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

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 Existentialismand Humanism thrown in as the flyer says in only four (4) weeks in the dept. of Education, and that’s what it is 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.” (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 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 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.

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 their own ways, will also keep “a small diary of…brief reactions to some existential ideas.” Small. Brief. Some. And naturally, reactions . Knowledge is not at issue. Each student is promised “an annotated bibliography on existentialism and humanism (for…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 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 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 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 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 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 Centering, the Center’s little newsletter. Here it is — sic:

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

In the hush that falls suddenly upon the whole (or “hole,”) sorrowful land, do remember that Emily is only the Assistant Director. What must 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 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 any of our aspects. The horror, the horror.

We have, of course, no idea at all of what teachers 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 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…unless a kind of note…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…luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Excruciate the brats!’ ” And that, of course, would explain 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 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 methods of educationism, if not the ideology, is, of course, Dale Carnegie.

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