imagine, then your students will come to believe,
or at least come to believe that   {\bfseries you}  believe. The behavior by itself,
of course, will be ambiguous, perhaps even baffling, and unless you also
tell your students what your behavior means they may well conclude that
you're just a bit smarmy. Your acts and demeanor are ``reinforcement''
of the precept, the assertion that man's core is good. See?



The intrusion of the intellect at any point in this process is disastrous.
Even a simple question, ``Miss Jones, why exactly do you view man's
core as essentially good?'' will undo many months of exhibited behavior
and reiterated precept. Notice, please, that the disaster lies   {\bfseries in the
question}, not in the answer, although that would surely make
things even worse. It is the asking of the question that marks the intrusion
of the intellect, and it is no less devastating to humanisticism when the
question is, as in fact it   {\bfseries usually}  is, unspoken.



The inevitable collision of intellect and sentiment has even more frightful
consequences. In a Sunday school it would be a simple demonstration either
of dogmatism or typical grown-up hypocrisy, either of which children can
easily recognize and shrug off. But classes in school, although they are
in fact dedicated to the inculcation of beliefs, are often ostensibly devoted
to some small work of the mind. In a biology class, therefore, intellectual
inquiries are sometimes appropriate and sometimes not. The resultant confusion
between what is knowable and what is not, and between statement of fact
and assertion of belief, is usually sufficient to last any schoolchild for
the rest of his life. And, for all the recitation of precepts and exhibitions
of behavior, the lesson that he learns best is that his teachers could not
make such distinctions either. Nor could   {\bfseries their}  teachers.



To the incipient transpersonal teacher's view of man's core as good,
we must also add, if we are teacher-trainers, the belief that ``the
locus of power and authority in one's life is within the individual.''
This curious proposition bristles with terms that are going to need very
precise and narrow definitions if we are to find it credible. We will probably
find that its very attractiveness as a sentiment will be drastically diminished
when definitions are provided, and it is only in the absence of such definitions
that anyone can recommend it as a major virtue. It becomes ludicrous when
we imagine how the precept must be translated into practice in the teacher
academy. Gum-chewing girls, still troubled by acne and addicted to movie
magazines, will be persuaded that their chubby frames are loci of power
and authority, notwithstanding the fact that their skills, the instruments
of power, are minimal, and their knowledge, the root of authority, is meager.
And, thus persuaded, they will go forth to exhibit the appropriate behaviors
and recite the appropriate precepts in order to persuade poor and wretched
children into the same sad delusion.



Now that we have given our would-be transpersonal teachers the belief,
contrary to all evidence, that they are self-sufficient loci of power and
authority and that man's core is inherently good, it remains only to see
that they apply these values in ``life situations'' ``with flexibility,
and free of preconceptions of prejudice.'' Decisions, decisions. Well,
what the hell. Let us by all means hold unalterably to that value about
man's good core, until we flex it in a life situation, that is. On the other
hand, though, can it be that that very belief, that is, the belief that
we must be flexible about out beliefs, is one of those preconceptions and
prejudices of which we must be free? Or can it be that the value out of
which we flex our values is itself flexible, thus permitting us, in   {\bfseries certain
} life situations, to be flexible enough not to be flexible and to free
ourselves from that preconception about being free from preconceptions?
Or can we just lie down and forget the whole damn thing? Such absurdities
must always occur when the mouth runs off in the recitation of precepts
couched in vague generalizations and undefined terms. But they do not trouble
the educationistic humanisticists, who never seem to notice them. The important
thing is that the precept   {\bfseries sounds}  good. And it does --- quite good
enough, in fact, to be elevated into a principle of teacher education, where
the disruptive questions of the intellect will never intrude.



I have been talking, of course, not of the specific program of any teacher-training
academy but of Waterman's notions of ``the personal characteristics
related to transpersonal teaching.'' It may be, I admit, that there
is somewhere in America a teacher academy that rejects such notions and
also the notion that such notions have anything at all to do with effective
teaching, but I don't think so. Waterman's ``characteristics'' are
painfully familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the loudly proclaimed
humanisticism of teacher-training. That's exactly the sort of thing they
  {\bfseries all}  say, and that they   {\bfseries all}  champion as our only protection
against the unbridled ruthlessness of intellectual discipline, also known
as ``excellence narrowly defined.''



Excellence   {\bfseries broadly}  defined, however, is a mild master. It can
be anything you like. And when broadly defined excellence is understood
as the goal of a pious and humanisticist education, any sanctimonious amateur
can fancy himself a teacher of anything at all. In the teacher academies
this permits some startling but not at all uncommon courses, in which ``appreciation''
is the aim, in despite of knowledge.



A splendid example of the hokum thus generated came in the mail one day
to the editorial offices of {\itshape The Underground Grammarian.} It was a
mimeographed sheet, headed by one of those silly smiling faces and announcing
a course in the Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction at
the University of Tennessee. The course, ``The Existential Student,''
was for   {\bfseries seniors}  and   {\bfseries graduate}  students, and the ``teacher,''
who billed himself as ``Seminar Co-ordinator,'' was a certain Anand
Kumar Malik. His powers must be unbounded; here's what he proposes:


\begin{quote}

  
{\itshape OBJECTIVES:}  {\bfseries }  Aim is to introduce the students in an informal
  situation to the major themes in existentialism and humanism; to make them
  aware of their basic inner freedom to lead an authentic life, to sing their
  own song, to dance their way through life, to relate themselves to themselves
  through self-understanding, to relate themselves to others through non-ego
  love, to accept their complete academic responsibility to their own growth
  and to enrich their own educational curriculum and life experiences. All
  in harmony with their basic responsibilities to others in the world.

\end{quote}



There follows a description of the intended ``Learning Experiences,''
on which I would like to comment, but cannot. My power of language is just
not sufficient. Fortunately,  {\bfseries }  however, a letter was enclosed with
the announcement.  {\bfseries }  It was printed in its entirety in {\itshape The Underground
Grammarian} thus:

\begin{quote}

Song and Dance in Tennessee

Dear Underground, I have been reading and studying you magazine for sometime
and I truly do enjoy reading it. The onliest thing is, is that it is hard
to study out what it means. A least always. I don't mean the Latin or whatever
it is in the ``headlines'' which I can skip them anyway but it seems
to me that folks up   {\bfseries North}  make things out harder than they have to
be some time and you could learn from us as well. You take Philosophy, as
any one would call it a hard ``subject'' (but not in Knoxville)
because you would want to read about the material dialects and the rational.
Still, I think you would very seriously do it but end up finally with book
learning that is alright in its place, however, life must go on as they
say. You will see from the ``enclosed'' that Philosophy does not
have to be hard, and not even Existentialism that is the hardest known Philosophy.
It tells about Anand Kumar Malik and his course he is teaching called
The Existential Student, and very well put by the ``headline.''
``You are hereby invited to become no one but yourself.'' It gives
a good feeling and the smiling face picture really gets the message across.
Any one who could get themselves down to the University of Tennessee, in
Knoxville this summer, could learn Existentialism  {\bfseries  and}  Humanism thrown
in as the flyer says in only four (4) weeks in the dept. of Education, and
that's what it {\itshape i}s about after all. If I may give some quotes
from the flier you will see that school can be fun, when the students learn
``to sing their own song'' and ``to dance their way through
life.'' It gives some selected writings too, and as I said there is
not a thing wrong with book learning, but I have to admit that I don't recognize
the names, except Elizabeth Lacey tells me that a friend of hers has a whole
book of Philosophy by that Mr. Kahlil Gibran, or probably Prof. Gibran,
and she says that he is ``very good.'' (  {\bfseries Exact}  quote!) They
will have existential music and existential art slides, and ``making
your own existential painting.'' Best of all is they will ``relate
themselves to themselves through self-understanding'' and that makes
good sense if you ask me in my humble opinion. Maybe you shouldn't think
school should be all that hard as you seem to think some times, because
here is Mr. Malik whose not only an education teacher but he can teach Existentialism
too, and he even lets the students figure up their grades so there won't
be all that worry about flunking (failing.) Now that {\itshape is} the whole
difference right there between the teachers and the others, and I bet you
you won't find any cheerful smiling face picture drawn up at the top of
any fancy medical school flyer. You take doctors and lawyers and even I
hope you don't mind my saying so some of your college professors and you
will find there is more than just one stuffed shirt between them. That is
because all those ``subjects'' they study they make them so serious
as though somebody's or other   {\bfseries life}  depended on it. Life isn't all
a rose colored glass, you know, and it is good to have faith that our school
teachers can learn Existentialism and dance through it with a song in their
heart nevertheless. I know you hate mistakes, so I looked up the hard words.

\end{quote}




To that breathtaking commentary I can add only a few trivial footnotes:
The writers whose ``existential themes'' are to be studied in four
weeks are eighteen in number and range from Kierkegaard to Susan Polis Schutz,
and include Carlos Castaneda as well as that celebrated existentialist,
Kahlil Gibran. The students, who will, of course, determine their own grades,
even as they sing their own songs and dance  {\bfseries }  their own ways, will
also keep ``a small diary of\ldots brief reactions to some existential
ideas.'' Small. Brief. Some. And naturally,   {\bfseries reactions}.  Knowledge
is not at issue. Each student is promised ``an annotated bibliography
on existentialism and humanism (for\ldots continuous self-development after
the seminar is over.)'' Continuous self-development. As to how (or whether)
existentialism and humanism are distinguished I cannot say.



The ordinary citizen, contemplating such a juvenile parody  {\bfseries }  of
scholarship, is inclined to protect his sanity by assuming that such a course
is a freakish anomaly. That, alas, cannot be so. This instructor, after
all, is not an independent entrepreneur peddling self-help and uplift down
at the Community Center on Tuesday evenings from seven to nine. This course
is offered with the approval and connivance of his colleagues and co-conspirators
in that Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction and the entire
administrative apparatus of the University of Tennessee. And that means,
dear citizen, that not one of all those professors, committee members, chairmen,
deans, vice-presidents, and who can say how many other functionaries, probably
including legislative committees and the governor himself, had either enough
knowledge or concern to suggest that the king was naked.



It would probably be a mistake to assume that the students enrolled in
such a course were taken in by it, although there will be a few in any teacher-training
program slow and gullible enough to mistake a small diary of brief
reactions for the work of the mind. Students take those courses precisely
  {\bfseries because}  they are silly and easy, and you would do the same. Those
credits are worth money. And on the other side of the transaction, the existence
of such a course is also worth money --- and professional respectability,
and job security --- to the one who teaches it and the system that permits
it. That makes me suspicious. Although I think that I can understand why
those seniors and graduate students, in search of certificates and raises,
might gladly take courses like ``The Existential Student,'' I find
it less easy to be tolerant of those who teach and sponsor them and of what
can only be called the corporate complicity of the entire system of public
education in America.



Furthermore, it is discouraging to notice that the graduates of our teachers'
colleges do   {\bfseries not}, as you might think, all forswear the nonsense
to which they have been subjected once they have their certificates in hand.
Or, if they do, they are remarkably secretive about it. In the kingdom of
educationism, outspoken dissidents are rare. This is because those few who
  {\bfseries do}  dissent and shake off the childish humanisticism of their
education courses have good reason to know that nothing can be done about
anything. But it must also be because there are in any teachers' college
enough of the slow and gullible to form a permanent population of committed
humanisticists who will never change. I conclude that this must be so, for
there is no other way to account for the existence and growing numbers of
institutions like the Connecticut Teachers' Center for Humanistic Education,
which was described thus in the pages of {\itshape The Underground Grammarian:}



The Black Whole of Connecticut
``Mistah Kurtz --- he transpersonalized.''



The center cannot hold, you say? Poo. Come with us now, up some tranquil
New England waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth and into
the heart of an immense darkness. There, we will come at last to the Connecticut
Teachers' Center for Humanistic Education, and it's holding very well indeed,
thank you.



Dark humanistic shapes we will make out in the distance, flitting indistinctly
against the gloomy border of the forest, and, chief among them, brooding
over some inscrutable purpose, Emily, the Assistant Director. All we know
of her is what we read in {\itshape Centering,} the Center's little newsletter.
Here it is --- {\itshape sic:}


\begin{quote}

  
Emily has experience training in the areas of Bio-energetics, Psychosynthesis,
  Gestalt Therapy, Arica Psychocalesthenics, Yoga and Tai Chi. Emily has
  been a consultant to Connecticut Public Schools\ldots in self-awareness
  training, confluent education, and organization development\ldots Emily is
  committed to working with individuals wholistically --- facilitating
  the integration of their emotional, intellectual, physical and transpersonal
  aspects.

\end{quote}



In the hush that falls suddenly upon the whole (or ``hole,'')
sorrowful land, do remember that Emily is only the   {\bfseries Assistant}  Director.
What must   {\bfseries he}  be, who can direct the labors of such an assistant?
And whose heads are those, their transpersonal aspects hideously integrated
on self-awareness training poles, that fence these murky precincts? They
look so small.



We are lost, lost in an area. Is it the area of Psychosynthesis or the
area of Tai Chi? Could we be in the neighborhood of Bioenergetics or even
in the immediate environs of Arica Psychocalesthenics? Who knows? They look
so much alike. That's why we all need Assistant Directors, real   {\bfseries professionals
} of education, with rigorous ``experience training'' in areas.
Oh, what a mistake we made studying junk like geography when what we ought
to have had was experience training somewhere in the area-awareness area.
Now we just can't seem to facilitate the integration of   {\bfseries any}  of our
aspects. The horror, the horror.



We have, of course, no idea at all of what teachers   {\bfseries do}  in a teachers'
center, and we obviously never will, for the gravity of the Black Whole
of Connecticut is so enormous that no light escapes. We can only guess,
therefore, that teachers hie themselves there to have their Gestalten therapized
in the lotus position, performing the while, quietly within the psyche,
synthesizing calesthenics, whatever   {\bfseries those}  may be, interspersed with
an occasional aspect-integrating and big-energizing round of Tai Chi, perhaps
a confluent form of Parcheesi for individuals. That would explain a lot.



That's all we can tell you. Like that other cryptic screed, our source
gave ``no practical hints to interpret [or even to understand] the magic
current of its phrases\ldots unless a kind of note\ldots scrawled evidently
much later, may be regarded as the exposition of a method,'' or, at
least, of a course in methodology. ``It was very simple, and at the
end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed\ldots luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Excruciate
the brats!' '' And that, of course, would explain   {\bfseries everything}. 







Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it isn't out of cynicism but something worse that
students in teachers' colleges take courses in self-relating through life
experiences. Maybe it's folly. Maybe stupidity. Maybe it's just the paralysis
of the mind that may well befall anyone who has taken enough of such courses
and listened to such cant and endured, bored and thus uncritical, the foolish
circular arguments, generalizations, and non sequiturs of educationistic
vaporizing. The teachers who frequent that Connecticut Teachers' Center
for Humanistic Education, and there must be some, perhaps many, go there
of their own free will. They must   {\bfseries want}  Psychosynthesis and Tai Chi.
They must want to be worked with ``wholistically'' in the cause
of the facilitation of the integration of their aspects. And the educationist
bureaucrats who take our money for the support of the Connecticut Teachers'
Center for Humanistic Education must want the teachers to want such things.
And the schools must have wanted to consult with Emily, again at our expense,
on self-awareness training and organization development. In a world where
all of that is not only possible but even usual, cynicism seems a refreshing
virtue.



But it is precisely in such a climate, where self-help facilitations
and puerile popularizations can blossom, that the pseudo-science and pseudo-religion
of educationism can spread and flourish. In a climate of hard knowledge
and rational analysis such flamboyant weeds would wither and die in a season.
But that won't happen. To their unique blend of the illogical and the sentimental,
the educationists have added the techniques of a man to whom they owe far
more than they do to Horace Mann, or John Dewey, or even Wundt, poor Wundt.
The guiding spirit of the   {\bfseries methods}  of educationism, if not the ideology,
is, of course, Dale Carnegie.




\chapter{The Pygmies' Revenge}




Peter's well-known Principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew
nothing at all about schools. In schools it just isn't true that the people
who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves,
at last and forever, in the jobs they can't do. This is because the most
difficult and demanding jobs in education are what industry calls ``entry-level
positions,'' teaching in classrooms. That's the bottom rung of the school
ladder, and there are many people who just can't do that work. It isn't,
in itself, very difficult work; all it takes is intelligence, diligence,
talent, and a little bit of luck. Those who have some of the first three,
however, often run clean out of the fourth when they start taking education
courses and start worrying more about enhancing their personological variables
than about collecting more knowledge. (Furthermore, teaching obviously has
to be done in a school, and many of our schools, after decades of eschewing
``mere information'' in the cause of ``worthy citizenship,''
have turned into lawless encampments of armed barbarians where no one can
teach and no one can learn.) Those who are short on intelligence, diligence,
and talent, however, find their luck much improved by the fact that the
teachers' colleges are designed for just such people.



Thus, partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and
partly because so many are born to incompetence, in every faculty there
will be people who just can't handle the entry-level position. In industry,
or even in a fast-food restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don't
do that kind of thing in the schools, especially since public school teaching
is more and more used by government as a jobs program for the less able.
In the schools, those who cannot do the work at the lowest rank are simply
promoted into higher ranks. Weirdly enough, given the nature of the educational
enterprise, this makes perfect sense.



In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true
that higher rank and higher pay do go along with harder work. In the schools,
where there   {\bfseries is}  no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly
the opposite is true. In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly
splendid school in which there are only teachers and one clever and industrious
handyman who can also type. On the other hand, think for a moment about
the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving,
a school made up almost entirely of administrators and their own ``support
services.'' (They usually call them that.) In such a school we would
see clearly what we now can see only darkly, through the frosted glass of
governmental mandate and educationistic dogma: that almost all of the work
done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so that there may be
more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in
schools is intended not to   {\bfseries do work}, as a physicist would use
the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of some administrative
post.



It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated
jargon, superbly suited to the darkening of logic and the interminable belaboring
of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic administrator
needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn't
need doing. If you want to rise in the school business, you have to master
the lingo. This is another reason why good teachers don't become principals
and superintendents: The very attributes that make them good teachers also
make it impossible for them to talk about experiential remediation enhancement
strategies with straight faces. And if there is one attribute a principal
or superintendent needs, it's a perfectly straight face. You have to believe.
Solemnly.



When those who can't teach want to improve themselves by becoming supervisors
of those who   {\bfseries can}  teach, they must go through, once again,
the strait gate of the teachers' college. Outside of that church, there
is no salvation. They must return, perhaps on Monday and Thursday evenings,
to the study, if that's the word, of such arcana as Curriculum Development
and Supervision, Career and Guidance Counseling, and Educational Administration/Management.
Since there is little to be learned about such matters, the courses are
easy, requiring mostly the ability to tolerate ponderous recitations of
the trivial and obvious and a mind just weak enough to fall without a struggle
into an habitual inanity in language. These are the very proclivities that
have made the poorer teachers what they are, so there is no shortage of
suitable candidates for graduate study in the schools of education. While
the steady stream of aspirants to lofty (nonteaching) rank assures perpetual
public funding for the teachers' colleges and pleasant, permanent employment
for professors of education, it has some even more unhappy consequences.
It assures that the anti-intellectual climate of the public high schools
will prevail in the colleges and universities as well. Except for the uncharacteristically
depraved, professors of chemistry or history, or of any traditional discipline
with a concrete and growing body of knowledge, simply don't   {\bfseries want}  to
do the boring and empty work of administration. They gladly leave that to
the educationists and other nonacademic arrivistes in higher education,
who gladly take it. Thus it comes to pass that in most of our colleges and
universities policy decisions about academic matters are regularly made
by direct descendants of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education, to whom intellectual discipline and mere information are pesky
impediments to worthy ethical character and right emotional response.



The work of school administration, therefore, usually has two typical
attributes: Because it must justify the very existence of school administration,
it must seem time-consuming and difficult. Because it is an instrument of
educationistic ideology, it must be ``humanistic'' and ``democratic,''
as the educationists understand those terms, which is to say emotional and
collective rather than coldly knowledgeable and authoritarian. You can recognize
in the typical administrative committee, therefore, a long-trouser version
of the social studies class envisioned in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} where
it is imagined that ignorant but right-feeling children will corporately
hatch out wisdom.



Here, from the pages of {\itshape The Underground Grammarian,} is an example
of how the administrative work of an institution of higher education is
actually done:



Ask a Stupid Question\ldots 



Glassboro has so many low-ranking, junior administrators that it's hard
to find them useful work. We don't even try, in fact; we just find them
things to play with.



George Wildman and Robert Harris are co-chairmen of the Task Force on
Recruitment, Retention, and Image. We don't know how they produce their
prose --- whether by one as told to the other or by taking turns word
by word --- but here's how it comes out:


\begin{quote}

  
In the first two sessions of the Task Force, the group explored the
  task facing them. Discussion ensued during these sessions concerning the
  goals and objectives to be accomplished. The Committee began the task of
  gathering supporting data by virtue of reports supplied by the offices
  of Admissions, Counseling, and the Registrar. Considerable time was spent
  attempting to define terminology as a basis for functioning, and much thought
  was given in an attempt to identify some of the major concerns which the
  Task Force would be facing in its work.

\end{quote}



The first, second, and fourth sentences of that paragraph say the same
thing, although the fourth   {\bfseries does}  add that bit about defining
``terminology [terms?] as a basis for functioning.'' The third sentence
actually has its own thing to say, but only that they ``began the task
of gathering.'' Does that mean that they began gathering or that they
began getting ready to gather? This sentence also uses ``by virtue of''
as though it meant ``from.'' Never ask a junior administrator to
say something straight out. He'd rather be knocked flat in an airport by
O. J. Simpson. (Good idea.)



Since the combined salaries of the twenty members of the Task Force must
be more than half a million dollars a year we're glad to report that their
labor has had some results. As early as their second meeting, they divided
themselves into three ``interest-area subcommittees'' (shouldn't
that be sub-Task Forces or Task Forcelets?), one each for Recruitment, Retention,
and Image.



They did more. Each interest-area subcommittee undertook to ``define
its term.''



Now you would think that any fool could define {\itshape recruitment, retention,
}and even {\itshape image,} although why that should be necessary is not
clear. We have to guess that many members of the Task Force were unacquainted
with those words and needed remediational input.



Discussion ensued by virtue of input, and tasks were explored. Thought
was given in an attempt, and time was spent attempting.



By the next meeting, each ``interest-area'' subcommittee had
defined ``its term.'' Here's what they found --- as a basis for
functioning:


\begin{quote}

  
recruitment: the institution's philosophy and procedures by which we
  attempt to attract students to continue their education\ldots 

  
retention: the ability of the college to hold students who are pursuing
  a degree program (B.A., M.A., including certification) .

  
image: the reflection of reality and substance.

\end{quote}






The language of these administrators is symbolic, as language always
is, although in this case not consciously symbolic. They do on the page
exactly what they do in their jobs. They say over and over again a thing
that needs no saying in the first place. They set themselves, at public
expense, to the silly task of defining, in   {\bfseries groups}  no less,
terms (or, as they prefer, terminology) that need no defining. If their
labors were successful, they would learn at great expense of time and money
what any thoughtful person could have told them at their first meeting,
and they will inevitably propose the obvious. They will urge more recruitment
and retention along with image-enhancement.



It is important for the ordinary citizen to realize that such  {\bfseries }  committees,
through whose agency almost everything is done in Academe, are not composed
entirely of administrators. There will always be some members who are only
incipient administrators making themselves useful and noteworthy, some junior
professors bucking for promotion and not at all reluctant to be parties
to a lengthy and arduous reinvention of the wheel, and other faculty members
somewhat less than passionately devoted to their chosen disciplines. The
latter, of course, are usually from an education department, where a passionate
devotion to discipline is precluded not only by the questionable nature
and content of what is taught but by the traditional animosity to discipline
itself.



If you can assemble enough such people and assign them an especially
ambiguous errand, neither of which is at all difficult in a school, you
can easily devise an educationistic enterprise that can go on, literally,
forever:



The Future Lies Ahead!


\begin{quote}

  
Early in the Fall, the Needs Assessment Task Force was asked to study
  the process of Academic Planning as it presently exists at Southwest Texas
  State University and determine whether we should implement a different
  process. (From the works of Joseph Caputo, VP for AcAff.)

\end{quote}



As the time for dinner approaches, the standard American amateur looks
in the refrigerator. He notices some food. He takes some of it out and cooks
it. Then he eats it. It's so crude; any savage could do it. Here in Academe,
we are ``professionals,'' and we have better ways of doing things.



First we establish a committee to consider whether or not there should
  {\bfseries be}  any dinner, and, if so, whether or not it should actually be eaten,
and, if again so, where, and when, and by whom. Then we form a subcommittee
to decide what, if anything, to cook, and how. Now we discover that we need
a study group to consider whether or not dinner-planning is, in fact, all
that simple, and to establish its parameters and to explore the implications
of fiscal, curricular, and societal restraints that may be perceived as
existing. Or maybe not. But the study group cannot do its work until we
have definitive findings from the Needs Assessment Task Force, which is
``to study the process of Academic Planning as it presently exists\ldots and determine whether we should implement a different process.''



The Needs Assessment Task Force down at Southwest Texas State University,
where the squirrels   {\bfseries also}  rush around the brush, has done its
work. Here's some of it:


\begin{quote}

  
An Academic Planning Model must involve a futures planning component.
  Goals should be set for some time in the future. These goals should be
  translated into shorter-term objectives for which the degree of detail
  and concreteness varies inversely with the lead time. There should also
  be reasonable suspense dates for implementation of plans and a definitive
  methodology for evaluation and feedback. The interfacing of long-term\ldots and short-term planning should result.

\end{quote}



So, you thought that only a herd of nerds would set themselves to wondering
whether or not to plan how to plan, eh? No siree! It takes some of the sharpest
thinkers in Academe to discover and announce that plans are about the ``future,''
not the past!



They're even smart enough to call for the involvement of a component,
which would never occur to an ordinary human being, and a definitive methodology,
where any simpleminded taxpayer would have settled for a mere method.



That's not all, of course. The Task Forcers also urge ``update features,''
prudently left unspecified so that yet another task can be forced on yet
another task force, and warn against the ``counterproductive hurdle,''
the worst kind. One of their main conclusions, solemnly pronounced, probably
after much deliberation and searching of heart, is that an Academic Planning
Model (they always capitalize it) should actually   {\bfseries work}, or,
as they put it, ``be functional.'' They further opine, cutting right
to the bone, that any plan that will work, will in fact work: ``Any
Academic Planning Model to be considered\ldots would positively impact [wham!]
our decision-making process to the extent that it accomplishes its designed
purpose.''



To proclaim the obvious in language that is odious is, of course, the
regular practice of the educationists, who love to serve on task forces
(they put that kind of stuff in their resumes and grant applications), and
have no moral or intellectual objections to writing at length about nothing.
However, at least one member of this task force was   {\bfseries not}  an
educationist, but an {\itshape agent provocateur} and a subtle ironist. On his
backward colleagues he foisted the one sentence that says it all: ``An
Academic Planning process must not become viewed by the participants as
activity to be finished so that they may return to the real business of
the university.''






Then again, to be sure, the revelation of that last sentence may have
been due simply to ineptitude. But the revelation is a true one, for, as
far as the educationist is concerned, ``the real business of the university''
is not what you probably think.



For years, I have been looking around for the key, the master metaphor,
the one striking analogy that would clarify and dramatize the nature of
our schools. They are, of course, something like the asylum where the inmates
have taken over, but that doesn't do the whole job. They are more like some
island nation in which the traditional, mild, but inefficient governance
once exercised by a genteel but effete and distracted aristocracy has been
taken over, without any bloodshed at all, by bands of persistent pygmies
from the unexplored interior. The less than worldly aristocrats, far more
interested in watching for comets and collecting Lepidoptera than in zoning
rules and customs control, were not displeased to accede when the pygmies
drifted in and offered to do all the hard work. It seemed such a good idea
at the time, but by now the pygmies are in charge of everything, and the
bemused aristocrats, whose ancestral estates have been converted to miniature
golf courses, find that they are sipping their soup out of very small spoons.



But that metaphor isn't enough either, for it does not provide a place
for the only slightly rationalized vengefulness that characterizes the educationists'
almost complete governance of what was once an academic and intellectual
confederation of semiautonomous principalities. We might do better to think
of Bolsheviks in the Winter Palace, or the moneychangers in the temple who
have it in mind not only to do a flourishing business but to preach the
doctrine as well, thus ensuring that business will always flourish. I think
that latter analogy especially good, but not very entertaining. The former,
however, while even less entertaining, may be even better, for educationism
is in fact an ideological collectivism devoted to social change through
institutionalized thought control, but of that more later.



Perhaps the best metaphor, although unfortunately the nastiest, is that
of racism. If we could divide the world of schools roughly, and it would
be very roughly at best, into two ``races,'' the academicians and
the educationists, we would find some useful analogies. The educationists,
although long released from slavery, have indubitably been treated like
second-class citizens and kept in the ghettos. From the point of view of
the academicians, the department of education, where not even the educationists
have been able to identify a concrete body of knowledge out of which to
make a ``subject,'' is as much a ghetto as any local public school.
The educationists, although they eagerly do the scutwork of administration,
have never been admitted into the society of the ``learned,'' and
they have had to make their own sub-society complete with its own sub-Phi
Beta Kappa and countless subjournals of sub-scholarship. (It is an interesting
irony that the learned journals of literary criticism, for example, are
often as pretentiously impenetrable as anything you can find in any one
of those apparently countless journals of educationistic research into perceived
personological variables, but the diction is more noble and the verbs almost
always agree with the subjects.) In faculty dining rooms all over the country,
historians and biologists and professors of Renaissance literature happily
lunch together, but the educationists usually keep to themselves. The very
degrees that educationists award one another are held to be inferior to
the degrees that the academicians award one another. Although the traditional
``original contribution to scholarship'' expected of the academic
doctoral dissertation is often ludicrously picayune, the dissertation in
education, often nothing more than a report on the results of some questionnaire,
ordinarily deals with either the obvious, like the conclusion that children
who want to learn will learn more than those who don't; or the trivial,
like the mechanics of pencil distribution; or the utterly ineffable, like
the perceived personological existential variables. Furthermore, the doctorate
in education almost never requires that signal cachet of the learned scholar,
competence in foreign languages. This often cited distinction is enough
by itself to ``prove'' to the academicians the innate inferiority
of the race of educationists.



The prejudice is real, and the educationists, naturally, resent it. Much
of what they do, therefore, can be understood as an expectably hostile thirst
for revenge. {\itshape Cardinal Principles is} only superficially a plan for
secondary education; it is essentially a {\itshape Summa contra gentiles}, a
stick-it-to-the-intellectuals manifesto. The pronouncements of {\itshape Cardinal
Principles} must be read in two ways.



Consider, for example, the proposition that a disciplined academic study
of literature, whatever that might mean, precludes ``right emotional
response.'' On the one hand, that shows the ``humane'' intention
to provide students with the ``best'' that literature has to offer,
certain feelings, presumably good to have. It asserts, and who would deny,
that the pity and terror of tragedy will strike even those who are utterly
ignorant of the textual variants, although it also provides the possibility
that pity or terror might not be included among the ``right'' emotional
responses. On the other hand, it makes clear that the ``teachers''
of literature in the secondary schools can do   {\bfseries their}  jobs without
having to go through all that disciplined scholarship by which those lofty
academicians make their livings. From that notion it is not far to the next,
to wit, that the academicians are in fact   {\bfseries preventing}  right emotional
response with their footnotes and critical editions and that the only path
to right emotional response is the deliberate neglect of such things. With
the next step we can see that ignorance is better than knowledge, an idea
singularly attractive to those who have not   {\bfseries read}  any of the
footnotes or critical editions.



The dream of putting down the scornful mighty from their chairs also
informs another cardinal tenet of educationism: the notion widely held in
the teacher academies that all a teacher needs is training in how to teach,
with which he can teach anything at all, perhaps with a little boning up.
Thus it is that the high school social studies teacher, already inoculated
against the dehumanizing effects of the ``mere information'' associated
with the disciplined study of history, can readily be retreaded into a teacher
of English. After all, we all speak English, don't we? In any case, what
is important is not what a teacher knows but how he relates to the students.
Such ideas are impossible where academic subjects are held important in
themselves, but where they are seen only as the devices by which to generate
feelings it is inevitable that existentialism (  {\bfseries and}  humanism,
in the same package deal) boils down to singing your own song and dancing
your way through life in a two-week summer session.



Such Jack-of-all-tradesism, although long a regular practice in the public
schools, is a little harder to get away with in colleges and universities.
But   {\bfseries just}  a little. Anand Kumar Malik, you must have noticed, seems
to have had no trouble at all in setting up shop as a teacher of philosophy
and even of painting at the same time. Here we can see the mighty consequences
of the fact that educationists are eager to serve on committees and to undertake
the dull labors of administration. Without powerful co-conspirators in the
superstructure at the University of Tennessee, Malik would have been laughed
off the campus and sent to sing and dance for a much smaller supper in the
Thursday evening class at the YMCA.



It probably isn't exactly true that we become what we hate. It seems
more likely that we become a parody of what we hate. Certainly the oppressed
and scorned educationists, driven in part by oppression and scorn to denigrate
the very intellectual powers they are said to lack, are pathetically eager
nevertheless to lay claim to those powers for themselves, and also to the
expertise that such powers can provide. Thus they put themselves forth as---well,
not exactly professors of philosophy, but at least as easy professors of
easy philosophy. Students like that, of course, but it makes professors
of philosophy glum.



Given the principle that any subject matter is a useful device for the
generation of socially desirable feeling, and given also the fact that policymaking
in colleges and universities has been conceded to the educationists who
proclaim that given principle, it follows that ``higher'' education
will have its analogues of the phys. ed. teacher who takes over when the
biology teacher gets pregnant, of course. But it   {\bfseries also}  follows,
even more ominously, that there is really no need for a biology teacher
in the first place. And in college, where the biology teacher is firmly
entrenched in tradition and tenure, it further follows that the study of
biology itself might just as well be replaced with something else, something
that can be ``taught'' by one who knows little of biology but who
has been trained as a teacher and whose eye is on not the biology itself
but on whatever worthy attitudes that may, or should, arise from the study
of biology. Since those attitudes   {\bfseries are}  the worth of the study,
why bother with the study when one can jump right into the attitudes?



Here is an example of exactly such a leap of faith, which legitimizes
a startling educationistic Anschluss of a host of traditional and concretely
identifiable academic studies:



Long Underdue



The Department of Foundations of Education has proposed a workshop in
``intercultural education'' to tack three more hours onto a course
in the same thing, if that   {\bfseries is}  a thing. From reading the proposal,
we guess that both course and workshop call for lots of ``relating''
and ``interacting,'' and, naturally, ``problemsolving,''
with ``foci on direct field experience'' and ``working on real
school or/and community problems.'' (That sure beats indirect field
experience and fake problems; but these folk are into ``professional''
matters, not amateur dabbling like math or history.) As far as we can tell,
there will be no study of any identifiable body of knowledge, just rapping,
preferably with someone who says {\itshape Mama mia!} now and then.



This workshop is not expected to have results; it anticipates ``outcomes,''
outcomes of some ``nature.'' One anticipated outcome is:


\begin{quote}

  
of the nature of\ldots development of ability to anticipate factors
  likely to influence proposals for changes in human relations\ldots 

\end{quote}



What this means, of course, is that they hope the student will be informed,
rational, and prudent. So hope we all; but to suggest that there are forms
of rationality and prudence specifically germane to ``intercultural
relations'' is fatuous. To suggest further that someone knows how to
instill those virtues is patently absurd, if not mendacious. Who is rational
and prudent needs no workshop to teach him how to be rational and prudent
about Bulgarians any more than a man who can find the diameter of circle
needs to be schooled in the methodology of finding the diameter of a pizza;
and who is neither prudent nor rational will scarcely be helped through
chatting with Bulgarians. Furthermore, who would become knowledgeable about
Bulgarians will do better to study their history or language or literature
than to pursue


\begin{quote}

  
[d]evelopment of ability to apply selected tools or procedures for analyzing,
  assessing, and surveying school and/or community provisions for intercultural
  education.

\end{quote}



And how will students show that they have (get? interact with? what?)
these outcomes? The proposal looks for ``taped evidence of interaction
with other cultures'' (they probably mean a   {\bfseries person}  from
another culture), ``oral presentations that exemplify good intercultural
education practices,'' ``peer performance assessments,'' ``records
of participation'' (in what, would you guess?), and even ``practical
written tools'' (try to figure  {\bfseries  that}  one out).



We must put aside small questions (how, for instance, is a good intercultural
education practice different from other good education practices?) to explore
the central question: What, exactly, is the subject matter here? Is it information
about diverse cultures?   {\bfseries That}  is  {\bfseries }  available---inescapable,
in fact---in the study of anthropology, art, economics, geography, history,
language, literature, philosophy, religion, and many other traditional disciplines.
Is this the study of the collisions of cultures and their effects upon one
another? Ditto. Is this a study of tolerance and love?



The proposers cannot intend either of the first two, for if they do,
there is no need to propose anything. Let's hope they don't mean that third
possibility. There must be   {\bfseries some}  limits to what they can teach.



If intercultural education is in truth some new subject matter not yet
widely known, it must have been described   {\bfseries somewhere}  in clear
English and with concrete reference to things in the real world. We deserve
to hear such a description, since the language of the proposal tells us
little (that's often the aim of this kind of jargon) and makes us suspect
much.



We must in fairness say that the proposal has been given comprehensive,
penetrating scrutiny and analysis by the very Dean of Professional Studies,
so it seems only honest to print   {\bfseries her}  commentary --- in full:



A good idea-long overdue.



The background of that proposal is instructive: In the State of New Jersey,
as in many other states, students in teacher-training programs are required
to have some instruction in what is generally called the ``appreciation''
of other cultures. This seems to be all the more important as the public
schools, especially in the cities, fill up with children of recently arrived
immigrants from many different lands. I say that it ``seems'' important,
because I'm not sure that it is really necessary to ``appreciate''
Bulgarian culture, whatever that means, in order to teach arithmetic to
children whose parents came from Bulgaria, although it would obviously do
a math teacher no harm to have   {\bfseries knowledge}  about Bulgarian culture.
But the mandate, in any case, is not for knowledge. The incipient teacher
is to   {\bfseries appreciate}  other cultures so that he can   {\bfseries relate}  and  {\bfseries  interact}. 



Here we see again --- we see it everywhere --- the shadow of {\itshape Cardinal
Principles.} Knowledge, generally a matter of mere information, is untrustworthy
as a generator of right response, so that intercultural appreciation can
be taught through learning some folk dances and sampling the traditional
cookies of many lands. But it   {\bfseries must}  be taught, for those who
award teaching certificates require it. They require it because their cousins
in the teacher academies, whose enrollments are falling, need some more
required courses with which to justify their continued employment. In the
same cause, and with the great weight of the tradition of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,
}the teacher-trainers must hold that such academic studies as anthropology,
history, literature, or language can   {\bfseries not}  provide a worthy
appreciation of other cultures. Since the teacher-trainers, and the certifiers,
and the managers and bureaucrats of entire systems of state education are
all from the same litter, and since legislators all have more important
things than education to think about, especially in New Jersey, where someone
has to pay attention to casinos, basic minimum intercultural appreciation
speedily becomes the law of the land. And the professors of education who
get to ``teach'' it have assured their continued employment and
proved yet again that a teacher can teach anything, anything at all.



Educationists can say that, of course, only when ``anything''
means ``anything that should be taught,'' in the system of worthiness
enunciated in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} and when ``taught'' means
``produced as a response to stimulus,'' as defined in the methodology
of behavior modification. You will notice that the state-supported monopoly
in intercultural education does   {\bfseries not}  concede that a professor
of anthropology can teach ``the appreciation of other cultures.''
Far from it, he is all too likely to teach mere information, which may or
may not lead to what   {\bfseries should}  be taught, appreciation, the worthy
response.



That's why the word ``appreciation'' is so important both in
{\itshape Cardinal Principles} and in all educationistic theorizing thereafter.
First, it sounds good. Who can be against it? More important, it is a code
word with which to indicate, without having to be concrete and specific,
any or all of the ``worthy'' attributes that we may expect as the
student outcomes of anything that is done in school, however trivial or
trendy. In one sense, ``appreciation'' is familiar to anyone who
has been through ``Music Appreciation,'' a course that usually does
  {\bfseries not}  require any study or knowledge of harmony, counterpoint,
or even the classification of elementary forms, although it often does provide
uplifting or entertaining vignettes from the lives of composers. In another
and far more important sense, the meaning of ``appreciation'' is
what is embedded in the notion that when we have learned some Bulgarian
folk dances we will better ``appreciate'' Bulgarian culture, and
that that will be good. ``Appreciation'' seems to be used to suggest
an amiable tolerance of that which someone thinks we   {\bfseries ought}  to
tolerate but probably wouldn't if we were left alone.



A student outcome of the order of appreciation has another tremendous
value in an anti-intellectual education: No one can measure it. No one can
measure ``right emotional response'' or ``worthy ethical character''
either. The value of such student outcomes is in fact double. They make
it impossible to check up on the effectiveness of a curriculum, and they
permit the bogus ``research'' of educationistic theorizing, in which
such things as existentiality and commitment to the goodness of man at his
core are put forth as measurable quantities. Who is to say, after all, exactly
which students, and with what ardor, are indeed singing their own songs
and dancing their ways through life after two weeks of harmony and small-group
discussions at the University of Tennessee? Unfortunately, someone probably
  {\bfseries will}  undertake to do just that, perhaps the very chappie who
told us all about the ``values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy pertinent
to transpersonally oriented non-public school teachers.''



The Student Outcomes Principle (it seems to deserve capitals) is the
Prime Mover of American education. It is our equivalent of the Death of
God, after which everything is permitted. It arises inevitably from the
intersection of that sentimental humanisticism that has made the schools
into virtue-nurseries where guards patrol the corridors, and the iron law
of behavior modification that has made them laboratories where all the experiments
fail. But that's all right. As schools, and consequently the rest of society,
become more anarchic, the educationists can point to an ever greater need
for the inculcation of values, and every failed experiment makes room for
new devils in the guise of faddish innovations.



But the Student Outcomes Principle has brought us even worse abominations
than the fads and gimmicks that have been tripping over each other's heels
for the last sixty years. Since the proponents of that principle have become
the makers of policy at all levels of public education, they have been able
to refashion even the most traditional courses of study into exercises in
the inculcation of right emotional response and the clarification of values.
Such was proposed, of course, in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} and in some
cases easily effected by the ouster of history for the sake of social studies,
for instance, in which the especially civic virtues, whatever they happen
to be at any given time, are fostered by idle gossip about current events
and some ill-informed generalizations about remote tribes.



The process, however, has only  {\bfseries  begun}  when social studies
are implanted in the secondary public schools. Imagine what happens thereafter:
At first, of course, the history teachers must be the social studies teachers.
The less committed they are to the traditional study of history, the more
likely they are to welcome this opportunity to escape the tyranny of mere
information and develop instead an ``appreciation and\ldots a clear
conception of right relations.'' History itself now becomes nothing
more than   {\bfseries a}  social study, and by no means {\itshape primus inter
pares} but rather an aging and demanding relative less and less acceptable
in a rapidly growing family of trendy issues. The next generation of social
studies teachers cannot be students of history, or certainly not   {\bfseries merely}  students of history. This means that whatever is to be done in the
high schools in the name of social studies must also be done in the teachers'
colleges where the social studies teachers are to learn their trade. The
professors of such things as history and economics, therefore, have to be
reeducated. They must welcome into partnership the sociologists, who are
cousins to the educationists both in language and ideology, and learn to
appreciate the priority of values over mere information. This is done in
the name of ``meeting the needs of the students,'' which is another
way of expressing the Student Outcomes Principle, and which can have any
practical effect you please depending only on the ``needs'' chosen.



Imagine that you are a bright young history scholar who has become an
instructor in a college where there is a school of teacher education. After
a year or two of teaching the basic freshman course in Western Civilization,
which is already a social studies course, devoted to a little bit of everything
and anything that probably ought to be appreciated, you discover that you
would like to spend more time in teaching about the Renaissance in Italy,
a body of knowledge in which you are especially well informed. Since the
history department is small and offers no course in the Italian Renaissance,
you write a description and a syllabus and send off a course proposal to
the curriculum committee, with the blessing of your fellow history professors,
who believe that the Italian Renaissance is worth studying.



Now your proposal comes before the curriculum committee, where the educationists
and would-be administrators are serving with gladness and where the rules
and procedures, as well as the ideology, have long been established by others
of their kind. When they look at your proposal, they do not think about
the intrinsic value of the study of the Renaissance in Italy; they ask rather
about the projected student outcomes and the measurable behavioral objectives.
They don't really want to hear what you could probably tell them: that those
who study the Italian Renaissance can come to have knowledge. They want
to know what kind of people your students will become, what they will appreciate,
and whether they will be able to relate the Renaissance in Italy to the
goals of self-fulfillment. In short, they will want to know, although the
chances are good that no single member of the curriculum committee has ever
heard of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} exactly what it is that makes your
course ``worthy'' in spite of its distinctly academic taint.



In response, you can, of course, lie. You can trump up some noble and
plausible outcomes and objectives. That would probably work, for it is standard
practice in any case, especially in the courses in education, and your interlocutors
would be receptive to loose talk about appreciation of cultural heritage
and the relating of self to self and others both as groups and individuals.
You can say such things about the study of anything or even about dabbling
in anything, cookery or karate, for that matter. But such a maneuver has,
for   {\bfseries you}  at least, two nasty consequences. First, you become either
a fool or a liar. You may actually come to believe your concoctions, in
which case you become a fool, but you can escape folly only by knowing yourself
a liar, or, as we in the academic world prefer, a pragmatist. You lie in
good cause, naturally, and in the company of all the other pragmatists who
devise student outcomes and behavioral objectives in order to get past the
curriculum committee, but still you lie. Lying and scholarship cannot live
together, but Iying and indoctrination are made for each other. Where scholarship
is not practiced for its own sake but only in the service of doctrine, everybody
has to lie --- or be a fool --- and your proposed course in Renaissance
Italy must be put forth only as a means to some higher (and socially more
acceptable) end than the mere learning of some knowledge.



And there is the other nasty consequence. If you do lie and cook up some
lovely student outcomes and behavioral objectives that can justify the study
of the Italian Renaissance, you explicitly admit that the higher end is
more important than the means, since the latter can be justified only because
of the former. That being so, your cunningly devised outcomes and objectives,
which sound amazingly like the outcomes and objectives of many other courses,
are obviously ends that might be achieved by many other means. Thus, whatever
it is that makes your proposed course ``worthy'' also makes it unnecessary.
But that fact doesn't doom your proposed course, although it may doom   {\bfseries you}. 
If you have lied well enough, your course will be approved, since the continuous
multiplication of courses is a profitable practice in any case, because
it is now an admission by a humbled elitist academic that disciplined study
is no more than a means to certain student outcomes. And once you have admitted
that, you have become a de facto educationist. If you are willing to teach
the history of the Renaissance in Italy as a way of engendering right appreciation
of a cultural heritage and an exercise in relating self to self and others,
then you must admit the academic validity of any other course, including
cookery, that can make the same claims. You must also admit that students
might just as well take cookery as your history course, for the student
outcomes are the same. And, worse yet, you may someday have to admit, since,
by your own confession, knowledge, or mere information, is  {\bfseries  not}  in
fact the main point of your course, that it could just as well be taught
by someone who is   {\bfseries not}  a scholar of the Renaissance in Italy.
And that is why it is that educationists can find permanent work teaching
ten-cent-store equivalents of anything in the catalog, and, far worse, why
once-serious scholars can end up doing the same thing without even knowing
it.



It is interesting to notice that there are some studies that are by nature
resistant to this process, and even more interesting to discover that they
are the very studies where the failures of public education are most obvious.
No amount of prattle about ``right emotional response'' to literature
can for long disguise the fact that students can't read literature, and
worthy appreciation of the logic of mathematics rarely assures the ability
to cipher. The failure of the schools to teach these and other ``fundamental
processes'' briefly mentioned and dismissed in {\itshape Cardinal Principles}
is nowadays well known, but we have not yet given enough thought to the
  {\bfseries reason}  for that failure. It is not sufficient, although it
is more and more true, to say that the children cannot read and write and
cipher because their teachers cannot read and write and cipher. That just
puts the question off one more step and leaves us to wonder how the teachers
came to suffer that disability. The answer is to be found in that intellectual
miasma emitted by the Student Outcomes Principle, which always holds, remember,
that the truly desirable outcomes of any study at all are attitudes or values
of some sort and not mere skill or information. Because they insist on teaching
what is unteachable, educationists must denigrate the teaching of what  {\bfseries 
is}  teachable. Where the pygmies rule, everybody else has to crouch.



Having seized power from the wicked elitists, the pygmy educationists
are always busy stamping out vestiges of the old regime and its discredited
ideals and practices. If you want to make an educationist wince, all you
have to do is cite some ``facts and dates,'' which you could know
only as the result of ``rote learning.'' Such things are all characterized
in {\itshape Cardinal Principles} as notorious impediments to the true goals
of education. They are not only elitist but oppressive and antidemocratic
as well, and it may even be that a detailed knowledge of the constitution,
for instance, would prevent the proper appreciation of our institutions
and their values. It follows inevitably that those studies that depend heavily
on memorization, mere ``rote learning,'' will be given very short
shrift indeed in our schools and the same in our teacher academies. Just
as the instructor of Renaissance Italian history forswears himself by proposing
anything other than knowledge as the goal of study, the educationist forswears
himself and all that he stands for in permitting the  {\bfseries }  suggestion that
the goal of study is just knowledge. Thus it is that the educationists just
don't know what to do with subjects that cannot, like history or literature,
for example, be diluted for the sake of noncognitive student outcomes. And
when they can't dilute a subject, they just neglect it.



It is for that reason, in fact, that along with reading and writing and
ciphering, another equally ``basic'' study has fallen out of favor
in the schools, and that is the study of foreign languages. We make a virtue
of ignorance and sloth by claiming that a distaste for foreign languages
is an American attribute, and while perhaps lamentable, nevertheless a tribute
to the tough independence of our pioneer forebears. Many of those forebears,
however, obviously saw the knowledge of other languages as an elementary
part of an education and nothing more esoteric than literacy itself. Our
supposed distaste for foreign language has in fact been fabricated in the
schools. Foreign language study is not mentioned in {\itshape Cardinal} Principles,
and it must be precisely what is   {\bfseries excluded}  when that document,
asserting that the language skills of elementary school children are ``not
yet sufficient,'' points out that ``this is particularly true of
the mother tongue.'' And foreign language is, no doubt, one of those
``provisions'' that might be made for ``those having distinctively
academic interests and needs.'' What we think of now as the lack of
interest in foreign languages, and the obvious and unpleasant social and
economic effects of that lack, to say nothing of the intellectual, is simply
the inevitable consequence of the anti-intellectual educationism that informed
{\itshape Cardinal} Principles.



The ideological distortion that can twist the study of literature into
the inculcation of right emotional response just won't work with the study
of irregular verbs. And, while any half-baked teacher of social studies
can peddle appreciation of institutions without any tiresome concern for
facts and dates, a teacher of German actually has to know the prepositions
that take the dative. Furthermore, the results of foreign language study,
and thus perhaps even the efficacy of teaching, can be measured concretely
and objectively. Either you have learned those prepositions, and ``by
rote'' at that, or you haven't. The Student Outcomes Principle just
won't stretch far enough to cover the study of foreign languages. The only
thing left is neglect, which is made all the more acceptable by the implication,
already visible in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} that a knowledge of French
or --- God forbid! --- Greek is an esoteric dabbling in the arcane and
nothing more than an antiquated social adornment suitable only for elitists.
(Indeed, something very much like that same judgment is nowadays made of
expertise in ``the mother tongue'' as well, which makes it much
easier to apply the Student Outcomes Principle to the study of reading and
writing English, where creativity and self-expression are held more important
than spelling and punctuation, mere ``rote learning.'')



Because of the educationistic hegemony in public ``higher'' education,
which is more often than not a clumsy apparatus built around a teacher-training
academy, the neglect of foreign language study is just as common in the
colleges as in the high schools. The neglect of foreign language, in fact,
is a splendid case in point out of which to show that whatever happens in
the realm of educationism must eventually have an effect not only everywhere
in education itself but everywhere in our society.



As foreign languages are less and less studied in the public schools,
fewer and fewer language teachers are needed, and enrollments decline in
foreign language departments in teachers' colleges. As enrollments decline,
the numbers of language professors decline, and some languages disappear
entirely from the curriculum. That's not bad; it's good. It justifies still
further neglect in the high schools, where, when the last old Latin teacher
finally retires, the principal can replace her with an auto mechanics teacher
since, whatever the students may want, you can't find a Latin teacher nowadays.
At the same time, there are fewer and fewer students enrolling in foreign
language courses even in those colleges that are   {\bfseries not}  teacher academies,
and there, too, faculties will shrink. One of the first to go --- and
you can believe that the pygmies will be damn glad to get rid of   {\bfseries him} 
--- will be the the only surviving professor of Attic Greek, a notoriously
unreconstructed elitist. He will be replaced by a woman with a right-sounding
surname who will teach remedial English as a second language, and she, just
as soon as the doddering professor of Old English packs it in, will be joined
by another of the same, and a new department will be born.



While all of that has been happening, foreign language study has been
continually a victim of propaganda. Because it is not reducible to appreciation,
and especially because it requires such antihumanistic behavior as memorization,
it has become widely known as a ``hard'' subject, which is furthermore
tainted with elitism. As a result, high school graduates who go to college
are less and less likely to choose a foreign language. Where such requirements
were once common in anything from English to political science, they must
be abolished, lest enrollments shrink, which is the worst thing that can
happen in any department. This leads, of course, to further shrinking in
the already embattled language department, but what can we do? Surely it
is better for the few to suffer than the many. But it also leads to one
more abandonment of an intellectual standard and one more submission to
the life-adjustment ideology of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} and --- after
all, those now forgotten language requirements have to be replaced ---
to one more lie about student outcomes and behavioral objectives for a course
in the appreciation of foreign-language-speaking cultures. And, when we
have finally reached something like our present condition, when the bad
name of language study has provided that few college graduates can even
speak English, never mind German or French, and when businesses find that
their memo writers can't understand each other, and when thousands of workers
are driven out of jobs by foreign competition, then we discover that every
Japanese salesman speaks fluent English, and we wonder if that means something.



To whatever other woes it may bring us, of which diminished ability to
compete in international trade is only one, we must add another step in
the general decline of the intellectual enterprise as a whole, which ought
to be the principal business of the schools. This decline, which we can
see in science and technology just as well as in the study of the humanities
and languages, must continue as long as the inheritors of {\itshape Cardinal Principles
}continue in all the committees and administrative posts and in all the
centers, both public and private, of educationistic``research.''
Even when they are unaware of it, as indeed they often are, all their notions
and theories and programs have an underlying theme, the theme that is sounded
when the ineffective and thus discontented social studies teacher decides
that he would rather go to those evening classes in educationism and become,
instead of a mere teacher, a curriculum facilitator or a guidance counselor
or even, oh joy, an assistant principal. That theme is compounded partly
of a distaste for the work of the intellect, which he has never been able
to do with pleasure, and partly of the desire to take some revenge on those
who do seem to find that pleasure and in whose eyes he is a second-class
citizen. And the whole apparatus of theory and governance established in
the shadow of {\itshape Cardinal Principles} and now in complete control of
public education in America makes it not only possible but even easy for
the failed social studies teacher to rise above his more intellectual colleagues
and tell them what and how to teach or, even better, find a place in the
eternal task force where needs are assessed within the parameters of planning
whether to plan. The sought-after jobs in education are the ones that take
you as far as possible from the classroom.



That, by itself, would be splendid, for it would take the silliest people
in the education business away from the places where they can do the most
harm. Unfortunately, however, all the follies they commit in offices and
meeting rooms and administration buildings and tax-supported agencies are
visited not on their own heads --- they pay each other to think up new
follies --- but on the heads of the students and teachers whom they have
gladly left behind. Thus it is that, after about sixty years of organized
and militant anti-intellectualism in the schools, every disorder in education
brings power and profit to those who have made that disorder, and every
problem is given for solution into the hands of the only people who cannot
possibly solve it. The pygmies have been in charge for so long now that
we are all cracking our skulls on the doorways of the public buildings;
when we go to them for remedy, they urge on us the value of crawling. 




\chapter{Problem-Solving in the Content Area}



When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and
events, it is always useful to ask, who profits? The problems and disorders
in education have become more and more visible in the last few years, of
course, and even the ordinary citizen who happens to have no children in
the schools suspects that something is very wrong, but he will never understand
exactly   {\bfseries what}  is wrong until he realizes that all our educational
problems and disorders, none of which are new, although they   {\bfseries are}  more
obvious, provide endless and growing employment for the people who made
them. Barely literate children may be suffering and facing whole lives of
deprivation, but consultants and remediationists and professors of reading
education and tax-supported researchers and the editors and publishers of
workbooks and handsome packets of materials are doing very well indeed and
looking for even better days to come. It is important to note, too, that
all those profit-makers have not suddenly appeared among us like the wandering
bands of looters who can reasonably be expected to show up after the earthquake.
They've been around a long time, diligently turning the wheel, professing
what must be remediated and remediating what has been professed and enlarging
in our society the role of what can only be called the educationist-industrial
complex. Anything that may seem to us a disorder in education is for them
a golden opportunity---indeed, since they live by tax money, they cannot
make their profits until we   {\bfseries do}  see a disorder in education and thus
feel obliged to shell out.



Curiously enough, therefore, it is very much in the interest of the policymakers
and theoreticians of public schooling that there   {\bfseries be}  problems and
failures and that we know about them and also, even more curiously, that
  {\bfseries any}  kind of social disorder at all be made the business of the schools.
We are encouraged thus to hand over to the educationists not only the problem
of widespread illiteracy but also the notorious disinclination of the American
voter to trouble himself by going to the polls, the fear and hatred of each
race for the others, and the epidemic of venereal disease among thirteen-year-olds.



Sometimes, especially when defending themselves against the charge that
they just don't know how to teach reading and writing and ciphering, the
educationists complain that they are unfairly burdened by ``public demand''
for all sorts of social but nonacademic services and instruction. But, in
fact, as any reader of {\itshape Cardinal Principles} would know, they chose
long ago to be social engineers rather than academicians, claiming, too,
that they had chosen the nobler calling. It would be interesting to put
them to the test, offering them the opportunity to give up all that thankless
inculcation of right and worthy feelings and habits and stick to teaching
only what can be objectively taught and measured. It would, however, take
an enlightened and thoughtful public to make that offer, and the influence
of {\itshape Cardinal Principles} makes an enlightened and thoughtful public
impossible. For all their occasional whimpers, therefore, the educationists
are delighted to take upon themselves the right ordering of society, which
is, in any case, even more profitable than the cycle of professing and remediating
general public illiteracy.



Now here is an interesting and suggestive fact: The seven cardinal principles
can be divided, and were in fact divided by their propounders, into two
categories. In one category, the category that the educationists themselves
have come to call the ``cognitive domain,'' we can put only one
principle, the Command of Fundamental Processes, or Basic Minimum Competence.
You will recall that once the principle-makers had named the Command of
Fundamental Processes they could think of little more to say about it. There
is a fascinating truth hidden in that fact: Educationistic research flourishes
where it is possible to say a lot about what is vague and withers where
there is little or nothing to say about the concrete. About right emotional
response to literature you can natter forever; about adding numbers to each
other, what else is there to do but teach it? It is partly for that reason,
of course, that all the other six principles are in what they now call the
``affective domain,'' where there is no limit to talk. Even vocational
education, which you might think would be very concrete indeed, is to be
a vehicle for various worthy responses, ``right relationships toward
fellow workers and society,'' and even that ``clear conception of
right relations'' between employer and employee, the sort of thing thought
useful in East Germany, too. And it is perfectly clear, from {\itshape Cardinal
Principles} itself and from educationistic theory and practice thereafter,
that educationists are much more interested in the six other principles
than in the Commend of Fundamental Processes. This is so not only because
the Six can generate more verbiage than the One, but because the consequences
of schooling in the One are embarrassingly measurable, while the consequences
of schooling in the Six are not only impossible to measure but usually not
even discernible for so many years that, when they do begin to appear, the
people who caused them will all be dead, or at least retired. Thus it is
that our educationists are far readier to offer solutions to disorders in
their affective domain than in their cognitive.



Consider, as a trendy example, sex. In a sane civilization, to be sure,
the citizens would tell the school people that the sexual attitudes and
values of the young were none of the school's damn business and that they
ought to stick to facts, but we don't do it that way. Our schools have been
granted the sex concession by virtue of those cardinal principles that put
them in charge of Health, in one context, and Worthy Home-membership, in
another. And then there is also the Worthy Use of Leisure. Thus chartered,
the educationists who have long dabbled in what they call sex education
have now, now that unabashed and self-indulgent libertinism has brought
upon us great plagues of divorce, illegitimate births, venereal diseases,
and all the social and economic and personal disorders attendant on such
things, come into their kingdom. Sex education is in bloom in America.



And what form does it take? What form can it   {\bfseries possibly}  take when
it is devised by the inheritors of the cardinal principles and the manipulators
of stimulus and response? We can, for the sake of convenience although not
in any absolute sense, partition the study of sex, and especially human
sexuality, into the educationists' own categories, the cognitive and the
affective. In the one category we can put everything that we can name and
know, all that is objectively demonstrable and subject to reasonable hypothesis
and prediction. In the other category we will have to put the other things,
the feelings, attitudes, values, and responses, worthy or not, that so fascinated
the makers of the cardinal principles. Thus, while the latter considerations
can be included with the Six, the former must go with the One. The teaching
of certain facts about sex and sexuality is   {\bfseries like}  the teaching of
reading and writing and ciphering. Knowledge about sex is like any other
knowledge, publicly available and publicly verifiable and not variable in
accordance with attitudes or emotional responses, however worthy. It is
what educationists call ``subject matter''---often ``mere
subject matter''---and can easily be learned without the help of any
teacher at all. Most of it is in books, to which a good teacher can, of
course, provide useful footnotes in the form of newer knowledge, further
description, and the devising of analogies by which facts can be seen as
functions of one another and from which hypotheses and principles can be
formed. The books do exist, and if students had the habit of reading books
there would be no shortage of knowledge about sex. But, because of decades
of neglect of the mere subject matter of those fundamental processes, they
do not have the habit of reading books any more than the schools have the
habit of using books as the primary medium of what is called an education.



The books used in the public schools are almost exclusively books designed
specifically to be used in the public schools. This is in keeping with the
mandate of {\itshape Cardinal Principles} that every course is ``in need
of extensive reorganization in order that it may contribute more effectively
to the objectives outlined herein.'' A history written by a historian
is therefore disqualified unless, by some extraordinary coincidence, it
happens to foster the approved responses and appreciations, and that without
dependence on mere information. Even should that be so, the book probably
would have to be rewritten and simplified for students in whom the Command
of Fundamental Processes is meager. A scientist's book on biology, furthermore,
would find no place in the schools because it will not be ``properly
focused upon personal and community hygiene [and] the principles of sanitation,
and their applications.'' To find a welcome in the schools, a book must
be simply written---``childishly'' might be the better word---and
carefully designed to elicit worthy responses, in which cause mere information
can be not only dismissed but even distorted. Because it must meet those
standards, a schoolbook can never be a mere   {\bfseries book}, as we ordinarily
understand the term, a record of the controlled and thoughtful discourse
of a knowledgeable, individual mind. To guard against every possible occasion
of unworthy response and to root out every appearance of mere information
displayed in no cause other than that of mere knowledge requires the diligent
labor of a committee in collusion with right-minded consultants and editorial
assistants.



In {\itshape America Revised} (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1979) by Frances FitzGerald,
you will find a full and demoralizing description of how school history
books come to be the perversions that they are. And more recently there
was a little-noticed but illuminating example of the nature of school ``learning
materials'' in a Hilton Kramer essay in {\itshape The New York Times} on
the aftermath of the great Picasso retrospective. The schools are just as
good at teaching the right appreciation of art as they are at teaching worthy
sexual attitudes, and the Picasso show brought forth not only an ``educational''
film in which the painter was portrayed, surely to the stupefaction of those
with some mere information, as an exemplary parent and role model, but also
a teachers' guide in which Picasso is identified as a Fauve playing with
bright colors. That's bad enough, but his imaginary enlistment in fauvism
is also said to have been a result of his abandonment of experimentation
with bright colors. And the cover of the teachers' guide bore a large ``Picasso''
signature superimposed on a lovely photograph of a studio littered with
painter's paraphernalia and handsome canvases, certainly appreciable, but,
to anyone having a little knowledge, easily identifiable as the work of
Mir\'{o}.



As bad as this ludicrous display of ignorance is, there is something
worse, which Hilton Kramer probably doesn't suspect any more than you do,
and that is that no one in the schools is likely to be troubled or embarrassed
by such a display. Well, so what? Looking at Mir\'{o}'s studio is   {\bfseries also
} a worthy use of leisure, and a niggling attention to trivial details
is exactly the kind of elitism that has always inhibited right emotional
response. So there. It is in the same spirit that educationists can blithely
justify the omission, in an American history text, of any reference to the
Civil War.



The making of a schoolbook is analogous to the classroom rap session
in which the ill-informed are supposed to reach understanding through the
recitation of slogans and notions and by relating to one another. There
are differences, however. For the captive children pretending to formulate
``good judgment as to means and methods'' for the promotion of some
worthy social end and developing ``habits of cordial cooperation in
social undertakings,'' as prescribed in {\itshape Cardinal Principles},
the whole thing is obviously a game. Only a teacher, or an especially dull
or cowed student, could take it seriously. But the committees and task forces
that devise (you cannot say ``write'') those non-books used in the
school take their work very seriously indeed. There is profit in it Even
prestige. So we can be confident that the ``books,'' and all the
other wondrously diverse and cunningly packaged ``learning materials''
out of which sex education will be taught, will be acceptable to the ideology
of educationism both simplified and tendentious, careless of mere information
and careful in the elicitation of right response in the cause of social
adjustment. In other words, this ``new'' campaign intended to remedy
whole hosts of social and personal disorders is different from the old program
of education as social manipulation only in extent---and, of course, expense.
In both cases, much greater.



As our schools now embark on a massive campaign of sexual rehabilitation
for all of American youth, we can naturally expect that they will give it
all they have, which means, of course, that what they   {\bfseries don't}  have
they won't give it. What they do have,   {\bfseries all}  they have, is that earnest
devotion to the power of suggestion in the cause of social and psychological
manipulation, and, although their decades of devotion to pious social adjustment
may not be the   {\bfseries only}  cause of our present disorders, they have certainly
not prevented them. Now the necessary concomitant of the social adjustment
theory of education is the denigration of intellectual discipline, for the
sake of which the command of fundamental processes was slighted in {\itshape Cardinal
Principles.} Perhaps it  {\bfseries  is}  a bit rash, however tempting, to say
it is exactly   {\bfseries because}  the schools have been preaching vapid and sentimental
sermons for sixty years that hosts of our newborn children and their mothers
will become permanent wards of the state, but it is not a bit rash to suspect
that widespread and crippling social disorders of all kinds are directly
caused by ignorance an thoughtlessness. There is only one remedy for ignorance
an thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and million of American
children would today stand in no need of sex education, or consumer education
or intercultural education or any of those fake educations, if they had
had in the first place   {\bfseries an}  education.



We have seen above, for instance, that what is called intercultural education
is a shabby dodge by which students and teachers may be excused from the
study of history, anthropology, geography, language, literature, philosophy,
and who can count what else. That all makes for a long and detailed discussion,
but an equivalent and simpler model of the genesis of fake educations can
be seen in the trendy and popular consumer education. We are told that we
need consumer education because people are easily duped by misleading advertising,
cannot figure out the per-ounce price of ketchup, and imagine that they
can live on Twinkies and Coca-Cola. (When teen-aged mothers raise their
illegitimate children on Twinkies and Coca-Cola, that reinforces the need
for sex education and also family living education.) The consumer who is
duped by misleading advertising does not need consumer education; he needs
to know how to read. The housewife who can't figure out what ketchup costs
does not need consumer education; she needs to know how to cipher. And as
to those who want to live on Twinkies and Coca-Cola, frankly that's their
own damn business and we ought to leave them alone, but we might legitimately
provide them with knowledge about biology and chemistry first and   {\bfseries then}  leave them alone. Our problems come not from ignorance and thoughtlessness
about sex any more than from ignorance and thoughtlessness about ketchup,
they just come from ignorance and thoughtlessness, which are preserved and
nourished in our schools by those whose profits lie in ``solving''
the problems they have created.



Literacy is like the kingdom of Heaven. Those who seek it first will
find that other things are added unto them. Literacy is   {\bfseries not}  the same
as Basic Minimum Competence, but, if we provide an emphasis that seems not
to have occurred to the principle-makers, it might indeed be described as
the   {\bfseries command}  of the fundamental processes of word and number. The
power of number, to be sure, is not usually included in ``literacy,''
but it should be, for it is through the ability to   {\bfseries command}  the techniques
both of word and number that we can know and think. There is no other way.
To say that we can ``know'' or ``think'' in other ways is
to blur those words into uselessness so that rather than making fine distinctions
they can point vaguely in the direction of any events at all that seem to
take place invisibly in the mind. It is exactly that reluctance to seek
or even tolerate fine distinctions that makes the muddled jargon of the
educationists what it is, and it is not surprising, therefore, that those
who have neglected literacy should look for some presumed {\itshape other} ways
of knowing and thinking. This makes it possible to excuse or even to justify
the failure to teach literacy by claiming that it doesn't have to be taught
anyway. Consider the following, a brief and unfortunately oversimplified
piece from {\itshape The Underground Grammarian:}



The Idea of Expressing Feelings In New Mexico



It had to happen. Last month we granted the world's first DEd, {\itshape horroris
causa,} and now everybody wants one. Two new candidates present themselves,
and they are not some silly educationists but {\itshape bona fide} associate
professors of English out at what they call Eastern New Mexico University.



Laid-back folk. Arlene Zekowski, Stanley Berne. Hate apostrophes. Rules.
Arbitrary. Down sentences! Up feelings expressing! Up Zekowski! Up Berne!
Right on!



Or, if you prefer, On right! ``We're professors of English,''
says Berne. (Hm. Shouldn't that be ``Were professors of English''?)
``We are concerned with the idea of expressing feelings. Arbitrary rules
of grammar prohibit that.'' (Cmon, be patient. Sure he talks that tired
old grammar, but only because he has to get to we elitists.) Hes wright.
No, thats not expressing feelings. He rite! Wordsworth feeling-expressing
fouled-up by verb-subject agreement. Shakespeare shot down---Donne undone
by nonrestrictive clauses. Whitman comatose from commas.



Zekowski: ``Grammar is elitism. I wish to destroy what is dead, lifeless
and snobbish.'' Hows that for boring from within? ``Arbitrary sentence
structure is logical,'' she complains, ``but the brain isn't logical.
[How true!] You don't think in sentences. You think in terms of patterns
and images. It's random association.'' And further: ``Many advertisements
don't use sentences or grammar. They use words to create images.'' (Exactly
  {\bfseries how}  they use the words she doesn't say. Could be they sprinklem here
and there, collage-wise. Cool. Just think. If {\itshape Das Kapital} had been
done like that, we wouldn't have all this damn trouble now. There's nothing
more dangerous than a bunch of logical sentences, but what would you expect
from an elitist like Marx?)



If there's one thing we love around here, it's the classing of icons,
and we support the idea of expressing feelings 1,000 percent. That's   {\bfseries exactly}  what we should be teaching these kids. For one thing, it's a cinch,
like playing tennis with the net down, as Frost put it. Another: if we let
them in on the secrets of logical sentences and coherent discourse, the
ignorant little bastards will go on to take away some of our cushiest jobs,
perhaps even as associate professors of English, and that will be the end
of lifeless elitism as we know it.



However, while we applaud Zekowski and Berne for their cunning subterfuge,
and while we admit that it   {\bfseries is}  the first duty of a DEd to cook up
schemes for job security, we cannot give them their degrees just yet. Their
plan sounds good off paper, but when they write their grammarless English,
we read: ``Once upon a time ago. But now nevermore.'' Cute and expressive
of feeling, sure, but clogged up with grammar. Maybe next year.






Following the appearance of that article, I heard from many readers who
accused me of inventing Berne and Zekowski. How silly. Bernes and Zekowskis
are generated spontaneously out of the primordial nutrient broth of {\itshape Cardinal
Principles}. If you find them unbelievable, you might be sobered to know
that they have written many books for the guidance of public school English
teachers and are said to go about holding workshops and training sessions
for same.



The ``thought'' of Berne and Zekowski---I know that's not the
right word, but we may not even   {\bfseries have}  the right word in English---repays
study. Consider: ``You don't think in sentences. You think in terms
of patterns and images. It's random association.'' All of that is true,
of course, if you happen to be an imbecile, or maybe a gnu. All of it is
also true even for conscious human beings   {\bfseries if}  the verb {\itshape to think}
refers to anything, anything at all, that takes place invisibly in the mind.
The mind does indeed, from time to time and often with dismal consequences
when there is a certain kind of work to be done, find itself occupied with
patterns and images and random associations. And it does many things that
have no need of sentences: it regrets, it exults, it yearns, it wonders,
it fears, it expects, it dreams (perchance to sleep), it wanders, it sees,
it hears\ldots you can make your own list. The very fact that there are
so many words for the invisible acts of the mind reveals that our language
can and regularly does make, as Berne and Zekowski do not, countless fine
and subtle distinctions among those acts. And the act in which we   {\bfseries do} {\itshape ,
}if we have a command of fundamental processes, make such distinctions
may be called thinking; and, in fact, we do that thinking in sentences,
in which we say to ourselves that yearning and thinking are different for
such and such reasons. We may perform any number of mental acts ``in
terms of,'' whatever that means, patterns and images, but thinking is
not one of them. Thinking is done in sentences, logical sentences. {\itshape Principia
mathematica} is not random association. Nor, for that matter, is poetry,
which Berne and Zekowski are said to write, and which they seem to confuse
with ``expressing feelings,'' which could also include smashing
urinals in the boys' room. It is one of the great wonders of poetry that
it can be supremely free and individual   {\bfseries in spite of}  countless traditional
and arbitrary restraints, and even in spite of the often greater restraints
that poets usually choose to impose on themselves.



Berne and Zekowski, I admit, are probably an extreme case of educationistic
anti-intellectualism, but they are, don't forget, professors of English
at a state university where English teachers are trained. Their notions
are right at home in the context of {\itshape Cardinal Principles.} They are
concerned with expressing feeling, or, as they put it, with the ``idea''
of expressing feelings. (I don't know what that might mean, but I suspect
that it is   {\bfseries not}  some fine distinction between ``expressing''
and ``the idea of expressing.'') They wish to destroy elitism, which,
although dead and lifeless, somehow manages to remain snobbish. They characterize
rules as ``arbitrary'' rules, as though no one had ever put modifiers
near what they modify until the rule had been devised, and assert that the
arbitrary rules prohibit the expression of feelings, against which assertion
some evidence could be adduced. They turn, for example, to the demotic,
the advertisements that ``use words to create images,'' as though
that were some startling new use of language and especially to be prized
because of its commercial quality. They differ from garden-variety educationists
only in detail (and perhaps in their taste for the dramatic---notably
absent in educationists) but not in principle. They prefer emotional response
to knowledge; they equate technical proficiency with elitism; they imagine
grammar as a set of rules, mere information, and the stuff of rote learning;
and they depend for their lessons on the popular or practical, to which
students can presumably ``relate.''



When we look around America, we notice, of course, what seems to be a
general decline in our young people of the powers of observation and discrimination
and the habits of accuracy and precision that we might expect in the literate.
This is an illusion born of the fact that it is only the young people who
are occasionally tested or measured. The same disabilities are to be found
in   {\bfseries all}  groups, because they have been fostered for so many years
now. And those many years of malpractice have fostered the same disabilities
within the ranks of the educationists themselves that we can see in the
public at large. The now-retired professors of education who learned   {\bfseries their
} appreciation of the ``command'' of fundamental processes in
the shadow of {\itshape Cardinal Principles} taught it to the professors of
education, who taught the same to all the teachers and supervisors and facilitators
now in the schools, who in their turn can pass on to their students nothing
but more of the same.



It follows, therefore, that the formulation and direction of the currently
faddish fervor for those fundamental processes are given into the hands
of those who lack the skills of those processes and who have grown up in
the climate of opinion out of which Berne and Zekowski have formulated their
principles. The enterprise cannot succeed any more than pygmies can grow
tall by pulling upward on their ears.



Here is how one state system of teacher academies plans to solve the
problem:





The Missouri Compromise



You will not be astonished to learn that there are some people in Missouri
who cannot manage commas, cannot avoid sentence fragments, cannot regularly
make verbs agree with subjects and pronouns with antecedents, and cannot
help sounding like literal translations from Bulgarian. If you are a regular
reader of this journal, you'll also be unastonished to hear that those pitiable
illiterates are members of the Missouri Association of Colleges of Teacher
Education.



These poor saps have finally noticed that lots of irate citizens ``have
indicated concern of [yes,   {\bfseries of} ] the decreasing standardized test scores
of students.'' They even know that a ``sensitivity has become quite
manifest in the development in state wide [yes, two words] assessment systems.''
But they don't seem too worried. They've cleared up the whole mess in a
``position statement'' called {\itshape Assessment of Basic Skills Competencies
of Potential Teachers.}



The Missouri educationists have also just discovered, or have at least
come to suspect that they might perhaps decide to assume --- tentatively,
what the rest of us have always known. They put it thus: ``Although
many factors may intervene the teacher is viewed by many as a critical variable
in the teaching-learning process and, therefore, the key to the improvement
in the basic skills of students.''



``The teacher,'' they say, ``must have a high degree of proficiency
in the basic skills. They are expected to transmit to their students through
precept and example.''



Yeah. And here are some of the precepts and examples through which these
Missouri Teacher-training Turkeys transmit:



``The latter ['field experiences'] being principally in student teaching
with a major emphasis on institutional planning, execution, and evaluation
of subject matter to be presented.'' And, ``Utilizing the assumption
that the measuring/ascertaining of the competencies of potential teachers
should be done on or about the end of the traditional sophomore year.''
For the Turkeys, those are sentences. So why should   {\bfseries they}  care? It's
the taxpayers and children who'll have to serve them.



Those, of course, are just supersaturated, freebooting participles, but
this one passes understanding: ``If the student does not meet the prescribed
standards of basic skills and the student, before they are formally admitted
into teacher education and certainly before graduation, should have remediation
and reevaluation.'' (Wow, these people are tough!   {\bfseries Before}  graduation,
no less.) Any competent sixth-grade teacher would flunk such rubbish, but
the Turkeys aren't worried. As long as they're in charge, there will be
damned few competent sixth-grade teachers in Missouri.



``Also,'' say the Turkeys, ``there is a question of the relationship
of secondary and co-secondary schools in terms of relationships. The authors
[ ! ] of this position paper agreed that such an assessment process can
have a significant impact [they never discuss   {\bfseries insignificant}  or  {\bfseries 
mere}  impacts] on secondary school curriculum in turning to an assessment
instrument to which the public schools might be inclined to reach toward.''



Why do the good people of Missouri suffer such humbug, without turning
to some blunt instrument to which they might be inclined to reach toward?
We can tell you why. It's because  {\bfseries }  these ugly crimes against nature
are committed in private among consenting Turkeys. How many ``authors,''
do you suppose, conspired to write, rewrite, edit, and finally to   {\bfseries approve}  all that gibberish? How many of Missouri's teacher-trainers, would you
guess, have read it? Was   {\bfseries not one}  of them embarrassed or outraged
by this sleazy display of ignorance and ineptitude? And if there  {\bfseries {\itshape  was}}  one, what do you think he did? He kept his mouth shut. It's better to
suffer a momentary discontent than to attract the taxpayers`` attention.



So, unhampered by pesky public outcry, people who cannot devise sentences
or make sense or even punctuate will get on with the business of providing
Missouri with teachers. And they don't want   {\bfseries any}  interference, if
you please, as they make, well, not ''clear,`` to be sure, but at
least ''quite manifest,`` in their ghastly and ungrammatical peroration:



''There is an advantage to each institution in Missouri preparing
teachers to have an institutional level responsibility rather than a state
wide\ldots responsibility for assurance of proficiency of basic skills.
Alternate assessment processes allow for diversity of response by each institution.
It [?] allows for diversity of response loads [?] by students, it allows
for diversity of interpretation of what is basic   {\bfseries [that's}  the part
they like best] for that institution's student population, and it eliminates
conflicts of perogatives [typo?] and rights of faculties of institution
to set curriculum in means of assessing a testing or assuring of competencies.``



We have some advice for the good people of Missouri. Turn those rascals
out. Pension them off for life at full pay, requiring only that the never
again set foot on a campus. Don't worry about the cost. In fifty years or
so, there won't   {\bfseries be}  any cost. As it is, you're planning to pay more
and more of them for ever and ever. Once they're gone, on the day they go,
in fact, your schools and colleges will become the best in the land.



A knowledge of history is one of the basic skills of which we have been
deprived by the educationists' fervor for shabby social studies and smug
civics. We have forgotten that the storekeeper used to pay miscreants to
stay   {\bfseries away}.  It worked We've gotten it backward. We pay them to hang
around and smash the windows. Let's be realistic and pay the miscreants
to do that one thing the we most need them to do-nothing, nothing at all.






I am very sorry to have to award any points at all to the compromisers
of Missouri, who are contentedly unconscious of their own ignorance and
the ludicrous pathos of their determination to ensure the ''measuring/ascertaining``
of that ''high degree of proficiency in the basic skills,`` but
they do deserve a few. In the first place, if this   {\bfseries is}  an exculpation,
their ignorance was visited upon them by the system in whose service they
labor, and, in the next place, there is much justice in the educationists'
routine disclaimer of responsibility for the literacy of incipient teachers.
That, they happily point out, is supposed to be the business of the English
departments. And they are right, although, if literacy is a fundamental
process, it ought to be a concern in   {\bfseries every}  department. But there
is no doubt that English departments must be charged with teaching everything
that can be taught about the technical skills that provide a command of
literacy. And Berne and Zekowski, you will surely remember, are professors
not of education but of English, who ply their trade in a school where teacher-training
happens. Although it is, to be sure, the very existence of the articles
of educationistic faith that makes Bernes and Zekowskis   {\bfseries possible}, professors of English are supposed to have some of their  {\bfseries  own} 
articles of faith, which ought to double them up with hysterical laughter
when Bernes and Zekowskis appear at department meetings. So the poor professors
of education are put in the sad position of having to lament aloud that
even the professors of English have swallowed the potion bottled by the
professors of education. There's a satisfying sort of justice in that, but
it still means that there is not much hope of breaking the cycle in which
illiteracy is passed on from generation to generation.



The story of what has happened to English departments in the last few
decades, especially in English departments attached to teacher-training
academies, would make a fat and dull book. In brief, that history can be
seen as a conditioned response to the dual role of the study of English
as imagined in {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} where the command of fundamental
processes on the one hand and the right emotional response to literature
on the other were obviously assigned to the same people. Since a fervid
dedication to the former has not exactly been a hallmark of the schools,
and since the latter can more or less be ''taught`` by anyone, the
teaching of English has evolved into a curious creature that now looks something
like a pair of wings with no bird between them. There is the Right Wing,
devoted to the study of literature (pronounced in four syllables and without
any trace of a ''ch``), which has handed over the much-hated and
laborious teaching of composition to graduate assistants and junior department
members panting after promotion, who look upon the work as a necessary apprenticeship
to be swiftly accomplished so that they might go on to teaching seminars
in the early Elizabethan dramatists.



The Left Wing is more complicated, because it is divided into two persuasions
or parties, the democrats and the technocrats. The democrats are really
true inheritors of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} for they propose literature
as a vehicle of social and ''interpersonal`` understanding and an
incentive to the appreciation of the brotherhood of all mankind and the
human condition. It is the democrats of the Left Wing who have multiplied
the offerings in the catalog by cooking up courses in everything from the
Urban Experience to Adolescence in America and Female Problems in an Age
of Lowered Expectations. Such courses all have, inevitably, their analogues
in the high schools, where the study of literature comes down to mini-courses
in ghost, sport, or animal stories adapted from popular magazines.



However, while the democrats hold large tracts in the kingdom of government
education, the broadest acres are being deeded to the technocrats of the
Left Wing, who have prudently provided for themselves and their progeny
by reconstruing reading and writing as ''communication.`` Communication
is socially acceptable. Even the desultory deliberations of the uninterested
ignorant can be called ''communication.`` And the eighth-grade rap
session on free abortions for eighth graders suddenly becomes a   {\bfseries skill
} to be taught as a legitimate ''fundamental process.``   {\bfseries All
} the presumed skills of communication, including film-making and tape-recorder
operation and even (this is true) television-watching, become precincts
of the great realm of communications, where writing itself, only one precinct,
is subdivided into utilitarian fragments. The study of writing thus gives
way to courses in Personal Writing, Creative Writing, Journalistic Writing,
Technical Writing---well, however long the list, it will be longer tomorrow.



The innumerable offerings of the communicationists---they sometimes
call themselves ''communicologists``--- recommend themselves in
the world of educationism by virtue not only of their collectivist aims
but also because of their technical flavor. Idle chatter finds respectability
and curricular justification when it becomes Interpersonal Group Communication
Methodology. Furthermore, while a course in writing needs only some paper
and pencils, courses in communicology can generate some very impressive
budgets.



Here is a case in point, indeed, a case in   {\bfseries several}  points, for
whose sake I must provide some background. The Communications Department
in question does its business at the college where I do mine, and it is
famous here for having announced its withdrawal from the division of arts
and sciences, as we call them. The announcement, a portion of which is quoted,
was neither preceded nor accompanied nor followed by any   {\bfseries action}  at
all. That in itself was a splendid display of the paramountcy of communication
over substance. Now, however, there is some substance at issue, specifically,
a proposal to establish what was then called a ''Flagship`` program
of great excellence in the ''field`` of communications. (The word
''Flagship`` cannot be printed out in full in {\itshape The Underground
Grammarian):}



The Works of Scriblerus X. Machina



When the Communications Department blasted off into the unknown regions
of interdivisional space, its chairman left us to  {\bfseries }  mull over his now
famous Farewell ({\itshape sans} Hail):


\begin{quote}

  
But in the sober light of day after the intoxicating elixirs of self-delusion
  have begun to fade, after the sonorous tones of your voices have begun
  to sound hollow, after the technicolor hues of your dreams have begun to
  mute into the blacks and whites of reality---then you may perhaps face
  these details of reality.

\end{quote}



He was reminding us that we had not yet entered the twentieth century,
so he must have chosen that quaint and antiquated tone of purple fustian
for ironic emphasis---don't you think? How subtly he reminds us of our
enslavement to outworn tradition by his innovative use of ''mute``
as an intransitive verb and that multimedia metaphor in which our elixirs
''fade`` before our very eyes!



Now the Communications Department re-enters our atmosphere, blazing like
another Kohoutek, and bringing no faded elixirs but a heady draft proposal
for a F--------- of its very own.



We looked at the part where they tell all about the teaching of writing,
twentieth-century style. Here's the plan:


\begin{quote}

  
The communications Department proposes to establish an ideal classroom
  for the teaching of the basic writing course\ldots While there is no single
  classroom prototype that could be considered ideal for all circumstances,
  there is a concern that different approaches be taken. One of the keys
  in suggesting an ideal classroom is that traditional classrooms have a
  way of perpetuating traditional approaches\ldots By bringing together in
  one room a large variety of audiovisual implements, creating a relaxed
  atmosphere by having the room carpeted with pictures on the walls and easy
  chairs and tables and by having duplicating equipment and a variety of
  newspapers and magazines readily available, we can encourage attempts to
  change both students' perceptions and teachers' approaches to the task
  of learning how to write.

\end{quote}



Now why couldn't we have thought of all that neat stuff? Because we've
been hung up perpetuating traditional approaches---things like drill and
practice, writing and rewriting---that's why. Even desks! Now we see.
What we need is a dentist's waiting room redone by Radio Shack, magazines
and Muzak, comfy chairs, and a shiny new Xerox so the scholars won't have
to fight over the latest number of {\itshape Popular Mechanics.}



Notice a refreshing absence of flat, empty surfaces where a thoughtless
student might accidentally write words on a piece of paper and set the whole
class back a century. That's the hard part, all right, putting the words
on the paper. That's why hardly anyone was able to write before the advent
of that large variety of audiovisual implements. {\itshape (Implements?)}



The proposal itself seems to have been put together in just such an innovative,
relaxing setting. Notice, for instance, the creative (or easy chair) treatment
of punctuation in that bit about the pictures. The room is carpeted with
pictures on the walls. The pictures are on the walls and easy chairs and
tables. It's a split-screen effect. Elec  {\bfseries tron} ic!



Elsewhere we find:


\begin{quote}

  
A second prong in the outreach of the department would come from a Communication
  Consultancy Center. This would be created as an umbrella from which many
  different kinds of services could be offered to the community.

\end{quote}



Stunning. No fuddy-duddy of the age of paper and pencil could ever have
accomplished prose like that. The secret is ''vision.`` Only a writer
who has learned his craft from long hours of assiduous (but relaxed) scrutiny
of a twenty-inch color implement could hope to develop a vision modern enough
to see that outreaches have prongs, prongs coming from their Centers, and
that a prong, or maybe a Center, can be created as an umbrella, an umbrella
from which services can be dispensed, services that can help us all to learn
how to communicate in just this fashion.



Well, you can just bet your Bearcat scanner against a busted quill pen
that all our staff writers will be standing at the door the day they open
that Communications Consultancy Center. We're mired in traditions. We could
never, for instance, have come up with these spiffy structures that go the
tired old passive at least one better---maybe two:


\begin{quote}

  
\ldots [the] Department can provide leadership that will cause it to
  be viewed as a resource . \ldots few of the courses\ldots have been able to be offered on a regular
  basis.\ldots needs should be able to be filled\ldots 

\end{quote}



You just can't hope to master that smooth modern style without spending
hours, whole   {\bfseries seasons}  probably, in the old easy chair, beer and pretzels
at hand, studying the styles of the greatest play-by-play and color
men to be found on the audiovisual implement.



And just look at these daring departures from stodgy tradition. We're
so old-fashioned that we almost thought they were mistakes:


\begin{quote}

  
\ldots the advantages the computer offers\ldots lies in continuous availability.\ldots the equipment needs\ldots is appended. \ldots there needs to be provisions made\ldots 

\end{quote}



All of this is encouraging for anybody who worries about the teaching
of writing here at Glassboro. It shows that the Communications Department
is perfectly willing to put some of the taxpayers' money where somebody's
mouth is---in a collection of machines. Time was when your basic model
communications teacher would rather watch reruns of ''Washington Week
in Review`` than teach a writing course. Now they'll be clamoring to
twiddle the dials and leaf through {\itshape Cosmopolitan} and rap about nontraditional
approaches to interpersonal communication in the easy chair.



So not to worry. We can all go down to the launching in good conscience,
sing in our hollow tones one chorus of ''Anchors Aweigh,`` smash
a fifth of faded elixir on the prow of the refitted Starship Triad, newly
home from one uncharted deep, sallying forth into yet another, carrying
our hopes and dreams, ere they mute, our tuners and amplifiers and, of course,
the prongs of our outreach.






In that blazing display of furniture and equipment, you may have missed
the fact that the ''ideal classroom`` (certainly ideal for some
lucky contractors) is for ''the teaching of the   {\bfseries basic}  writing
course.`` Advanced courses in various ''writings`` will require
yet more specialized doodads. The implicit suggestion of all the paraphernalia
and even the carefully designed environment will be the same, to wit, that
writing is just one of many ''skills`` of communication, similar
  {\bfseries in kind}  to the making of television commercials and the grammarless
collages that so pleased Berne and Zewokski. And it follows that ''reading``
is the skill of receiving and registering ''communication,`` which,
accordingly, may or may   {\bfseries not}  come in the form of writing. And it further
follows, therefore, that what the schools mean by ''literacy`` is
not what you think it is. Literacy may be ''visual literacy`` or
the ability to program computers, although it is hard to imagine how people
who are not interested in punctuation or spelling can meet the even more
stringent demands of computer programs.



But the greatest achievement of the communicationists, and the one that
best assures their prosperity, is that they have transformed writing from
a private act into a public one, from a solitary search for understanding
into a public display of some communication. This suggests some deeper reasons,
deeper than their obvious distaste for the mere information required in
the teaching of writing, for the {\itshape pro forma} mention and subsequent
neglect of those fundamental processes in {\itshape Cardinal Principles.} Everywhere
in that pamphlet, we can find exhortations to socialization through group
efforts, group discussions, group thinking, and even games and dances. We
find specific condemnations of too much knowledge of mere facts and too
much attention to intellectual discipline, characteristic foreshadowings
of that later indictment of ''excellence narrowly defined.`` In
an even more recent policy statement from the National Education Association,
{\itshape Curriculum Change Toward the 21st Century} (1977), a reappraisal and
expanded reaffirmation of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} we read:


\begin{quote}

  
Imbedded in the question of freedom is an educational dilemma---the
  long-standing enigma of how to obtain the important output of superior
  minds without creating an elite of scientists, politicians, social planners
  and commentators, military specialists, business executives, and so on.

\end{quote}



Or, in other words, how can we manage to muzzle the ox while he treadeth
out the corn?



The supposed love of democracy out of which the commissioners devised
their principles is really just a hatred of those ''superior minds,``
from which, notice, we can profit   {\bfseries not}  by the study and practice of
superior mindfulness but by ''obtaining their output.`` While we
will discourage students from a painful retracing of the path of Newton's
logic, for instance, we will take profit and pleasure from the fact that
Newton has made it possible (for some   {\bfseries few}  of us, who do have
to be watched carefully for signs of incipient elitism) to construct devices
that work.



But we mustn't forget that bullet, the one that ''spins`` end
over end in perfect but antisocial obedience to the laws of motion. (A thoughtful
writer would have written ''tumbles,`` but, having done that out
of thoughtfulness, he would probably, out of that same thoughtfulness, have
understood that the point of the example was utterly irrelevant.) Of the
output that we might obtain from those superior minds, some must prove unworthy,
which is to say, antihumanistic, which in turn is to say, the work of an
individual mind heedless of collective values. It is thus a primary aim
of social adjustment educationism to disarm and overwhelm the individual
mind and replace it with a comprehensive data bank of received and unexamined
attitudes, values, opinions, and worthy emotional responses. All of the
curricular dilutions and manipulations prescribed in {\itshape Cardinal Principles
}are means to that end. And, to that end, there is only one certain impediment.
It is the one ''student outcome`` that our schools simply cannot
afford to provide, even if they could, which, out of thoughtless acceptance
of their own principles, they can't. It is, of course, literacy.



''Literacy`` needs some redefining. When Jefferson spoke of that
literacy that would provide ''informed discretion,`` he did not
mean the ability to read the instructions for assembling a swing set or
even for assembling a nuclear power generating plant. He did not mean the
ability to write a correctly punctuated letter of application for a job.
He did not mean the ability to devise, or even to ''appreciate,``
advertisements that ''use words to create images.`` He did not mean
the habit of worthy emotional response to literature. In short, he did not
mean any, or even all taken together, of those ''skills`` that we
now put forth as studies in communications or language arts. He did mean
certain habits and powers of the individual mind, habits and powers that
can be learned and refined only by long practice in reading and writing.



Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a  {\bfseries  portion}  of
education. It is education. It is at once the ability   {\bfseries and}  the inclination
of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and, out of knowledge
and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional
responses, however ''worthy,`` to make judgments. Literate people
are   {\bfseries not}  easy prey. They do know an inference from a statement of
fact. They are not easily persuaded by pretended authority. They are attentive
to the natural requirements of logic. They can make distinctions, very fine
distinctions, and are able both to notice and to examine their own predispositions
and even their only presumably ''right emotional responses.`` To
say that young human beings are incapable of such powers  {\bfseries  is}  elitism.



But our schools do say that. And thus they not only preclude those powers
in the students but in the whole system. Today's teachers and the teachers
of today's teachers are all the inevitable results of the system. They simply
don't know what literacy is. This accounts for one of the most bewildering
contradictions to be found in the current pandemonium of bold, innovative
thrusts in basic minimum competencies. On the one hand, our educationists
fancy that literacy is something you achieve when you have developed enough
''skills.`` But it turns out that many of those skills are in fact
the results of much practice and hard knowledge and habits of rote learning
and mere information, things in short supply not only among the hapless
students but also among the teachers and the teachers of the teachers. Therefore,
on some other hand, having discovered how hard it is to teach those skills
in a system where   {\bfseries no one}  is very good at them, the educationists
can also fancy that literacy is  {\bfseries  not}  simply a matter of skills,
which now become ''mere`` skills, and that it might just as well
be achieved in their absence.



''Problem-solving in the content area`` is a favorite pastime
of educationists. In the case of literacy, it works this way: Literacy,
  {\bfseries whatever}  it is, must be a student outcome. So let's try to teach
those basic skills and offer mini-courses and interesting electives in all
sorts of communications and language arts and let the students express themselves
and improve their self-esteem. Then we'll find out what the student outcomes
are and call them ''literacy.`` Put in those terms, the proposition
sounds too preposterous to win approval even among educationists, unless
you happen to be one of millions of American parents who have wondered how
compositions full of uncorrected and perhaps unnoticed mechanical errors
could earn such good grades.



The convenient redefinition of literacy, however, is not merely a happy
dodge for teachers. It is national policy in the realm of educationism,
which embraces even those outlying provinces that we mistakenly deem buffer
states between us and the traditional expansionism of governmental social
adjustment. The same comfortable and undemanding redefinition is a matter
of policy at the Educational Testing Service:





The Holistic Hustle



Fortunately for American educationists, there is never any dearth of
trashy and popular fads, the raw material of curricular novelty. The half-life
of most bold innovative thrusts is less than that of the pet rock or the
nude encounter group, and pedagogical gimmicks have to be cooked up more
often than situation comedies. But, thanks to the fertile inventiveness
always inspired by exuberant greed, the master schlockmongers will always
provide the educationists with full measures of readily adaptable inanities.



Of course, there is a difference between the peddlers of pop and the
educationists. The peddlers of pop are skillful. When promoters have deposited
the take from Woodstocks and Earth Days, the educationists come limping
behind with mini-courses in the ''poetry`` of rock and roll, and
environmental awareness. In a frantic scramble after what crumbs may fall
from the merchants' tables, they rush to ''teach`` soap-opera-watching,
the casting of horoscopes, and the throwing of the Frisbee. Coming soon:
Elvis, the copper bracelet, and the T-shirt as literature.



Future historians of education (how's that for a dreary calling?) will
understand better than we that the most powerful influence on education
in our time was not new knowledge of the psychology of learning, not the
rise and dominance of the electronic media, not the fervor for democratization
that followed the civil rights movements, not even the newly awakened public
recognition of the tensions between the demands of an increasingly automated
society and a reinvigorated and often antimaterialistic individualism, but,
purely and simply, the Big Mac. Our schools are, in almost every respect,
analogues of the fast-food industry, although there probably is some nourishment
in the Big Mac. Even the slogans are the same: Have it   {\bfseries your}  way;
We do it all for yoo-oo-oo.



It's not surprising, therefore, that educationists respond to public
discontent not by trying to improve what they do, but by trying to ''educate``
the public into some other ''perception`` of what they do. In education,
as in the fast-food business, it's called ''image enhancement,``
and, like all flackery, it's done with slogans and buzz words. When the
public finally noticed, for instance, that fewer and fewer children were
learning to read, the educationists quickly discovered that ''learning
disabilities`` were far more common than anyone had ever suspected.
Therefore, we ought in fact to   {\bfseries praise}  the schools for doing such
a great job with swarms of undernourished, disaffected imbeciles, many of
whom were also myopic, hard of hearing, hyperactive (if not lethargic),
or even lacking in self-esteem.



Now, pestered by complaints about student writing, the educationists
have drawn from the bottomless pit of mindless pop a bucket of inspiration,
the Whatever Turns You On Plan for the Enhancement of Public Perceptions
Concerning Student Writing. They call it ''holistic`` grading. It
will improve grades dramatically without requiring any improvement in the
teaching of writing. It will work even in schools where there is {\itshape no} teaching
of writing. Now   {\bfseries that's}  educationism.



Most of what we've heard about holistic grading has come from the horse's
mouth, the National Council of Teachers of English. We now have a report
from another part of the horse, the Educational Testing Service, which is
offering ''workshops`` in holistic grading:


\begin{quote}

  
With this method, the essay is read for a total impression of its quality
  rather than for such separate aspects of writing skill as organization,
  punctuation, diction, or spelling. The method takes a positive approach
  to the rating of compositions by asking the reader to concentrate on what
  the student has accomplished rather than on what the student has failed
  to do or has done badly. Holistic scoring is both efficient and accurate.
  The standards by which compositions are judged are those that the readers
  have developed from their training and from their experiences with student
  writing.

\end{quote}



We have to presume that the written parts of tests given by ETS will
be ''rated`` in this ''efficient and accurate`` fashion
from now on. In a few years, we'll hear that the writing crisis, if indeed
there ever was one, is over.



This, you see, is a ''positive approach.`` To fuss about organization,
punctuation, diction, and spelling is the bad old negative approach that
caused the whole flap to begin with.



To judge writing by this ''holistic`` method is like judging
a musical performance without reference to rhythm, tempo, or dynamics, and
taking no heed of false notes or of ''organization.`` What could
we say of a performance in which all of those things were wrong? We could
certainly   {\bfseries not}  judge it as a musical performance if we choose to give
no weight to the attributes of musical performance. If we could consider
things without regarding their attributes, which we can't, we wouldn't even
know what the hell they were. It is only by their attributes that we can
distinguish a musical performance from a billiard ball. It is by just such
attributes as organization and diction, dismissed above as presumably optional
''aspects,`` that we can distinguish between written composition
and the egg stains on an educationist's face.



And   {\bfseries that}  is a distinction that we had better learn to make. There
will never be good, universal, public education in America until we learn,
from their own words, that the people in charge of it are badly in need
of an education. Educated people will not be deceived by such nonsense.
Some knowledge of the history of thought and some skill in logical language
can be expected of the educated, but they are not required for a degree
in ''education.``



Educated people are likely to know what ''holistic`` means. They
know, simply because they have the power of language and thought, that if
something is   {\bfseries more}  than the sum of its parts, it cannot be
  {\bfseries less}  than the sum of its parts. They even know what ''aspects``
are, and that to call punctuation, spelling, diction, and even organization,
''separate aspects`` of writing suggests either ignorance or mendacity.
They know, too, that this slick hustle, designed not only to deceive the
taxpayers about the state of student writing but also to make the grading
of compositions one hell of a lot easier, may appropriately be called many
things, but ''holistic`` isn't one of them.



''Contemptuous,`` however,  {\bfseries  is}  one of them. It is not out
of kindness but out of contempt (and sloth) that educationists design ways
to excuse students from the demands of good work. To tell a student that
''what he has accomplished,`` however little that may be, is an
adequate substitute for ''what he has failed to do or has done badly,``
however much   {\bfseries that}  may be, is not ''humanistic`` (they don't
know the meaning of that word, either) or even humane. It is arrogant.



It is also unmistakably to imply that the mastery of good writing is
not important. Do you suppose that those educationists would want their
dentists or even their electricians ''rated`` by their ''holistic``
method? When pilots and flight engineers are licensed by ''positive
approaches`` without regard for all those trivial ''separate aspects``
of their crafts, will the loyal members of the National Council of Teachers
of English fly to the annual convention   {\bfseries anyway}, just to demonstrate
their faith in a ''total impression of quality``? Will they consult
physicians whose diplomas have been granted in spite of ''what the student
has failed to do or has done badly``?



One thing must be said in fairness to the educationists who have packaged
and touted the Holistic Hot 'n' Juicy: The standards by which they propose
to measure students' work are no more rigorous than those by which they
judge their own work. After all, the ability to write good English isn't
required for a doctorate in education, so why bother high school kids about
it? Of course, there may be some kids who aim higher and would like to do
useful and respectable work that calls for the habits of accuracy and clear
thought that come from the mastery of written composition, but the fast-food
business doesn't work that way. When ETS serves up the Holistic Hot 'n'
Juicy, everybody eats it.



And the educationists all get to do a little something for themselves
too-oo-oo.






In a school where ''holistic rating`` is accepted orthodoxy,
will a student's understanding of the mere facts of human sexuality be measured,
and applauded, out of a total impression of its quality? Will the mindless
appreciation of expressed feelings in grammarless (and successful) advertisements
have some consequence in the classroom next door where children are learning
to be canny consumers? Having completed their courses in sex and consumer
education, will students be every bit as knowledgeable and thoughtful in
their sex lives and their ketchup selection as they are in the separate
aspects of writing skills? Will it come to pass with them in the world according
to whatever little they may have ''accomplished`` rather than according
to what they have done badly or failed to do?



In the absence of literacy and the habits of mind that it both induces
and permits, no one can understand anything, for understanding is not the
same as knowing. What we know can be expressed in statements about the world.
What we understand has to be expressed in statements   {\bfseries about}  statements
about the world. Understanding calls for classification and organization,
fine distinctions, and logical testing, all related to knowledge. All of
those things   {\bfseries can}  be taught in schools to very young children, but
they can   {\bfseries not}  be taught where an ''impression`` of overall
quality supersedes the measurement of ''separate aspects of writing
skills,`` which are precisely the devices of classification and organization,
fine distinctions, and logical testing. There is thus an absolute limit
imposed on what the schools can do in the zany ''educations.`` Even
should the schools be able to provide some knowledge about human sexuality,
for instance---and that itself is not to be counted on in an atmosphere
hostile to mere information and rote learning---they will never be able
to provide understanding until they have first provided literacy.



That absolute limit can also be understood in social and political terms,
terms of the educationists' own devising. We have seen that even the technically
skillful and ingenious, to say nothing of the educated (not always the same
thing), are beheld by the educationists with wary suspicion. They may well
be the products of that ''excellence narrowly defined`` that has
fouled the air and water, and they are certainly the incipient elitists
who constitute that ''dilemma`` in the form of a ''long-standing
enigma.`` Is there perhaps some danger in a program of sex education
that gets too close to ''excellence narrowly defined?`` Will some
lurking ''superior minds`` seize the opportunity to become more
knowledgeable and thoughtful than most of their classmates and become as
skillful and effective in matters sexual as they are in designing those
demonic transistors? Will they become a sexual elite, leading prudent and
orderly lives in stable families, from which privilege the great mass of
Americans is unjustly excluded? And from such a privileged elite, which
uses its thoughtfulness and knowledge exclusively in its own private interests,
how can we obtain any useful output?



Since our educational system thrives on the disorders it causes, such
questions are not as farfetched as they may sound. A case in point is the
new and much-talked-of ''awareness`` among educationists of a looming
and promising problem that will bring hosts of new programs, research grants,
administrators, counselors, facilitators, and specialists: the fact that
children who live with only one parent don't, as a group, do as well in
school as children from what is coming more and more to be thought of as
a special case, an ''intact family.`` That is, at least in part,
a problem of sexual values, attitudes, and habits. While the children who
live with only one parent may be in some personal distress, their growing
numbers are good for business. The workshops alone will provide employment
for thousands. On the other hand, any significant diminution in their numbers
would be bad for business. It is not realistic to suppose that a massive
governmental institution will do anything that will someday give it less
to do.



There is, in fact, no ''problem-solving in the content area,``
although there are certainly problems ''in the content area.`` But
in a government institution, there is only one area in which problems are
taken seriously, and that is the political. Many of the strange things done
in American educationism suddenly become perfectly understandable when we
see them not as educational methods but as political maneuvers. We must
understand illiteracy, therefore, the root of ignorance and thoughtlessness,
as not some inadvertent failure to accomplish what was intended but simply
a political arrangement of great value to somebody.



\chapter{Every Three Second}




Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their
prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
It's always amusing to watch them reinventing the wheel every few years
and announcing, for instance, as some of them recently have, that children
who know the sounds of letters can actually read words they've never seen
before, by golly. It's fun to consider the systems of Lilliputian leaping
and creeping by which they better their lots and advance from humble teaching
to exalted posts as curriculum facilitators, and the superintendent's speech
at the athletic awards banquet usually has that rarest of literary qualities,
absolute immunity to parody. Indeed, the first thing you see when you consider
thoughtfully and in some detail the ways of American educationism is that
it is funny. It's usually the last thing you see, too, and since education
is not one of the truly   {\bfseries serious}  enterprises of American civilization,
like petrochemicals or banking, it doesn't seem to matter much. True, clowns
and kooks seem common in the education business, especially at the higher
managerial levels, but so what? The whole business is about nothing more
than children, who don't count yet, and who can't be expected to do any
important work. We are quite ready to tolerate in curriculum and governance
the same clumsy amateurism that we find so engaging in the school play and
the marching band. After all, weren't we all taught in our own time in the
schools that what  {\bfseries  really}  counts is the effort? And it is only
when we go to the home games that we hope to see excellence.



We tolerate the educational establishment the same way that we tolerate
the children themselves, and we therefore extend to the guidance counselors
and curriculum facilitators the same immunities that we extend to the children,
the harmless children. They are all together-over   {\bfseries there{\itshape -} } aside
from the mainstream of  {\bfseries  real}  life. But anyone who will look
long and carefully at what happens ''over there`` will sooner or
later notice something that doesn't seem funny. He may begin to suspect
that perhaps there  {\bfseries  are}  some consequences to child's play,
and that maybe the children aren't so harmless after all, to say nothing
of the counselors and facilitators. It may begin to dawn on such an observer
that the children in school actually {\itshape are} people and not merely yet-to-be-formed
raw materials who will start to be people after the last blackboard has
been washed. Where once he tolerated the silliness of the schools as a temporary
and sectarian custom in a small fragment of real life, he now sees that
the habits and attitudes so earnestly inculcated in children by silly people
will almost certainly  {\bfseries  not}  evaporate on commencement day. And
why should they? Habits and attitudes never evaporate. We may sometimes
change them consciously, but only after skillful observation and controlled
thoughtfulness, which are generally   {\bfseries not}  among the habits and
attitudes that children acquire in school. Those are the habits of literacy.
The attentive and patient observer, therefore, must come to see at last
that school is not ''something else over there.`` School is America.
If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.



Schools do   {\bfseries not}  fail. They succeed. Children  {\bfseries  always}  learn
in school. Always and every day. When their rare and tiny compositions are
''rated holistically`` without regard for separate ''aspects``
like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or even organization, they  {\bfseries 
learn{\itshape .} } They learn that mistakes bring no consequences. They learn
that their teachers were only pretending in all those lessons on spelling
and punctuation. They learn that there are no rewards for good work, and
that they who run the race all win. They learn that  {\bfseries  what}  they
win is a rubber-stamped smiling face, exactly as valuable as what they might
lose, which is nothing, nothing at all. They learn that the demands of life
are easily satisfied with little labor, if any, and that a show of effort
is what really counts. They learn to pay attention to   {\bfseries themselves{\itshape ,
}} their wishes and fears, their likes and dislikes, their idle whims
and temperamental tendencies, all of which, idolized as ''values``
and personological variables, are far more important than ''mere achievement``
in subject matter. The ''whole child`` comes first, and no one learns
that lesson better than the children. Just as you can predict the future
by going to school, you can decipher the past by looking-around. All those
thoughtless, unskilled, unproductive, self-indulgent, and eminently dupable
Americans-where have they been and what did they learn there?



What is done to children in schools is not inconsequential. It is not
even the ''fun and games`` that might be deplored for its own sake.
It is permanent and deadly serious. Sometimes, it is simply deadly:





The Royko Papers


\begin{quote}

  
When you talked us in your paper you called us barbarians. It is even
  more rude than when you call us delinquents. You cant compare us to 50
  years ago because we dont wear knickers' and deliver newspapers. All you
  Old Farts are the same. At Cominsky Park we were just expressing our feelings
  about disco, because disco sucks. If you write another column like that
  you will have to answer to me in person.

  \begin{quote}

    
A letter to Mike Royko
    from a high school student

  \end{quote}

  
I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] that made
  it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper
  level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer\ldots was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There
  was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil
  motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past
  behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the
  pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not
  stupidity but   {\bfseries thoughtlessness{\itshape \ldots} }  Is wickedness, however
  we may define it, this being ''determined to prove a villain,``
    {\bfseries not}  a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem
  of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected
  with our faculty of thought?

  \begin{quote}

    
Hannah Arendt, in
    {\itshape The Life of the Mind}

  \end{quote}

\end{quote}



Mike Royko is a columnist at the {\itshape Sun}-{\itshape Times} of Chicago.
His essays appear in many newspapers throughout the country, thank goodness,
for he has the habit of clear language and thought. Mike Royko wrote a column
about those eleven people who were trampled to death at a rock concert in
Cincinnati. He suggested, by no means injudiciously, that ''those who
would climb over broken bodies to reach a seat in an auditorium could be
called 'the new barbarians.' `` That suggestion must have seemed less
than humanistic and perhaps even somewhat un-self-esteem-enhancing to a
certain Robert Maszak, a teacher of English at Bloom Township in Chicago
Heights. Maszak, probably remembering his training in the teacher academy,
seized for his students this marvelous opportunity for a relevant and experiential
exercise in the integration of self-awareness aspects and the clarification
of values. He had them all write letters telling Royko where to head in,
and proving, since they   {\bfseries could}  write, that some teenagers were
not barbarians. In fact, they couldn't, and they are.



Royko, to be sure, had said nothing about teenagers---or about the
worth of rock music, which was stridently championed in many of the letters.
Maszak, however, may well be a member of the National Council of Teachers
of English, and thus both a proponent and a practitioner of ''holistic``
reading, in which the reader must scrupulously refuse to consider what the
writer actually says, a mere ''aspect`` of writing.



Maszak may also be a holistic grader, for he was not reluctant to display
the fruits of his teaching, which look like this:


\begin{quote}

  
Dear Tenage hater
  I was disapointed by what you writen on the Who concert. From what you
  said I can see you have know so called barbarism. You used some strong
  words in there with very little fact, you say everyone was numbed in the
  brain. I will say from concert experience maybe half or three forties were
  high on something or nether but I allso know that theres not one forth
  to half that weren't. You say everyone was pushing and throwing elbows,
  did you ever think that some of the thrown elbows were from people who
  didn't like getting pushed. You said something about when you were a kid,
  well times have change\ldots 

\end{quote}



Yes. The times indeed have change. Well, let's try to be holistic. Let's
ignore failures of technique and, as we were instructed in last month's
quotation from ETS, concentrate on ''what the student has accomplished
rather than on what the student has failed to do or has done badly.``
Let's remember as well the aggrieved whimpers of the educationists who beseech
us to believe that skill in writing is obviously, while useful, much less
important than humanistic things like the encouragement of self-expression,
the enhancement of self-esteem, and the clarification of values.



Now we can understand why Maszak was untroubled by such a piece of work.
It is, in fact, a testimony to the triumph of educationism over education.
That poor student, not a villain but a victim, has indeed expressed nothing
more than  {\bfseries  himself{\itshape .} } His esteem for that forlorn and meager
self is firm and truculent. And his values are perfectly clear.



Perfectly clear, too, are the values of the few students who actually
mentioned Royko's topic, the death of eleven people. One saw it as a perfectly
expectable concomitant of everybody's inalienable right to have what he
wants when he wants it. Here's his clarification of values:


\begin{quote}

  
If there were someone yer looked up to and yer went to see them in person
  and thier were thousands of peopl just like you and wanted to see him up
  close would you fight yer way in?

\end{quote}



Another shows an even keener sense of values; he gives us the very numbers
by which we can reconcile ourselves to death in Cincinnati: ''People
die every three second. What would you do if you paid \$15 for a ticket?``



Eichmann must have said as much in the still watches of the night, if
he ever  {\bfseries  did}  say anything to himself. Jews die anyway, don't
they? And Eichmann had even more than fifteen dollars at stake.



You can be sure that the humanisticists in our schools will make a profit
from that last letter. They will transform it into a ''values clarification
module``: You have paid for a ticket to hear a concert by the Walking
Dead, whom yer look up to. How cheap does it have to be for you to decide
that getting to your seat just isn't worth the hassle of trampling a few
people to death, people who may in any case die every three second? The
ensuing rap session will be quite long enough to provide yet another day's
respite from the tedious and dehumanizing study of language and thought.



The children who wrote the Royko papers are juniors and seniors in high
school. They are probably from sixteen to nineteen years old. They have
spent eleven, twelve, or more, years in our ''humanistic,`` ''values-oriented,``
schools. What their teachers have praised as ''creativity`` looks
remarkably like anarchic self-indulgence, which is what creativity must
always be in the want of discipline and skill. Their much-encouraged ''self-expression``
cannot be distinguished from dissolute libertinism, a virulent form of self-expression
where there is no self-knowledge. Their ''enhanced self-esteem``
has blossomed into an arrogant narcissism, a perversion of self-esteem where
there is no idea of what is estimable.



Can we hope that Maszak's few students are unique, or at least unusual?
We cannot. We know that there are millions, millions of children who have
in effect been   {\bfseries dehumanized}  by the ''humanistic`` education
that smugly dismisses the mastery of knowledge and skills and the discipline
of the intellect as elitist adornments accessible, if they   {\bfseries will}  have
them, only to the few, and eagerly peddles to the many the mindless claptrap
of environmental awareness and career orientation and ethnic sensitivity
and doing your own thing and letting it all hang out.



Human beings only, of all living creatures, can know what Hannah Arendt
has described as ''the claim on our thinking attention that all events
and facts make by virtue of their existence.`` She said of Eichmann
''that he clearly knew of no such claim,`` although she does not
say of him, as we might have to of Maszak's students, that even had he known
of such a claim he would have proved incapable of paying it  {\bfseries  thinking}  attention.



Thinking attention can be paid only in skillful language. And, for those
who want to be humanistic, there is no more distinctly human attribute than
the power of language and no more distinctly human accomplishment than thinking
attention.



Go and learn  {\bfseries  those}  things, you humanism-mongers, before
you presume to instruct our children in values. And do it fast. There isn't
much time. We have read the Royko papers, and we know what you have been
doing. We have seen the future that you have fashioned for us, and, in words
that even your victims will understand, it sucks, humanisticists, and all
the  {\bfseries  young}  farts are the same.






It is possible, of course, to make too much of what seems a smoldering
savagery in the students of Robert Maszak. But when we seek mitigation of
that ominous threat to the future of an already disintegrating civilization,
we discover yet other threats. For instance, it is probably true that Maszak's
teenagers are in part striking poses designed to disturb grown-ups, {\itshape pour
\'{e}pater,} no doubt, {\itshape le bourgeois.} That is not only a child's
inalienable right, but an important part of the training of the mind. Rational
thoughtfulness, after all, is not and should not be the ordinary condition
of daily human life; it is a stance that we assume, if we can, when appropriate.
Even if we are able to do the work of logical thinking, we do not, unless
we are John Stuart Mill, perhaps, do it except in response to a summons,
exactly the summons that Hannah Arendt has in mind when she speaks of ''the
claim\ldots that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.``
Attentive thoughtfulness is an aberration, an act not only rare in human
experience but also an act requiring cultivation. Thinking is not unlike
playing the violin; it isn't simply natural. Even if we can do it, we don't
often do it.



Very well, then. We admit that those teenagers are, in part at least,
striking stances. But why these and only these stances? What stance, we
wonder, has their teacher himself chosen, so that they can so obviously
expect his approval? Their chosen stance is (just like their teacher's?)
tiresomely ordinary and predictable; even its virulent truculence is exactly
what ''tough`` teenagers suppose ''stylish.`` It pretends
to express an independence, especially an independence of the outworn values
of grown-ups who wore knickers and delivered newspapers, but it in fact
expresses the opposite, for it is nothing but a recitation of attitudes
and emotions as generally received and accepted in that milieu. ''That
milieu`` includes the classroom, obviously, and the school. It includes
principally, however, the world   {\bfseries out there{\itshape ,} } the popular, the
ideology of the streets and the movies and the music. In that sense, Maszak's
classroom   {\bfseries is}  the world, only less so, for it repeats what is uttered
first in the world. The agents of American educationism do not   {\bfseries lead}  their students anywhere, they  {\bfseries  follow}  them, and always
downstream, always in the way they would go even if there were no schools.



An education, which requires the training of the mind in rational thoughtfulness,
goes against the grain. It isn't easy. It isn't even ''natural,``
as we usually mean that word. To live, even to live an ordinary and comfortable
life, requires the practice of rational thoughtfulness no more than it requires
practice on the violin. You can come and go, get and spend, work and play,
choose and reject, rise and fall, live and die, entirely in response to
the suggestions without and the appetites within. You need never feel, never
mind answer, that claim that facts and events make on the thinking attention.
For any value you share, any ''worthy`` emotional response to which
you are led, any received opinion that you think to call ''yours,``
there is always the justification of some fifteen-dollar ticket.



Furthermore, a whole culture composed of people just like you would be
a very stable and peaceful one. While the social-adjustment educationists
may seem silly and ignorant, at the heart of all they do there is an important
and correctly understood truth: thoughtfulness is disruptive, and the work
of an individual mind is seldom likely to contribute to the consistent harmony
of a collective social system. Therefore, while you, as an individual mind,
may judge that the children who wrote to Royko suggest some failure in schooling,
and while such might even be the judgment of individual minds who actually
  {\bfseries do}  the schooling, those same children represent a mighty success
  {\bfseries in principle{\itshape .} } Whatever else they might be, they are not individual
minds that will fall into the anticollective habit of thoughtful attention.
They may indeed make a ruckus at a rock concert, which is ironically only
a part of the ''consistent harmony of a collective social system,``
but they will not examine and reexamine the ideas and values that have been
delivered unto them.



Those students represent another kind of success. Their schools have
undertaken, at the expense of skills and knowledge, to instill in them values.
And they have values. They know what a fifteen-dollar ticket is worth and
that disco sucks. Those {\itshape are} values. They are not determinations from
evidence, not descriptions of phenomena, not conclusions from argument.
They are assertions of worth. Values. They are neither unusual nor eccentric,
however repellent some may find them. But even the most intemperate critic
of American educationism cannot accuse the schools of   {\bfseries intending}  to
teach such values, and the people in the schools will themselves protest
that such reprehensible values are picked up  {\bfseries  not}  in the schools,
which struggle bravely and perhaps hopelessly against them, but from ''the
society.`` They are right, and they are wrong. Certainly the resort
to violence, hedonistic self-indulgence, and the supposed worth of whatever
is popular are celebrated in ''the society.`` But why is that so?
It must be because we are in the habit of accepting values out of suggestion
and example rather than of formulating them out of knowledge and thoughtfulness.
And  {\bfseries  that}  must be so because we have been schooled into that
habit, for whose sake we have been unschooled in the habit of thoughtful
judgment, which would preclude the habit of accepting values out of suggestion
and example and make impossible the social adjustment that is the principal
aim of the schools. Thoughtful judgment is a specific antibody against uncritical
susceptibility to suggestion, so it must be repressed if schooling is to
succeed. And when it is repressed successfully, through willful neglect
of intellectual discipline and mere information, schoolchildren will form
their ''values`` not from the transparent preachments of teachers
who are obviously trying to con them into putting on knickers and delivering
newspapers, but from the dramatic and stylish examples of the world of the
demotic.



Many pernicious consequences flow from the fact that the schools have
appointed themselves inculcators of values and that the American public,
itself ''adjusted`` by the schools, has come to believe that the
inculcation of values is a legitimate aim of education. One of the worst
of those consequences is now made manifest in the current wave of sectarian
demands that the schools, since they {\itshape are} in the values business anyway,
ought to teach not just the nonsense they have been teaching but whatever
other nonsense any sufficiently noisy group of citizens may prefer. After
all, if the schools can ''teach`` doing your own thing or going
with the flow (  {\bfseries both}  of which, curiously enough, can justify
any particular belief or deed), why can't they ''teach`` that the
universe is just as well described in Genesis as in geology, astronomy,
paleontology, physics, biology, and chemistry? While they preach, from one
side of the mouth, a humanistic contempt for that ''excellence narrowly
defined`` that brought us all those ugly antennas, why can't they prate,
from the other, about the glories of the profit system? There is no good
answer to such questions. If a tax-supported government school system devotes
itself to   {\bfseries any values at all{\itshape ,} } it can always be made to do exactly
that for any   {\bfseries other}  values at all.



One of the inevitable consequences of sixty years of anti-intellectualism
in the government schools is the automatic assumption of most Americans
that things like spelling and punctuation are political and ideological
badges. Those who are fussy about spelling and punctuation, and other such
devices, are assumed to be old-fashioned, conservative, and elitist, while
those who care little for such traditional trivia must be with it, liberal,
and democratic. (This accords ill with another article of American folklore,
according to which it is the ''educated`` who become liberals and
abandon the old-time religion of this or that, but the American public has
been trained not to see such contradictions.) Because {\itshape The Underground
Grammarian} often ridicules academicians who cannot spell or punctuate
or even make sense, readers occasionally assume that it must also be against
gun control and in favor of prayer in schools and a return to McGuffey's
Readers. I often had letters from strange people asking aid and comfort
in such causes, all of them unwitting testimony to the distress and confusion
of mind that automatically equates schooling with education and indoctrination
with learning. Eventually it seemed good to write a general answer to all
such solicitations:





Guarding the Guardians of the Guards



We have been hearing both from and about groups of citizens who have
organized themselves as guardians of education and monitors of texts and
techniques. Those who have written to us have praised our efforts, claiming
a common cause and expecting that we will praise, and promote, their efforts.
We will not. They are decent and well-meaning people disturbed about the
obvious disorders of education, no doubt, but their understanding of ''education``
is as thoughtless and self-serving as that of the self-styled professionals
of education who brought those disorders upon us.



These guardians of education, while they differ in some ways, all seem
proponents of the back-to-basics frenzy, in which we find no merit. We champion
mastery, and we mean mastery, not minimum competence, in language and number
not because it is the goal of education but because it is absurd to imagine
an educated person who lacks it. Having that mastery, we can make of knowledge
the raw material of thoughtfulness and judgment. Lacking it, we can make
of knowledge nothing more than the substance of training and the content
of indoctrination.



The back-to-basics enthusiasts, who never fail to note the paramount
importance of being able to read want-ads and to write letters of application,
treat the skills of number and language as subdivisions of vocational training
to be imparted and done with, as though reading a micrometer and reading
a paragraph were acts of the same nature. In one sense, literacy is a trivial
skill, easily acquired and neither more nor less valuable than those darlings
of the schools, the ''life skills,`` things like shoe-tying and
crossing at the corner. In another sense, it is an endless and demanding
enterprise that is also the ground of our knowledge and understanding, but
an enterprise little likely to entice the minds of those taught literacy
as a life skill.



All unwittingly, therefore, the guardians preach the same degradation
of literacy that the educationists have so long practiced, and, strange
as it might seem at first, for the same reason. The greatest mischief done
in the schools is the attempt to inculcate certain presumed ''values,``
but the guardians understand that less than perfectly. They fancy that the
mischief lies not in the inculcation of values but in the inculcation of
the educationists' values rather than the guardians' values. All would be
well, they imagine, if only the school would foster the ''right``
values. And that is why they must make of literacy a ''basic`` life
skill rather than a way of life. If you want to foster in children certain
values and preclude others, you must take care that they do not develop
an appetite for knowledge and the skill to make of it the raw material of
thoughtfulness and judgment. Jefferson's words are an assertion of faith,
not fact; fact may be ''self-evident,`` but ''truth`` is
not. If it were, earth would be fair, and all men glad and wise.



There is a momentous difference between coming to believe what we have
often been told and deciding, as Jefferson did, out of knowledge and thoughtful
judgment, to ''hold`` something true. The former is a kind of slavery
and easy to achieve; the latter is difficult, for it requires knowledge
and governed intellect, in other words, an education, but it is freedom.



Freedom is, to be sure, frightening. There is no telling what values
free people will choose to hold. Decent and well-meaning guardians of values
were horrified by the monstrous principles of the Declaration of Independence.
It is, of course, out of fear that the guardians preach the inculcation
of values, fear of knowledge and thought.



Most of the guardians urge things like the study of history and economics
''emphasizing the benefits of the free enterprise system.`` We wholeheartedly
share the guardians' devotion to the free enterprise system, but they obviously
don't share our equal devotion to the study of history and economics, which
will inevitably bring the knowledge of some facts, events, and ideas that
are not at all conducive to our wholehearted devotion to the free enterprise
system. When we study history from a certain point of view, we do not study
history. If our students someday discover, as in fact they will, that we
were sometimes mistaken in our knowledge of history, they will probably
forgive us. But if they discover, as in fact they do, that we have misrepresented
or omitted knowledge in the service of some values, they will learn to distrust
both us and those values, as indeed they should-and apparently do.



If our values are grounded, as we usually imagine they are, in evidence
and reason, then those who can see the evidence and who know the ways of
reason are likely to adopt them. However, if we find ourselves tampering
with the evidence and tempering the power of language, the medium of reason,
then perhaps we ought to reevaluate our values. Should that prove unacceptable,
we should at least be able to see that our interest would be best served
not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state
to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that
we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others that we do not love.



The guardians do differ in one important way from the educationists.
The guardians have lost their nerve, while the educationists still have
plenty. The guardians, although they often wave the flag, do not truly hold
the most basic value of a free society: the belief that, given the choice,
knowing and thoughtful people will choose to continue in a free society.
Those who do hold that value must guard against the guardians. But not in
the classroom.






We misunderstand the dangers of schooling. We fancy that what is at stake
is some obviously needed widespread level of competence and ability, a large
population of people able to cope with the demands of a complicated and
technical system. And there is, to be sure, some danger that we will have
fewer effective people than we need. But we have at stake in the schools
something far more important than that, for what is effectively precluded
by the essential and pervasive ideology of the government school system
is nothing less than individual freedom.



We could probably say many things about the unhappy schoolboy who knows
the value of a ticket and even that ''people die every three second,``
but of them all the most important is that he is not free. His beliefs and
values are not his; he is theirs. He is possessed, as anyone must be possessed
who knows nothing of the claim that all things make on our thinking attention
and who lacks in any case the perfectly learnable powers and skills of thinking
attention. Which is to say that that schoolboy, in company with countless
millions of other Americans, is held captive by illiteracy, and that we
have in effect voted in favor of Proposition 3, which requires that the
ignorant must be unfree if civilization is to endure. But Jefferson warned
us that that might happen. What he did not foresee, unfortunately, was that
we would find a way to make it happen.



Literacy is not a skill or a collection of skills, although it surely
does provide many ever-growing skills; it is rather a way of the mind, the
  {\bfseries individual}  mind, for there is no other, the habit of thinking
attention paid in language in the search for understanding. It is the only
guarantee of freedom and the essential attribute of knowing and thoughtful
people who can choose. For free people, basic minimum competency won't do,
and that our schools now propose that shabby substitute for literacy is
clear evidence that their collectivist ideology has nothing to do with the
goal of the freedom of the individual.



A government institution serves the aims of government. The aims of even
the best government, as Jefferson warned us, are not the same as the aims
of free individuals nor can they be. Free individuals, capable of thoughtful
discretion, are the necessary check to the natural propensities of what
Jefferson so aptly named the ''functionaries`` of government. It
must follow, therefore, that if education provides us with free individuals,
it is   {\bfseries not}  in the interest of government functionaries to provide
education. They must provide something else, but they must  {\bfseries  call}  it
''education.`` In this respect, no government is different from
any other, and in the following  {\bfseries }  article {\itshape The Underground Grammarian}
explored a frightening parallel:





The Answering of Kautski



Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we
would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite
enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class,
and everyone will understand everything. V. I. Lenin



Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various.
The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and
think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or
covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population
in which the power of thought is occluded and the power of deed brought
low. That's why Lenin's bolshevism and American educationism have so much
in common.



''Give me four years to teach the children,`` said Lenin, ''and
the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.`` He wasn't talking about
reading, writing, and arithmetic. He wanted only enough of such skills so
that the workers could puzzle out their quotas and so that a housebroken
bureaucracy could get on with the business of rural electrification. Our
educationists call it Basic Minimum Competency, and they hope that we'll
settle for it as soon as they can cook up some way of convincing
us that they can provide it. For Lenin, as for our educationists, to ''teach
the children`` is to ''adjust`` them into some ideology.



Lenin understood the power of that ready refuge from logical thought
that is called in our schools the ''affective domain,`` the amiable
Never-never Land of the half-baked, to whom anything they name ''humanistic``
is permitted, and of whom skillful scholarship and large knowledge are not
required. Lenin approved the ''teaching`` of values and the display,
with appropriate captions, of socially acceptable ''role models.``
He knew all too well the worth of behavior modification. He knew that indoctrination
in ''citizenship`` is safer than the study of history, and that
a familiarity with literature is not conducive to the whole-hearted pursuit
of career objectives in the real-life situation, or arena.



On the other hand, Lenin knew that there was little risk that coherent
thought would erupt in minds besieged by endless prattle about the clarification
of values. He knew that reiterated slogans can dull even a good mind into
a stupor out of which it will never arise to overthrow the slogan-makers.
In this, our educationists have followed him assiduously, justifying every
new crime against freedom of language and thought by mouthing empty slogans
about ''quality education.``



''Most of the people,`` Lenin wrote, not in public, of course,
but in a letter, ''just aren't capable of thinking. The best they can
do is learn the words.`` If that reminds you of those bleating sheep
in {\itshape Animal Farm,} try to forget them, and think instead of the lowing
herds of pitiable teacher-trainees, many of whom began with good intentions
and even with brains, singing for their certificates dull dirges of interpersonal
interaction outcomes enhancement and of change agent skills developed in
time-action line. Lenin's contempt was reserved for the masses. These educationists,
pretenders to egalitarianism, hold even their own students in contempt,
offering them nothing but words.



If you think it too rash to charge our educationists even as unwitting
agents of tyranny and thought control, consider these lines from a recent
proclamation of the Association of California School Administrators:


\begin{quote}

  
''Parent choice`` proceeds from the belief that the purpose
  of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact,
  educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which
  is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and
  by which they are sustained. ''Family choice`` is, therefore, basically
  selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the ''wants`` of
  a single family rather than the ''needs`` of society.

\end{quote}



So what do you think? Would it suit Lenin?



And if you'd like to object, you'll see that these people also know how
to answer Kautski. They'll just pronounce you an elitist, and everybody
will understand everything.






Thoughtful people will discover some reservations about the voucher system,
against which the California administrators direct their strange homily.
It does assume, contrary to evidence, that the ordinary American parent
knows what an education is and prizes it, and it will provide lucrative
opportunities for even more fools and charlatans than the schools now harbor.
In fact, the best thing that can be said for the voucher system is that
it clearly terrifies the educationists and drives them to admit, out of
a mindless frenzy, apparently, for the admission is most damning, that ''educating
the individual is but a means to the   {\bfseries true}  end of education, which
is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by
which they are sustained.`` They almost certainly say exactly the same
thing in the schools of Albania.



It was the American promise that free individuals would be more important
than any ''social order,`` and that it was for them to choose how
best  {\bfseries  it}  might be formed and sustained. Nor is it suggested
in the Declaration of Independence that the individual's pursuit of his
''wants`` is ''basically selfish and anti-social`` and antithetical
to the ''needs`` of the society. But then the chances are very good
that no member of the Association of California School Administrators has
pondered the meanings of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, as inheritors
of the ideology of {\itshape Cardinal Principles,} the California principals
have probably never so much as read it, since ''civics should concern
itself less with constitutional questions and remote governmental functions,
and should direct attention to social agencies close at hand and to the
informal activities of daily life that regard and seek the common good.``



The common good. How splendid that sounds. But when William Blake once
gave his thinking attention to the perennial cry of those who justified
their deeds in the name of the common good, he had to conclude:


\begin{quote}

  
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General
  Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, flatterer; for Art and Science
  cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

\end{quote}



The deepest, most pervasive theme of American educationism is the rejection
of minutely organized particulars for the sake of vaguely appreciated generalities.
If the former are the substance of Art and Science, of what are the latter
the substance?



I can't think of any pat answer to that question, but I cannot help believing
that those whose minds wander in the work of vaguely appreciated generalities
and who cannot give themselves to the organization of minute particulars
cannot in any sense be free, and may not, in some special sense, be fully
human. If the direction of thinking attention to the claim of events and
facts is the essentially human act, performed in the essentially human medium
of language, what can we say of those who are unable to perform that act,
but that they are unfree in a state of civilization?



Rousseau had it backward. We are  {\bfseries  not}  born free. We are
born in the chains of the random and reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable
by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect
the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of
reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify,
define, distinguish, always in minute particulars. It was a premise of the
founders of American educationism that what they called ''ethical character``
could be instilled, indeed, might   {\bfseries better}  be instilled, without
attention to intellectual discipline. Out of that premise they devised their
''affective domain`` and set it over against the merely ''cognitive
domain`` as a somewhat  {\bfseries  more}  than equal and independent
principality, where they might wander comfortably among the unmeasurables,
the feelings and sentiments and values and ''worthy emotional responses.``
Of that affective domain I must now say four things, which, although I have
to put them in some order, are equally important:


\begin{enumerate}

\item[1.] 
It is out of resort to the affective domain that educationists can
palm off as ''education`` everything from folk dancing to bulletin
board decoration and visits to nursing homes, and, at the same time, so
neglect the merely cognitive disciplines that they can spend twelve whole
years in the teaching of something as simple as conventional punctuation
and still fail to teach it.


\item[2.]
The affective domain is a logical absurdity. Feelings, sentiments,
values, and responses have causes, attributes, and consequences. We can  {\bfseries 
know}  nothing of them, we can neither understand nor judge them,
without the work of the intellect in the organization of minute particulars.
You may call ''affective`` whatever you please, but you cannot deal
with it unless you are cognitive.



\item[3.]
The feelings, sentiments, values, and responses of our children, or
of any citizens, are none of the government's damned business. That we must
support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological
manipulation of citizens is infamous. That it should, out of that intrusive
manipulation, provide us with who can say how many young citizens who cannot
think coherently but who do ''appreciate`` the value of a fifteen-dollar
ticket to a rock concert is an unspeakable outrage.



\item[4.] 
It is the supposed existence and paramountcy of the affective domain
that have made the teachers' colleges what they are, nurseries of self-indulgence,
unskilled ''creativity,`` and half-baked pseudo-metaphysical incantation.
Silly as it may seem, training in the efficient storage of chalk and erasers
would actually be of more value to the incipient schoolteacher than a whole
experiential continuum of intercultural awareness-enhancement, but if teacher-training
were devoted only to the cognitive it could be very quickly accomplished
by very few people. The professionals of education can justify their continued
employment in great numbers only if they can convince us that they alone
can initiate supplicants into the mysteries. It is only in the cognitive
domain, which they scorn, that charlatanism is readily unmasked.

\end{enumerate}


Nevertheless, and although the colonists could hardly have been more
oppressed 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   {\bfseries want}  the
schools to teach values, and we  {\bfseries  believe}  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 {\itshape 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   {\bfseries schooling{\itshape ,} } 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.

\backmatter

\chapter{Afterword: Plus \c{C}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:


\begin{quote}

  
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.

\end{quote}



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,   {\bfseries 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;   {\bfseries now}  we know what to do. And they
lurched forward. Since the day of the Great Primal Lurch, the life adjustmentism
of {\itshape 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   {\bfseries 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 I  {\bfseries  do}  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   {\bfseries 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 the  {\bfseries  exact}  nature of the relationship, between
those hokey Language Arts, already infamous, and mere English:


\begin{quote}

  
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.

\end{quote}



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   {\bfseries routine}  enterprises of the
college. Furthermore, we  {\bfseries  never}  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, but its theme was fascinating.



It derived all of its recommendations from something that you will recognize:
the Student Outcomes Principle. It began by saying, and said again and again
throughout, that the ''aims`` of courses of study were certain student
outcomes, which might well be achieved --- which, indeed, might   {\bfseries best
} be achieved --- not by any traditionally practiced studies but by
the ad hoc invention of innovative interdisciplinary studies and other gimmicks.



One of the desired student outcomes, for instance, was ''an appreciation
of the role of science and technology in the modern world.`` (Yes, ''appreciation.``
{\itshape Plus} \c{C}{\itshape a change.)} While the proposal did concede that
such an appreciation might have something to do with ''a course   {\bfseries oriented
toward}  [my italics, and well merited, too] the discipline of
physics, chemistry, biology, geology, or astronomy,`` it quite specifically
and emphatically rejected the quaint and elitist notion that a student ought
to take a basic  {\bfseries  course}  in one of those disciplines. Such a
course is neither innovative nor interdisciplinary and cannot be expected,
therefore, to provide that appreciation which is the desirable student outcome.
Furthermore, a basic course in some hard science provides no opening at
all for some nervous member of a shrinking education department who is also
a skillful tinkerer with automobiles and motorcycles and who could surely,
as teacher-trainee enrollments decline, impart in a real-life situation
a worthy appreciation of the role of science and technology in the modern
world. (Since I myself do all the typesetting and printing for {\itshape The Underground
Grammarian,} I suggested that I too might teach a course in the appreciation
of science and technology. My printing press itself exemplifies all of the
cunning embodiments of the principles of mechanics that made the Industrial
Revolution, and   {\bfseries every single one}  of Newton's famous, but now
unknown, Laws of Motion can be seen at work in that machine. And appreciated.
The subcommittee members nodded emphatically, pleased to see that a notorious
slow learner was coming around. You cannot, in fact, dream up anything so
preposterous that you will not find it being taught in some school.)



The ''humanities`` are not mentioned in the proposal, although
''the human environment`` is. And there are the ''integrative
studies,`` in which ''innovation and experimentation are strongly
encouraged,`` and which ought to include things like Racism, Sexism
in the United States Today, or New Directions in the Search for Meaning.
For obvious reasons, the study of foreign languages is  {\bfseries  not}  to
be considered a necessary part of every student's general education, although
there would be little harm in teaching a student to appreciate the fact
that there are foreign languages. In every respect, even in its call for
a massive new bureaucracy to serve the needs of general education, the proposal
derives directly from the ideology, and often even from the very text, of
{\itshape Cardinal Principles.}



That's ominous, because there couldn't have been more than two or three
members of that subcommittee who had ever even  {\bfseries  heard}  of {\itshape Cardinal
Principles.} Indeed, some of those members are so clearly devoted to
things like intellectual discipline and all that mere information that they
would recoil in dismay from a clear statement of the ideology of {\itshape Cardinal
Principles.} This must mean that that ideology has so thoroughly seeped
into American schooling at every level that it has become the ground of
who can say how many rarely noticed and therefore rarely examined assumptions.
Those assumptions are dangerous, and there can never be the education that
Jefferson intended while they are the daily food and drink of the schools.
And they are. Even the academically disciplined members of the subcommittee
signed their names (what were they thinking?  {\bfseries  were}  they thinking?)
to this:


\begin{quote}

  
The realization that study areas refer to desirable outcomes and that
  these may be met in a variety of ways, ways that may at times deny the
  custom-established claims to coveted provinces of instruction, broadens
  the possibilities of curricular offerings immeasurably.

\end{quote}



The ideologues of educationism (fortunately for us, if we will pay thoughtful
attention) have so thoroughly given themselves to their disdain of intellectual
discipline that they   {\bfseries always} {\itshape ,} and always inadvertently, reveal
some truth when they pretend to do the work of the mind in writing. It isn't
true, as popular opinion fancies, that the unskilled writer fails to make
himself clear; he is far more likely to make himself all too clear. While
there is no clear meaning   {\bfseries in the assertion}  that areas ''refer
to`` outcomes and that outcomes can be ''met,`` there is a clear
meaning in the fact that the assertion is made in such a murky way. The
very use of the word ''realization`` is a mindless twitch of longing,
for in no way can the Student Outcomes Principle be put forth as some fact
to be ''realized`` but only as an assertion to be believed. It is
simply true that he who pauses to choose the right word will   {\bfseries find out}  what he means to mean, and he who can't will make it clear to his
reader that he is ignorant and thoughtless.



But the most unsettling revelation of that passage is of the automatic
assumption that underlies the characterization of the ''claims of disciplines``
as ''custom-established`` and ''provinces of instruction``
as ''coveted.`` What else must be true of one who automatically
assumes that it is out of  {\bfseries  custom}  that we turn to the scholar
of history for knowledge and understanding of history? Would he also assume
that it is out of nothing more than custom that we take our shoes to the
cobbler or our teeth to the dentist? What can you guess about devotion to
discipline and the love of learning in one who airily presumes that it is
out of   {\bfseries covetousness}  that the physicists greedily demand the
privilege of teaching the physics courses? When the outcome seeker suggests
that we might do better to teach the appreciation of history and physics
by devising innovative interdisciplinary courses to replace the customary
and coveted work of the physicists and historians, who is covetous? Such
bizarre notions are not only possible but inevitable in a world where there
really   {\bfseries are}  no academic disciplines, where this year's general
science teacher may just as well be next year's guidance counselor and then
another year's assistant principal for instruction, where this year's professor
of curriculum facilitation will probably be next year's grants proposal
coordinator and another year's supervisor of pre-service hands-on experiential
continua. Among the educationists, who make policy and devise theory, there
is so little experience of academic discipline that they probably really  {\bfseries 
can't}  imagine any reason other than ''custom`` for giving
the teaching of physics into the hands of the physicists. Physics, for them,
is not a concrete and complicated body of real knowledge and understanding
but just one of many vaguely similar vehicles for the enhancement of appreciation.
Nor is it surprising that those who have, because the mere teaching of general
science or social studies did not arise from or command love and devotion,
indeed coveted the nobler and more lucrative work of the guidance counselor
should imagine that the scholar of history has seized his chair, in which
he seems so disturbingly and unaccountably content, out of covetousness.



What can we hope for now that such people have boldly announced their
intention to devise new programs of emphasis on the great role of the humanities
in the development of Western Civilization and the powers of knowledge and
critical thought as the necessary virtues of a free society?



Nothing.



Or, more precisely, nothing but more of the same.



The state of American government education is simply not a ''problem``
that can be solved. It is rather an enormous fact of life, a self-perpetuating
institution elaborated from within by principle, not caprice, governed by
collective assent, not individual talent. It easily absorbs the shock of
every criticism by pretending to ''reform`` itself, only to transform
and dilute whatever it claims to embrace into nothing but more of the same.
It easily swallows and digests and incorporates into its substance everything
in the world around it, popular fads and fancies just as readily as appropriately
diluted new knowledge in genetics or psychology or in any of the disciplines
that it will not teach. Whatever there is in our society --- fast-food
merchandizing, militant homosexualism, disco dancing, supply-side economics,
weird religious cultism, futurology through computers, jogging, astrology,
est, you name it --- will find its analogue in the schools.



The Commission for the Reorganization of Secondary Education set out
to adjust the ordinary American child, whatever that might be, to life in
American society, whatever   {\bfseries that}  might be. It did not clearly
and fully understand either, but who does? It nevertheless succeeded prodigiously,
if only by a roundabout way. By now the children --- and the children
of the children of those children --- whom they ''adjusted`` have
  {\bfseries become}  American society. In strictest truth, therefore, it
may   {\bfseries not}  be correct to say that the educational system absorbs
and replicates the mindless fads and the manipulative practices of society
and commerce. It may be just the other way around. After more than half
a century of preparing children for life, our government education system
has prepared a life for children.



That system is a tiger that we can neither kill nor evade. To shoot the
tiger is unthinkable; the consequent social and economic upheaval would
turn us from a nation of children into a nation of crazy and desperate children,
a condition from which we are now (more or less) protected not by the good
offices of the schools but by their mere existence as employers and purchasers
of goods and services. Furthermore, the ideologues and leaders of teachers'
unions are indisputably correct when they recite, to the thunderous applause
of millions of government employees, the assertion that a free society's
impossible without a free, public, and universal system of education, although
they are absolutely wrong in imagining that an   {\bfseries education}  is what
that system in fact provides. Curiously enough, therefore, that assertion
is actually an incitement to the abolition of the public school system,
for we will never find that universal education, which we do in very fact
require in a free society, in these schools.



If we   {\bfseries do}  want to ''do something`` about the schools,
we must begin by giving up forever the futile hope that the educationists
will do it for us if only we ask them often enough. Governmental agencies
do not change from within except for their own purposes, and their ''responses``
to external cries for change, even when well meant, are inevitably subterfuges.
However, while public education is best understood as simply another government
agency, it does differ from the IRS and the Marine Corps in one supremely
important detail: it harbors hosts of dissidents, dissidents who are themselves
sick to death of what they see in the system that demeans and subverts their
best efforts. The plight of dissidents in the soviet of educationism embodies
precisely the principal thematic tension that engendered {\itshape Cardinal Principles:
}They are individual minds and talents caught in a system of collective
ideologies and values.



Consider, for instance, the case of a certain tenth-grade English teacher
in a Maryland high school. This audacious fellow had his students read the
{\itshape Poetics} of Aristotle and {\itshape The Prince} of Machiavelli as obviously
useful and thought-provoking adjuncts to the study of {\itshape Julius} {\itshape Caesar.
}Since Aristotle and Machiavelli are not approved by the local curriculum
facilitators, the teacher, who refused to recant, was suspended without
pay for insubordination and misconduct in office. (At this writing, he is
still awaiting trial, and I have no idea what will become of him.) The superintendent
of the school system where this outrage occurred was quoted in {\itshape Time} (December
15, 1980) as follows:


\begin{quote}

  
I don't know whether [he] is right or wrong about the books. But in
  a public school system, you have to have reasonable procedures to determine
  what is to be used, and the superintendent has to uphold them\ldots What
  if a teacher decided to use {\itshape Playboy} or {\itshape Hustler?} I think the
  school system has an obligation to set standards and to set curriculum.

\end{quote}



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   {\bfseries 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  {\bfseries  you}  might say, speaking as an
individual mind that can know, understand, and judge, that the difference
between {\itshape Playboy} and the {\itshape Poetics is} obvious. It is, quite simply,
a matter of worth. But a superintendent is   {\bfseries not}  an individual mind
but rather a functionary of a collective ideology. It is   {\bfseries 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   {\bfseries 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 {\itshape Playboy} and the {\itshape Poetics.} We have thus an educational
system that, exactly   {\bfseries 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
  {\bfseries 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,   {\bfseries a}  book{\itshape ,}
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 anti-social") 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  {\bfseries 
teachers{\itshape ,} } 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  {\bfseries  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.


\end{document}


