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

It derived all of its recommendations from something that you will recognize: the Student Outcomes Principle. It began by saying, and said again and again throughout, that the “aims” of courses of study were certain student outcomes, which might well be achieved — which, indeed, might best be achieved — not by any traditionally practiced studies but by the ad hoc invention of innovative interdisciplinary studies and other gimmicks.

One of the desired student outcomes, for instance, was “an appreciation of the role of science and technology in the modern world.” (Yes, “appreciation.” Plus �_a change.)_ While the proposal did concede that such an appreciation might have something to do with “a course oriented toward [my italics, and well merited, too] the discipline of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, or astronomy,” it quite specifically and emphatically rejected the quaint and elitist notion that a student ought to take a basic course in one of those disciplines. Such a course is neither innovative nor interdisciplinary and cannot be expected, therefore, to provide that appreciation which is the desirable student outcome. Furthermore, a basic course in some hard science provides no opening at all for some nervous member of a shrinking education department who is also a skillful tinkerer with automobiles and motorcycles and who could surely, as teacher-trainee enrollments decline, impart in a real-life situation a worthy appreciation of the role of science and technology in the modern world. (Since I myself do all the typesetting and printing for The Underground Grammarian, I suggested that I too might teach a course in the appreciation of science and technology. My printing press itself exemplifies all of the cunning embodiments of the principles of mechanics that made the Industrial Revolution, and every single one of Newton’s famous, but now unknown, Laws of Motion can be seen at work in that machine. And appreciated. The subcommittee members nodded emphatically, pleased to see that a notorious slow learner was coming around. You cannot, in fact, dream up anything so preposterous that you will not find it being taught in some school.)

The “humanities” are not mentioned in the proposal, although “the human environment” is. And there are the “integrative studies,” in which “innovation and experimentation are strongly encouraged,” and which ought to include things like Racism, Sexism in the United States Today, or New Directions in the Search for Meaning. For obvious reasons, the study of foreign languages isnot to be considered a necessary part of every student’s general education, although there would be little harm in teaching a student to appreciate the fact that there are foreign languages. In every respect, even in its call for a massive new bureaucracy to serve the needs of general education, the proposal derives directly from the ideology, and often even from the very text, of Cardinal Principles.

That’s ominous, because there couldn’t have been more than two or three members of that subcommittee who had ever even heard of Cardinal Principles. Indeed, some of those members are so clearly devoted to things like intellectual discipline and all that mere information that they would recoil in dismay from a clear statement of the ideology of Cardinal Principles. This must mean that that ideology has so thoroughly seeped into American schooling at every level that it has become the ground of who can say how many rarely noticed and therefore rarely examined assumptions. Those assumptions are dangerous, and there can never be the education that Jefferson intended while they are the daily food and drink of the schools. And they are. Even the academically disciplined members of the subcommittee signed their names (what were they thinking?were they thinking?) to this:

The realization that study areas refer to desirable outcomes and that these may be met in a variety of ways, ways that may at times deny the custom-established claims to coveted provinces of instruction, broadens the possibilities of curricular offerings immeasurably.

The ideologues of educationism (fortunately for us, if we will pay thoughtful attention) have so thoroughly given themselves to their disdain of intellectual discipline that they always , and always inadvertently, reveal some truth when they pretend to do the work of the mind in writing. It isn’t true, as popular opinion fancies, that the unskilled writer fails to make himself clear; he is far more likely to make himself all too clear. While there is no clear meaning in the assertion that areas “refer to” outcomes and that outcomes can be “met,” there is a clear meaning in the fact that the assertion is made in such a murky way. The very use of the word “realization” is a mindless twitch of longing, for in no way can the Student Outcomes Principle be put forth as some fact to be “realized” but only as an assertion to be believed. It is simply true that he who pauses to choose the right word will find out what he means to mean, and he who can’t will make it clear to his reader that he is ignorant and thoughtless.

But the most unsettling revelation of that passage is of the automatic assumption that underlies the characterization of the “claims of disciplines” as “custom-established” and “provinces of instruction” as “coveted.” What else must be true of one who automatically assumes that it is out ofcustom that we turn to the scholar of history for knowledge and understanding of history? Would he also assume that it is out of nothing more than custom that we take our shoes to the cobbler or our teeth to the dentist? What can you guess about devotion to discipline and the love of learning in one who airily presumes that it is out of covetousness that the physicists greedily demand the privilege of teaching the physics courses? When the outcome seeker suggests that we might do better to teach the appreciation of history and physics by devising innovative interdisciplinary courses to replace the customary and coveted work of the physicists and historians, who is covetous? Such bizarre notions are not only possible but inevitable in a world where there really are no academic disciplines, where this year’s general science teacher may just as well be next year’s guidance counselor and then another year’s assistant principal for instruction, where this year’s professor of curriculum facilitation will probably be next year’s grants proposal coordinator and another year’s supervisor of pre-service hands-on experiential continua. Among the educationists, who make policy and devise theory, there is so little experience of academic discipline that they probably really can’t imagine any reason other than “custom” for giving the teaching of physics into the hands of the physicists. Physics, for them, is not a concrete and complicated body of real knowledge and understanding but just one of many vaguely similar vehicles for the enhancement of appreciation. Nor is it surprising that those who have, because the mere teaching of general science or social studies did not arise from or command love and devotion, indeed coveted the nobler and more lucrative work of the guidance counselor should imagine that the scholar of history has seized his chair, in which he seems so disturbingly and unaccountably content, out of covetousness.

What can we hope for now that such people have boldly announced their intention to devise new programs of emphasis on the great role of the humanities in the development of Western Civilization and the powers of knowledge and critical thought as the necessary virtues of a free society?

Nothing.

Or, more precisely, nothing but more of the same.

The state of American government education is simply not a “problem” that can be solved. It is rather an enormous fact of life, a self-perpetuating institution elaborated from within by principle, not caprice, governed by collective assent, not individual talent. It easily absorbs the shock of every criticism by pretending to “reform” itself, only to transform and dilute whatever it claims to embrace into nothing but more of the same. It easily swallows and digests and incorporates into its substance everything in the world around it, popular fads and fancies just as readily as appropriately diluted new knowledge in genetics or psychology or in any of the disciplines that it will not teach. Whatever there is in our society — fast-food merchandizing, militant homosexualism, disco dancing, supply-side economics, weird religious cultism, futurology through computers, jogging, astrology, est, you name it — will find its analogue in the schools.

The Commission for the Reorganization of Secondary Education set out to adjust the ordinary American child, whatever that might be, to life in American society, whatever that might be. It did not clearly and fully understand either, but who does? It nevertheless succeeded prodigiously, if only by a roundabout way. By now the children — and the children of the children of those children — whom they “adjusted” have become American society. In strictest truth, therefore, it may not be correct to say that the educational system absorbs and replicates the mindless fads and the manipulative practices of society and commerce. It may be just the other way around. After more than half a century of preparing children for life, our government education system has prepared a life for children.

That system is a tiger that we can neither kill nor evade. To shoot the tiger is unthinkable; the consequent social and economic upheaval would turn us from a nation of children into a nation of crazy and desperate children, a condition from which we are now (more or less) protected not by the good offices of the schools but by their mere existence as employers and purchasers of goods and services. Furthermore, the ideologues and leaders of teachers’ unions are indisputably correct when they recite, to the thunderous applause of millions of government employees, the assertion that a free society’s impossible without a free, public, and universal system of education, although they are absolutely wrong in imagining that an education is what that system in fact provides. Curiously enough, therefore, that assertion is actually an incitement to the abolition of the public school system, for we will never find that universal education, which we do in very fact require in a free society, in these schools.

If we do want to “do something” about the schools, we must begin by giving up forever the futile hope that the educationists will do it for us if only we ask them often enough. Governmental agencies do not change from within except for their own purposes, and their “responses” to external cries for change, even when well meant, are inevitably subterfuges. However, while public education is best understood as simply another government agency, it does differ from the IRS and the Marine Corps in one supremely important detail: it harbors hosts of dissidents, dissidents who are themselves sick to death of what they see in the system that demeans and subverts their best efforts. The plight of dissidents in the soviet of educationism embodies precisely the principal thematic tension that engendered Cardinal Principles: They are individual minds and talents caught in a system of collective ideologies and values.

Consider, for instance, the case of a certain tenth-grade English teacher in a Maryland high school. This audacious fellow had his students read the Poetics of Aristotle and The Prince of Machiavelli as obviously useful and thought-provoking adjuncts to the study of Julius Caesar. Since Aristotle and Machiavelli are not approved by the local curriculum facilitators, the teacher, who refused to recant, was suspended without pay for insubordination and misconduct in office. (At this writing, he is still awaiting trial, and I have no idea what will become of him.) The superintendent of the school system where this outrage occurred was quoted in Time (December 15, 1980) as follows:

I don’t know whether [he] is right or wrong about the books. But in a public school system, you have to have reasonable procedures to determine what