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

thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education. We are neither peddlers nor politicians that we should prosper by that use of language which carries the least meaning. We cannot honorably accept the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as we darken counsel by words without understanding.

My first motives were just about what you would expect from an English teacher: a supposed reverence for that “Mother Tongue,” the noble and ancient language of Shakespeare and Milton and all the others; the notion that the judicious choice of a semicolon was a nice display of what Veblen called “the instinct of workmanship,” a good thing; and especially that sense of smug satisfaction that comes from knowing exactly why to use the word “nice” when making a nice display. There was also the natural, and perfectly justifiable, contempt that any front-line teacher feels for administrators. So many of them seem to be born aluminum-siding salesmen who took a wrong turn somewhere along the line. Nor is that contempt mitigated by the fact that many of them (but by no means all) were once front-line teachers themselves. On the contrary, that reveals what they really think of teaching: a humble and tedious calling useful only as a necessary step to a better life and better pay. There is furthermore, in almost every teacher, a small, dark current of fascism, and the work of administration not only permits but actually encourages it.

I did say, to be sure, that “clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education,” but that was little more than a recitation. That’s what we’re expected to say in this business, and we keep saying it and nodding, saying it and nodding. And, like most of the things that people are expected to say, it’s true in a way, and false in a way, and not well thought out. There is an important principle to be drawn here: Many of our supposed “ideas” are in fact recitations, recitations not of what we think or understand but of what we simply believe that we believe. Thinking is done in language, and understanding, a result of thinking, is expressed in language, but, when we simply adopt and recite what has been expressed, we have committed neither thinking nor understanding. When the first issue of The Underground Grammarian appeared, I had neither thought about nor understood that lofty proposition about clear language and. clear thought. But the words were there on the page, and they demanded attention.

All that talk about the ability to write letters of application for jobs is bunk; here is the real value of teaching everybody, everybody , to write clear, coherent, and more or less conventional prose: The words we write demand far more attention than those we speak. The habit of writing exposes us to that demand, and skill in writing makes us able to pay logical and thoughtful attention. Having done that, we can come to understand what before we could only recite. We may find it bunk or wisdom, but, while we had better reject the bunk, we can accept the wisdom as truly our own rather than some random suggestion of popular belief. If we have neither the habit nor the skill of writing, however, we have to guess which is the bunk and which the wisdom, and we will almost invariably guess according to something we feel, not according to something to which we have given thoughtful attention.

I had not, in fact, given thoughtful attention to “clear thought” and “clear language” and the ways in which they might relate to each other, but I had at least taken hold of one end of what turned out to be a long and tangled string. An examination, if only of comma faults and dangling participles, had begun. Examination has a life of its own. You simply cannot think about commas and the place of modifiers without finding that you are thinking about thinking. It is impossible to examine language at any level without examining the work of a mind. I knew that Wittgenstein had said that all philosophy was the examination of language, but I assumed, because I wasn’t paying thoughtful attention, that he was referring to the obvious fact that philosophy was about ideas, and that ideas could be read only in language. I don’t think that anymore. I’m convinced that he was talking about language as language, with its commas and modifiers, and especially about writing, a special case of language, permanently accessible.

Consider, for example, the following sentence, which was quoted without comment in a much later issue:

Teratology

During the 1980-81 school year, the project will provide teachers and administrators with education and support designed to optimize the behaviors and conditions in the school which support student learning to the extent that at least two thirds of the teachers receiving training and support in Expectations will report, on a specifically designed survey, changes in at least two school related operational characteristics that have been identified as critical elements of the network of expectations that support learning.

What we learn from studying that sentence has very little to do with the digest of rules in the back of the composition handbook. It has to do with the nature of a mind and the way it does its work. That is revealing enough, but it’s only the beginning. The mind we see at work in that sentence is not the mind of an isolated eccentric. That writer is a member, and probably in all too good standing, of a community of minds and the inheritor of a massive tradition. It represents what is obviously acceptable to a society of like-minded peers and superiors and subordinates. It speaks, one might say, for the mind of a vast bureaucracy, and, furthermore, since no mind works that way naturally, it must have learned that trick.

When we study that sentence, therefore, we study the intellectual climate of the society in which such work of the mind is not only acceptable but desirable, and we study the traditions and practices that must have formed both the society and the individual mind. That example is in no way extraordinary or even unusual; it is, in fact, typical. (You will know that, of course, if you have any acquaintance with the business of the schools, and, if you haven’t, you’ll soon see for yourself.) So we can ask: What is the intellectual climate of that society? What traditions and practices have formed that climate? Having answers to those questions, we can ask: Why is a society so endowed and so constituted given the task of teaching minds to work well, and how likely is it to succeed in that work?

In speaking of that “society” in such general terms, I have to advise civilians that I do not mean “the teachers,” or at least not simply the teachers. Most people think that teachers are the agents of public education and that all those guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators and others are merely support services. This is not so. Of all the agents of our system of public education, the teachers are by far the least influential, and what they actually accomplish or don’t accomplish in their classrooms has very little to do with the worth of “education” in the large sense. This is not to say that teachers are uninfluenced by the intellectual climate of the system as a whole, far from it, but only that they are the lowliest foot-sloggers in a vast army. Some of them will rise from the ranks and will be no longer teachers. They will become the people whose minds work like the mind of that writer just cited. Indeed, if their minds work that way, they are all the more likely to rise. But as long as they remain teachers they are, and they’re so treated as, mere employees, who may or may not be seeking admittance to the seats of power.

Incipient schoolteachers - I have known hundreds of them - are generally decent young people of average intelligence. Some are stupid, of course, and some rarer few are brilliant. Almost all of them seem a bit more than ordinarily ethical, and I can’t believe that any one of them ever decided to be a teacher for the sake of doing harm. Furthermore, the task of teaching a mind to work well is not a particularly difficult one. Teachers do not have to be brilliant, although they probably shouldn’t be stupid. In short, almost all of those who seek to be teachers are quite capable of being good teachers, but something happens to them on the way to the classroom. They fall into bad company. Here is an example of what they must face:

Pontiffs and Peasants

Unlike socialism, the realm of educationism was never meant to be a classless society. Just now it’s an emasculated feudalism whose few surviving pugnantes have decided to settle down with the unholy but happy Saracens, leaving the miserable laborantes to fend for themselves under the silly governance of the puffed-up orantes . The go-getter, self-promoting grant-grabbers have all wangled themselves cushy consultancies and juicy jobs in government. The wretched tillers of the soil are hoeing hard rows in the public schools and risking life and limb in the cause of minimum competence. The jargon-besotted clergy are bestowing upon each other rich benefices of experiential continua and peddling cheap remediational indulgences, fighting to keep their teacher-training academies growing in an age of closing schools and dwindling faith in bold innovative thrusts in noncognitive curriculum design facilitation. Fat flocks, fat shepherds. Things do look bad, but let us not despair. The Black Death has been reported in Arizona, and it may yet spread.

It’s not always easy to tell the pontiffs from the peasants. The sumptuary laws no longer apply. In the time of love-beads, both classes wear love-beads; in the time of Levi’s, Levi’s. Our best clue - always the best clue when we want to assess the work of the mind - is the language used by each class, Lumpensprache by the peasants and Pfaffesprache , a classier lingo indeed, by the pontiffs.

Here’s a typical passage of the latter as it appeared, unfortunately without attribution, in an otherwise splendid column by Howard Hurwitz, a syndicated writer on education:

“These instructional approaches are perhaps best conceived on a systems model, where instructional variables (input factors) are mediated by factors of students’ existing cognitive structure (organizational properties of the learner’s immediately relevant concepts in the particular subject field); and by personal predispositions and tolerance toward the requirements of inference, abstraction, and impulse control, all prerequisite to achievement in the discovery or the hypothetical learning mode.”

So. It may mean that what a student learns depends on what he already knows and on whether or not he gives a damn. For a pontiff of educationism, that’s already a novel and arresting idea, but if he said it in plain English he wouldn’t be allowed to teach any courses in it. Indeed, if he could say it in plain English he would probably have enough sense not to say it, thus disclosing to the world that years of study have brought him at last to a firm grasp on the obvious.

Even when intoning the obvious, however, a pontiff keeps his head down. Did you notice that “perhaps”? He doesn’t actually commit himself to the proposition that approaches are best conceived as a model where variables are mediated by factors; he is willing only to opine that approaches are “perhaps” best conceived as a model where variables are mediated by factors. If that were humility rather than self-defense, it would suit him well, for he seems to think that “conceived” means “understood” and that “mediated” means “mitigated” and that “factors” and “variables” can mean anything at all. He’s not