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

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 more than the sum of its parts, it cannot be 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,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 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 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 about statements about the world. Understanding calls for classification and organization, fine distinctions, and logical testing, all related to knowledge. All of those things can be taught in schools to very young children, but they can 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 “problemsolving 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.

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 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 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 there_-_ aside from the mainstream ofreal 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 thereare 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 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 certainlynot 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 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 not fail. They succeed. Childrenalways 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 learn_._ 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 thatwhat 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 themselves, 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