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

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 The New York Times for July 16, 1978. His piece 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 win those malpractice suits that they’re discussing with their lawyers.

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

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.

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 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 — 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…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…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…of monies to enact better programs” that will, 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 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 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 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 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 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,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 knowa lot about mathematics and have paid thoughtful attention to language, you can do a 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 teaching the arithmetic.

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