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

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 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 not in the interest of government functionaries to provide education. They must provide something else, but they mustcall it “education.” In this respect, no government is different from any other, and in the following article 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 wholehearted 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 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:

“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 antisocial in that it focuses on the “wants” of a single family rather than the “needs” of society.

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 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 bestit 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 antisocial” 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 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:

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.

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 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 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 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:

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.

2. The affective domain is a logical absurdity. Feelings, sentiments, values, and responses have causes, attributes, and consequences. We can 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.

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.

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.

Nevertheless, and although the colonists could hardly have been more oppressed