Propositions
Three and Seven
IN THE COUNTRY of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king.
And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king.
And why not? Its only natural, and considering the circumstances, not
really a bad system. We do the best we can.
But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows
that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit
knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people
had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be
inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed
not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but,
just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and
utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that
other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and
supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant
kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against
wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.
Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity
to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the
land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the
half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not
much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a
state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and
obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and
20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is
called education.
Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures,
institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to
that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact
occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than
their own survival, institutions are never capable of altruism, heroism,
or even self-denial. If you imagine that they are, if, for instance, you
fancy that the welfare system or the Federal Reserve exists and labors for
the good of the people, then you can be sure that the minions of the
one-eyed man and the half-wit are pleased with you.
Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact, be
successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that
education in America is failing, it is because we dont understand the
institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily,
hourly, in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations
of failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to
our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we
complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to
individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claimto
be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone can
raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and defend
individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the institution of
education claims direct descent in apostolic succession from the Founding
Fathers.
Jefferson was in favor of education, indubitably, but he meant the
condition, not the word. He held that there was no expectation, in a
state of civilization, that we could be both free and ignorant. The
modifier is important; it is to suggest that we might indeed be free and
ignorant in savagery. Free at least from the conventional and mutually
admitted restraints to which civilized people bind themselves.
Using Jeffersons terms, we can derive exactly eight propositions to think
about:
- We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
- We can be ignorant and free in civilization.
- We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
- We can be ignorant and unfree in savagery.
- We can be educated and free in savagery.
- We can be educated and free in civilization.
- We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
- We can be educated and unfree in savagery.
Jefferson asserts that the second is impossible, thereby implying the
possibility of the first and the sixth. The fifth and the eighth seem
unlikely, for if we are indeed educated it will be both a result of
civilization and a cause of civilization. The fourth is just a quibble,
for the freedom at issue is not freedom from natural exigencies, to
which all are subject, but from the devised constraints possible only in a
state of civilization. The truth of the third and the seventh, unhappily,
is recommended by knowledge and experience.
Omitting those propositions that seem impossible or meaningless, we are
left with:
- We can be ignorant and free in savagery.
- We can be ignorant and unfree in civilization.
- We can be educated and free in civilization.
- We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jeffersons, while
3 and 7 are implicitly Jeffersons. They describe conditions not only
perfectly possible but perfectly real. Unfreedom, the forced submission to
constraints beyond those mutually admitted by knowing and willing members
of a civilization, is not unheard of. Indeed, it is, in greater or less
degree, the current condition of all humanity.
Civilization is itself an institution and has, like all institutions, one
paramount goal, its own perpetuation. It was Jeffersons dream that that
civilization could best perpetuate itself in which the citizens were
educated, whatever he meant by that, and we do have some clue as to what
he meant. He wrote of the informed discretion of the people as the only
acceptable depository of power in a republic. He knew very well that the
people might be neither informed nor discreet, that is, able to make fine
distinctions, but held that the remedy for that was not to be sought in
depriving the people of their proper power but in better informing their
discretion.
And to what end were the people to exercise the power of their informed
discretion? The answer, of course, shouldnt be surprising, but, because
we have been taught to confuse government and its institutions with
civilization in general, it often is. Jefferson saw the informed
discretion of the people as one of those checks and balances for which our
constitutional democracy is justly famous, for it was only with such a
power that the people could defend themselves against government and its
institutions. The functionaries of every government, wrote Jefferson,
although the italics are mine, have propensities to command at will the
liberty and property of their constituents. Jefferson knewisnt this the
unique genius of American constitutionalism? that government was a
dangerous master and a treacherous servant and that the first concern of
free people was to keep their government on a leash, a pretty short one at
that.
Consider again Propositions 3 and 7: 3. We can be ignorant and unfree in
civilization, and 7. We can be educated and unfree in civilization.
Imagine that you are one of those functionaries of government in whom
there has grown, it seems inescapable, the propensity to command, in
however oblique a fashion and for whatever supposedly good purpose, the
liberty and property of your constituents. Which would you prefer,
educated constituents or ignorant ones? Wait. Be sure to answer the
question in Jeffersons terms. Which would you rather face, even
considering your own conviction that the cause in which you want to
command liberty and property is justcitizens with or without the power of
informed discretion? Citizens having that power will require of you a
laborious and detailed justification of your intentions and expectations
and may, even having that, adduce other information and exercise further
discretion to the contrary of your propensities. On the other hand, the
ill-informed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded by the
recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to self-interest, however
spurious. It is only informed discretion that can detect such maneuvers.
And thats how government works. There is nothing evil about it. Its
perfectly natural. You and I would do it the same way. In fact, the
chances are good that we are doing things that way, since more and more of
us are in fact functionaries of government in one way or another and
dependent for our daily bread on some share of the property of our
constituents, and sometimes (as in the public schools) upon the
restriction of their liberty.
It was the genius of Jefferson to see that free people would rarely have
to defend their freedom against principalities and powers and satanic
enemies of the good, but that they would have to defend it daily against
the perfectly natural and inevitable propensities of functionaries. Any
fool, can see, eventually, the danger to freedom in a self-confessed
military dictatorship, but it takes informed discretion to see the same
danger in bland bureaucracies made up entirely of decent people who are
just doing their jobs. But Jefferson was optimistic. As to the liberty and
property of the people, he saw that there is no safe deposit for them but
with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without
information. And he was convinced, alas, that the people could easily
come by that information: Where the press is free, and every man able to
read, all is secure.
That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have those
things, dont we? So all is secure, no? No.
Just as we cannot assume that what we call education is the same as
Jeffersons informed discretion, we cannot assume that Jefferson meant
what we mean by press and able to read. In our time, the press, in
spite of threats real or imagined, is in fact free. And, if we define
literacy in a very special and limited way, almost everyone is able to
read, more or less. But when Jefferson looked at the press, what did he
see? Or, more to the point, what did he not see? He did not see monthly
periodicals devoted entirely to such things as hair care and motorcycling
and the imagined intimate details of the lives of television stars and
rock singers. He did not see a sports page, a fashion page, a household
hints column, or an astrological forecast. He did not see a never-ending
succession of breathless articles on low-budget decorating for the
executive couple in the big city, career enhancement through creative
haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through enlightened
self-interest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of the important as
composed primarily of the doings and undoings of entertainers, athletes,
politicians, and criminals.
He would not, I think, have been unduly dismayed by all that. Of course,
he would have been dismayed, but not unduly. Such things are implicit in
the freedom of the press, and if enough people want them, theyll have
them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered why so many people wanted such
things, but thats not to the point just now.) Jefferson did, naturally,
see the press giving news and information, but, more than that, he also
saw in it the very practice of informed discretion. In his time, after
all, Common Sense and The Federalist Papers were simply parts of the
press. And every man able to read would have been, for Jefferson, every
man able to read, weigh, and consider things like Common Sense and The
Federalist Papers. He would have recognized at once our editorial pages
and our journals of enquiry and opinion, but he would have found it
ominous that hardly anyone reads those things, and positively portentous
that this omission arises not so much from casual neglect as from a common
and measurable inability to read such things with either comprehension or
pleasure.
Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can make
out many words, but all is not secure. Wait. Thats not quite clear. Some
things are secure. The agencies and institutions of government are secure.
The functionaries whose propensity it is to command our liberty and
property, they are secure. And, as the one-eyed man is the more secure in
proportion to the number of citizens he can blind, our functionaries are
the more secure in proportion to those of us who are strangers to the
powers of informed discretion. It is possible, of course, to keep educated
people unfree in a state of civilization, but its much easier to keep
ignorant people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is easiest of
all if you can convince the ignorant that they are educated, for you can
thus make them collaborators in your disposition of their liberty and
property. That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that it may
be invisible to those who perform it, of American public education.
Public education does its work superbly, almost perfectly. It works in
fairly strict accordance with its own implicit theory of education, an
elaborate ideology of which only some small details are generally known to
the public. This is hardly surprising, for the rare citizen who actually
wants to know something about educationistic theory, a dismal subject,
finds that it is habitually expressed in tangled, ungrammatical jargon,
penetrable, when it is at all, only to one who has nothing better to do. I
hope, little by little, to dissect and elucidate that theory, for it is in
fact even more frightening than it is dismal. For now, I can take only a
first but essential step and urge you to consider this principle: The
clouded language of educational theory is an evolved, protective
adaptation that hinders thought and understanding. As such, it is no more
the result of conscious intention than the markings of a moth. But it
works. Thus, those who give themselves to the presumed study and the
presumptuous promulgation of educational theory are usually both deceivers
and deceived. The murky language where their minds habitually dwell at
once unminds them and gives them the power to unmind others.
We will, with appropriate examples, explore the evolution of that strange
trait, especially in that portion of the educational establishment where
it is most evident: that is, among the people to whom we have given the
training of teachers and the formulation of educational theory. In the
cumbersome and complicated contraption we call public education, the
trainers of teachers have special powers and privileges. Although in law
they are governed by civilian boards and legislatures, they are in fact
but little governed, for they have convinced the boards and legislatures
that only teacher-trainers can judge the work of teacher-trainers. That
wasnt hard to do, for boards and legislatures are made up largely of
people who have, in their time, already been blinded by the one-eyed man,
having been given, as helpless children, what we call education rather
than practice in informed discretion. The very language in which the
teacher-trainers explain their labors will quickly discourage close
scrutiny in even a thoughtful board member, perhaps especially in a
thoughtful board member, who has after all, other and more important (he
thinks) things to do.
It is not strictly true that the public schools are a state-supported
monopoly. There are other schools. But the teacher-trainers are certainly
a state-supported monopoly. There are no other teacher-trainers than the
ones we have, and they are all in the business of teaching something they
call education. No one knows exactly what that is, and even among
educationists there is some mild contention as to whether there actually
exists some body of knowledge that can be called education as separate
from other knowable subjects. You may want to make up your own mind as to
that, for in later chapters you will see examples of what is actually done
by those who teach education. But for now we must consider the usually
unnoticed effects of the monopoly they enjoy.
The laws of supply and demand work in the academic world just as they do
in the marketplace, which is to say, of course, that what is natural and
reasonable will not happen where government intervenes. Our schools can be
usefully likened to a nationalized industrial system in which the
production of goods is directed not by entrepreneurs looking to profit but
by social planners intending to change the world. Thus it is the business
of the schools, and the special task of the educationists who produce
teachers, to generate both supply and demand, so that the nation will want
exactly what it is they intend to provide.
Within the academic marketplace, there are many enterprises other than
educationism, however. Historically, they have not seen themselves in
competition with one another, although Im sure that the faculties of the
medieval universities were not reluctant to claim that their disciplines
were more noble than the others. Individual professors, of course, must
indeed have competed for students, by whom they were paid, but the
students, many of whom were to become professors themselves, were free to
devote themselves to whatever discipline seemed good. But between one
discipline and another there seems to have been, rather than competition,
sectarianism.
A similar sectarianism has been revivified by our current educational
disorders. If you ask a professor of geography why we seem to be turning
into a nation of ignorant rabble, he will not be able to refrain from
pointing out that we dont teach geography anymore and that high school
graduates arent even sure of the name of the next state, never mind the
climatic characteristics of the Great Plains or the rivers that drain the
Ohio Valley. Professors of physics will allude to the all-too-inevitable
consequences of ignorance of the laws of motion and thermodynamics. You
can easily devise for yourself the comments of professors of mathematics,
languages, history, literature, and indeed of any who teach those things
we think of as traditional academic disciplines. Their views will be, of
course, at least partly predictable expressions of self-interest; however,
they will also be correct, and, if taken all together, will indeed tell us
much about our present troubles.
The academic world is like any other group of related enterprises in which
everybody can provide something but nobody can provide everything. For the
building of houses, for instance, we need many different things, and they
are not easily interchangeable. When we need copper tubing, we need copper
tubing, and we cant make do with wallboard instead. If houses are built,
therefore, many people making many different things will be able to
produce what is both useful and profitable. And, while the makers of
copper tubing wont have to worry about competition from the makers of
wallboard, they will have to be mindful of other makers of copper tubing
and also of the makers of plastic tubing. That will be good for the whole
enterprise.
Suppose, though, that the copper-tubing people should, through quirk or
cunning, secure for themselves some special legal privilege. First they
persuade the state, which already has the power to license the building of
houses, to prohibit the use of plastic tubing. Thats good, but so long as
the state is willing to go that far, the copper-tubing makers seek and
achieve a regulation requiring some absolute minimum quantity of copper
tubing in every new house. Now you must suppose that the copper-tubing
lobby has grown so rich and powerful that the law now requires that fifty
percent of the mass of every new house must be made up of copper tubing.
Houses could still be built. Walls, floors, and ceilings could be made of
coils and bundles of copper tubing smeared over with plaster or stucco.
Copper tubing could be cleverly welded and twisted into everything from
doorknobs to windowsills and produced in large sizes for heating ducts and
chimneys. The houses would be dreadful, of course, and, should you ask
why, you will discover that craftsmen in the building trades are more
direct and outspoken than college professors. Theyll just tell you
straight out that these are lousy houses because of all that damn copper
tubing. If the professor of mathematics were equally frank, hed tell you
that our schools are full of supposed teachers of mathematics who have
studied education when they should have studied mathematics.
This is, I admit, not an exact analogy. The manufacture of copper tubing
actually does have some relationship to the building of houses, while the
study of education has no relationship at all to the making of educated
people. The analogy would perhaps have been better had I chosen, instead
of the manufacturers of copper tubing, the manufacturers of gelatin
desserts. To grasp the true nature of the place of educationism in the
academic world, you have to imagine that houses are to be made mostly of
Jell-Oeach flavor equally representedand that the builders must eat a
bowl an hour.
(Well, that analogy fails, too. Jell-O is at least a colorful and
entertaining treat with no known harmful side effects. The same cannot be
said of the study of education.)
Our public system of education, from Head Start to the graduate schools of
the state universities, might also be called a government system. Those
who teach in its primary and secondary schools are required by law to
serve time, often as much as one half of their undergraduate program, in
the classes of the teacher-trainers. Should they seek graduate degrees,
which will bring them automatic raises, they will still have to spend
about one half their time taking yet again courses devoted to things like
interpersonal relations and the appreciation of alternative remediation
enhancements. The educationistic monopoly is strong enough that in at
least one state (there are probably others, but Im afraid to find out), a
high school mathematics teacher who is arrogant enough to take a masters
degree in mathematics will discover that he is no longer certified to
teach that subject. If he wants to keep his job, he must take a degree in
mathematics education, which will, of course, permit him to spend some of his time studying his subject. Even where there is no such visibly
monopolistic requirement, the laws and regulations of the public schools,
which have been devised by educationists in the teachers colleges,
provide an effective equivalent.
The intellectual climate of the public schools, which must inevitably
become the intellectual climate of the nation, does not seem to be
conducive to the spread of what Jefferson called informed discretion. The
intellectual climate of the nation today came from the public schools,
where almost every one of us was schooled in the work of the mind. We are
a people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when we
exchange generalizations and well-known opinions. We decide how to vote or
what to buy according to whim or fancied self-interest, either of which is
easily engendered in us by the manipulation of language, which we have
neither the will nor the ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach
conclusions without having the faintest idea of the difference between
inferences and statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there
are such things and that they are different. We are easily persuaded and
repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those
attributes and abilities that characterize authority. We do not notice
elementary fallacies in logic; it doesnt even occur to us to look for
them; few of us are even aware that such things exist. We make no regular
distinctions between those kinds of things that can be known and
objectively verified and those that can only be believed or not. Nor are
we likely to examine, when we believe or not, the induced predispositions
that may make us do the one or the other. We are easy prey.
That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and
everywhere is not to the point. They just wont do for a free society.
Jefferson and his friends made a revolution against ignorance and
unreason, which would preclude freedom in any form of government
whatsoever. If we cannot make ourselves a knowledgeable and thoughtful
peoplethose are the requisites of informed discretionthen we cannot be
free. But our revolutionists did at least provide us with that form of
government which, unlike others, does grant the possibility of freedom,
provided, of course, the public has the habit of informed discretion. That
possibility is all we have just now.
Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of ill-informed and
casually thoughtless captives. Even when we are well-informed and
thoughtful, however, we cannot be free where the character of the nation
and its institutions must reflect the ignorance and unreason of the
popular will. But if we are well-informed and thoughtful, we can take
comfort in the fact that our form of government is carefully designed to
preclude that condition described in Proposition 7. As long as we remain a
constitutional republic, we cannot ever be both educated and unfree. It
just wont work, and that may be the single greatest insight of the makers
of our revolution.
Therefore, whatever it is they do in the teachers colleges of America has
had and will always have tremendous consequences. By comparison with the
attitudes and intellectual habits and ideological predispositions
inculcated in American teachers, the acts of Congress are trivial. Indeed,
the latter proceed from the former. If, as a result of the labors of our
educationists, we were obviously clear-sighted and thoughtful and thus
able to enjoy the freedom promised in our constitutional system, then we
would know something about those educationists. If, on the other hand, we
are blind and witless, then we would knowif there are any of us who can
knowsomething else about them. To know anything at all about those
educationists, however, we must look at what they do, at what they say
they do, and even at how they say what they do.
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