The Graves of Academe - Richard Mitchell (electronic book reader .txt) 📗

The Graves of Academe

Richard Mitchell

ISBN 0-671-63937-4

Simon and Schuster, Inc./Fireside Books

1981

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

—Edmund Burke

Praised by critics across the nation, 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 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.

The Graves of Academe is a book of the highest importance…its slashing and irrefutable attack, not on teachers, but on the educational establishment that trains them — and which his trained us…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.” Dallas Times Herald “…makes H.L. Mencken sound like a waffler.” Time

“Mitchell is a brilliant stylist, a shrewd observer and a genuine wit.” National Review “…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…Amen and hallelujah, this is fine reading.” Charleston Evening Post

“…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.” Fresno Bee “Witty, literate, thoughtful and provocative…” Atlantic City Sunday Press

Foreword

This book started out to be a large collection of pieces from 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 gross organs and protrusions, its subtle convolutions and recesses, are invisible, I have still seen enough to know the nature of the beast.

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 because of our accusations of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to 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:

1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery. 2. We can be ignorant and free in civilization. 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization. 4. We can be ignorant and unfree in savagery. 5. We can be educated and free in savagery. 6. We can be educated and free in civilization. 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization. 8. We can be educated and unfree in savagery.

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:

1. We can be ignorant and free in savagery. 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization. 6. We can be educated and free in civilization. 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.

And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jefferson’s, while 3 and 7 are 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