The
AS A SCHOOLBOY, I always presumed that my teachers were experts in the
subjects that they taught. My physics teacher must, of course, be a
physicist, and my history teacher a historian. I knew that my music
teacher was a musician, for I had actually heard him play, and, during a
dismal year in military school, I could see with my own eyes that the
Professor of Military Science and Tactics was a bird colonel.
Even when I became a schoolteacher myself, quite by accident, I imagined
that I had been chosen for the work because of my knowledge of the subject
I was to teach. It turned out not to be exactly so, for I was soon asked
to teach something else, of which my knowledge was scanty. No matter, I
was told. I could bone up over the summer. Eventually, I was asked to
teach something about which I knew nothing, nothing at all. Still no
matter. I seemed to be a fairly effective teacher and at least smart
enough to stay a lesson or two ahead of the students. That’s just what I
did. No one saw anything wrong with that, and the students never caught
me. It was nevertheless depressing, for it led me to suspect that my
physics teacher perhaps hadn’t been a physicist after all.
What then, exactly, was he? What was it that made a teacher a teacher, if
it wasn’t, as it obviously wasn’t, an expert knowledge of some subject
matter? How could it be that I was able to teach, to the complete
satisfaction of my colleagues and supervisors, and with no visible
detriment to my students, a subject of which I knew practically nothing at
first, and of which, after a year of teaching it, I knew just about what
anyone could know of it after one year of study? Was there something wrong
with that? Was there something wrong with me that I suspected that there
was something wrong with that?
It took me many years to find answers to those questions, and, when I did,
it wasn’t because I was looking for them. It was because I finally settled
in what was called a State Teachers College. (Like Pikes Peak, it had no
apostrophe.) As it happens, it is no longer a State Teachers College. The
legislature later enacted a long and complicated law which had, as far as
I can tell, the sole effect of removing from that title the word
“Teachers.” The college has not changed much, except that where it was
once unashamedly a teachers’ college, it is now ashamedly a teachers’
college. There I was, and I couldn’t help looking around.
At the end of my first semester, I walked into a classroom where I was to
give a final examination. (We don’t do much of that anymore, since it may
just be a violation of someone’s rights.) On the blackboard was the final
examination that had just been given to some other class. Very neatly
written it was, too. The last question—I’ll never forget it—was worth
fifty-two percent of the grade: “Draw all the letters of the alphabet,
both upper and lower case.” Draw.
There is some truth in the “ivory tower” notion of academic life. I had
spent my whole life in one school or another, and I was, of course,
faintly aware that I was only faintly aware of what was going on out in
the world. When I looked at that blackboard and imagined all those
students dutifully “drawing” the alphabet in their blue-books, I realized
that I didn’t even know what was going on down at the other end of the
hall. Nevertheless, it still didn’t occur to me that this astonishing
examination had something to do with those questions that I had long since
stopped asking myself.
It turned out, of course, that what I had seen was a final examination in
one of those “education” courses, about which, at that time, I knew
nothing. Well, that’s not quite true: I did know one thing, because
earlier that semester I had looked into a classroom where something
amazing was happening. There, in front of the class, stood an unusually
attractive young lady, a student, tricked out in a fetching bunny
outfit—not the kind you’re probably imagining, just a pair of paper ears
pinned into her hair and a stunning puff of absorbent cotton somehow or
other tacked on behind and clothes, too, of course, but I can’t recall any
details. She was reading aloud, with expression, and even with an
occasional hop, from a large book spread out flat at about hip level,
glancing down at it remarkably infrequently. Large type. She was doing a
practice lesson. I awarded her instantly an A plus.
So I knew two things about the making of a teacher. Both seemed engaging
rather than repellent. After all, who can be against legible writing on
the blackboard? To be sure, I myself wouldn’t have assigned it a value of
more than half the grade on a final examination; perhaps, had it been in
my charge to foster, I would simply have required it as a tool of the
trade without bestowing upon it any special credit at all. And it did
occur to me that what the students drew in their examination books might
not be an accurate measure of their skill in drawing the same things on a
blackboard, an unusually intractable medium, but the motive seemed good.
And as for pretty girls in cunning outfits, what could be more cheering?
It seemed to me that those teacher-trainers must be amiable and playful
folk with well-developed aesthetic sensibilities and a penchant for drama,
in bold contrast to the rest of us who taught what you call “subjects,”
dour and narrow people reciting lectures and devising “thought” questions.
And who knows? Could it be that I would now actually remember the
political consequences of Henry’s sad pilgrimage to Canossa if only my
history professor had put on sackcloth and lectured on his knees?
And I began to watch the teacher-trainers in idle moments, in my idle
moments, that is, not theirs. They were rarely idle. They were busy
rumbling down the hall pushing metal carts laden with projectors and
loudspeakers, which they actually knew how to hook up and operate. I could
hear them in the next classroom shoving the desks into sociable circles so
that, as in King Arthur’s court, no one would be disadvantaged by having
to sit below the salt, or breaking up into small groups, so that
understanding could be reached by democratic consensus rather than imposed
by authority. Sometimes whole classes could be heard singing—a delightful
change of atmosphere in precincts otherwise darkened by realism and
naturalism and the intellectual despair of eminent Victorians.
All in all, I thought the teacher-trainers harmless and childlike,
optimistic and ingenuous. I knew, to be sure, that many of them held what
they called doctorates in things like comparative storage systems for
badminton supplies and for cafeteria management, but so what? They weren’t
pretending to teach anything that called for traditional training in
scholarship, were they? Doctorates in education, I remembered from my days
in graduate school, are much easier to get than any other kind, but what
did that matter? A doctorate, after all was just a union card, a ticket of
admission to a remarkably good life, and why shouldn’t those decent and
well-meaning people have doctorates just like everybody else? As to
whether what they did had any value in the training of teachers, I just
didn’t know. I wasn’t curious enough to pay thoughtful attention, and they
didn’t seem to be hurting anyone. Live and let live.
So I did. Once the novelty of their techniques wore off, and long before
it dawned on me that those techniques were better called “antics,” I just
stopped thinking about them. The teacher-trainers were not in my mind at
all when I started to publish The Underground Grammarian in 1976. The
Bicentennial Year was in my mind, and Tom Paine and even William Lloyd
Garrison, and, most of all, the ghastly, fractured, ignorant English that
is routinely written and spread around by college administrators, the
people charged with the making and executing of policy in the cause of
higher education in America. I presumed that those administrators would be
the natural prey of a journal devoted to the display of ignorance in
unlikely places. It never even struck me then that most administrators
were once the teacher-trainers who were not in my mind.
And I will beg your indulgence, reader, in suggesting that when you look
at the world and wonder what’s going on, the teacher-trainers are not in
your mind. Nuclear weapons and taxes are in your mind, along with
politicians and other criminals. Pollution and racial discord are in your
mind. Prices double and pleasures dwindle, violence and ignorance multiply
and expectations diminish, and all the season’s new television shows are
aimed at demented children, and master sergeants have to puzzle out in
comic-book style manuals how to pull the triggers on their Titan missiles,
and sometimes, in a moment of pure panic, you wonder whether you shouldn’t
have voted for Goldwater after all. And when you wave a finger this way
and that, trying to point it at someone, anyone, the teacher-trainers are
not in your mind.
Sometimes, to be sure, you do suspect and even indict “the schools.” Ah,
if only “the schools” would do this or that. But what? Everybody has a
formula, sort of. Money, obviously, isn’t the answer. They have money
beyond counting. Less money can hardly be the answer—just ask the National
Education Association. So what are we to do? Public schools? Private
schools? Vouchers? Integration? Remediation? Consolidation? Back to
basics? Forward to relevancy in bold innovative thrusts?
Then again, you may not even ask these questions, for to do so is to see a
connection that not many Americans have thought to make. Millions of us
have nothing at all to do with the schools. We have no children in the
schools, and we don’t know what they’re doing, and we don’t much care,
except about the taxes we pay to support the enterprise. We can easily
think of many things that must be far more important than education, a
notably dreary topic in any case. Surely politics is more important than
education. So is economics. Technology. National defense. Even art! And
the six o’clock news in any city in the land makes it perfectly clear that
the most important things that happened in your part of the world today
were murders, rapes, and a fire of unknown origin in an abandoned
warehouse. And as for the schools, most of us just hope that they’ll teach
the children to read and write and cipher someday soon and just not bother
us. We have all those important things to worry about and we really can’t
be bothered with wondering about whether the schools should experiment
with a groundbreaking return to the self-contained classroom.
In fact, the destiny of this land, of any land, is exactly and inevitably
determined by the nature and abilities of the children now in school. The
future simply has no other resources. And, an even more dismaying fact,
because it tells of us, not them, this land as it is today is the exact
and inevitable result of the nature and abilities of the schoolchildren
that we were. And the things that you think important, everything from the
politics to the rapes and murders and fires, are what they are and have
for us the meanings that they have precisely because of what we were.
Public education, because it is so nearly universal and because,
notwithstanding minor variations, it is a monolithic and self-sustaining
institution, has more power to create our national character than anything
else in America. While it does not bring us oil shortages or volcanic
eruptions, it does determine what we will think and do about such things.
It determines what we will feel and how we will do the work of the mind.
This should not be surprising. You, and you alone, could do as much if you
could somehow manage to influence almost every American child day after
day for about twelve years, although, as an individual controlling
consciousness, you would probably do a better job in many respects. There
is, of course, no individual controlling consciousness in the institution
of education—no villain need be—but the institution, like any institution,
has a kind of mind and will of its own. It changes, if at all, only very
slowly, and, since you don’t find it as important as politics or fire, it
changes only at the will of those relatively few people who actually do
find it important, because they live by it. Nor is it their will—and why
should it be ?—to make any change that is not in their self-interest.
“They,” of course are a loosely confederated host of administrators,
bureaucrats, consultants, professors, researchers, and Heaven only knows
how many other titled functionaries. They are a very diverse group, but
they have, with astonishingly rare exceptions, one thing in common. They
have all been through the process that we call teacher-training, and most
of them have done some of that themselves. They are the people who are not
in your mind when you wonder what the hell is happening to us.
And they would never have gotten back into my mind had I not undertaken,
for what I now think frivolous reasons, what turned out to be a serious
and infuriating study of the use of language, a study that had to lead to
a consideration of the meaning of the use of language. That study is, of
course, the business of The Underground Grammarian, which has been
accurately enough described as a journal of radical, academic terrorism.
It is radical because it seeks in language the root of the thoughtlessness
that more and more seems to characterize our culture. It is academic both
because the tenor of the study to which it subjects the work of its
victims is scholastic and because it finds the most egregious examples of
mindless and mendacious babble neither in the corporation nor in the
Congress but in the schools. It is terrorist because it exploits the fear
that many academics feel when they know that their words might appear in
print before the eyes of the public, mere civilians who are not members of
the education club.
Here is the brief statement of editorial policies that appeared in the
first issue of The Underground Grammarian:
Editorial Policies
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
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
It seems, at first, a puzzling fact that those who have spent as much as
one half of their time in college studying under professors who fancy that
they conceive their instructional approaches on systems models mediated by
factors can then go out into the world unable to compose complete
sentences or even to spell “education.” However, not until quite recently,
and then only in response to external demands, have the teacher-trainers
thought it their responsibility to see to it that newly graduated teachers
could in fact write complete sentences and spell correctly. (We will see
later some entertaining examples of what they do in response to those
demands.) Those things were the business of the English department people,
and if they failed to teach them, well, too bad, the fledgling teachers
would just have to do without them.
Furthermore, the students in teacher-training academies are not in fact
expected to adopt or even to examine the language of that “mediated by
factors” passage. That is the language of the education textbooks, not the
language of the classroom, although in education courses whole classes are
not infrequently devoted to the reading of some text, as mealtime in
monasteries is devoted to Scripture. Should a student ask, for instance,
the meaning of the passage cited, he would probably be told something very
much like the suggested translation. Should he ask, however, why such an
obvious generalization had to be couched in such strange language, I don’t
know what answer he would get, but I would bet that he will soon want to
reconsider his choice of a calling. Should he take the last step and ask
why anyone would think such a banal truism worthy of serious study, then
he probably won’t have to reconsider his choice of a calling. His adviser
will do that for him.
The passage is only a ritual recitation which is not supposed to be
subjected to thoughtful scrutiny. It is a formulized pastiche of
acceptable jargon terms and stock phrases. While it has, for the
inattentive, a formidable sound, it is the kind of writing that is
surprisingly easy to compose for anyone who is familiar with all of its
traditional devices. (The craft of making such prose, strangely enough, is
similar to what we can find to this day in the extemporaneous epic
recitations of mendicant storytellers in the marketplaces of the Near
East. They remember and stitch together thousands of recurring epithets,
stock descriptions of the hero, his horse, his armor, standardized
metaphors and narrative devices. Educationistic prose, however, is usually
less stirring than the recitations of clever beggars.) And who, in any
case, would want to scrutinize such a passage? Who? A more than ordinarily
inquisitive (and perhaps skeptical) student, that’s who. One who might
indeed be able to compose a complete sentence and even spell “education.”
Even in teacher-training academics, there are such students. They usually
learn to keep their mouths shut, but those who don’t can be a nuisance.
They are not only disconcerting in class, but they are likely to give the
place a bad name by complaining in public that their education courses
seem silly. (Most schoolteachers—go and ask some—will shrug off their
education courses as a kind of necessary evil, a “waste of time.” Those
courses, however, are a “waste of time” only for the students enrolled in
them; for the institution of teacher-training they are immensely
profitable.) That is why the pontiffs feel most comfortable when they can
in fact preach to peasants, which is one of the reasons (there are others)
for that “bizarre article of faith.”
The ordinary civilian, who may very well remember with awe the apparent
erudition of some teacher or other, is not generally aware of this strange
doctrine, but there is little enthusiasm in the teacher-training business
for outstanding intellectual accomplishment in would-be teachers. One
claimed theory is that since a teacher must be able to “relate” to the
students before any learning can happen, the teacher ought to be as much
like the student as possible, very unlikely in the case of an especially
intellectual teacher. The democratizing leaven of ignorance, therefore,
may be in fact desirable in a teacher. It is also a supposition of
educationistic folklore that intellectuals are likely to be more
interested in the subjects they teach than in their students, which will
make them cold and distant, perhaps even authoritarian. The latter, at
least, is hard to quarrel with, for the pronouncements of one who can in
fact speak with authority on some subject are by definition
“authoritarian.” They are also, however, exactly the pronouncements any
thoughtful person would want to hear if he sought knowledge. This doctrine
would seem to suggest that if you feel the need of a diet it would be
better to consult with a hairdresser than with a physician, for the
hairdresser is much easier to relate to than the frosty physician, whose
advice, furthermore, would surely be authoritarian.
The tangled evolution of this strange tenet, which is not at all the same
as the contention that it doesn’t require more than ordinary intelligence
to teach children the work of the mind, will be considered in later
chapters. For now, though, we have to consider the problem that it causes
for those who hold it. One part of that problem is invisible to the
believers: How can we at once denigrate the authoritarianism of the
intellectual while adopting in our own pronouncements the tone, if not the
substance, of authoritative intellectualism? While that question does not
trouble the teacher-trainers, who are simply unmindful of it, it must
bother us, eventually. That part of the problem visible to them, probably
because it is a matter of clear self-interest, is this: If intellectualism
is undesirable, its opposite must be desirable; but the opposite of
intellectualism, by whatever name, is hard to champion in a supposedly
academic context. It would take a bold professor indeed to come out in
favor of ignorance and stupidity and offer in their favor arguments based
on knowledge and reason, arguments of the sort that are still expected in
some of our colleges and universities. It requires only a presumptuous
professor to plump for ignorance and stupidity on other grounds, and this
is not unheard of, especially in enthusiasts of drugs and pop
pseudo-religions. For the institution of teacher-training as a whole,
however, something more publicly defensible is needed, and, since the
defense can afford neither kookiness nor the appeal to knowledge and
reason, it must rest upon what is likely to prove emotionally acceptable
to the largest possible audience.
And there is such a defense. Over and against the overweening demands of
scholarly intellectualism, the teacher-trainers have set the presumably
unquestionable virtues of what they call “humanism.” They use this term in
so many different contexts and to characterize so many different kinds of
acts and ideologies that I will not attempt to discuss it fully here. It
will just have to grow on you. It does not, as you might think, denote as
usual a particular school of thought or slant of philosophical or
religious speculation connected especially but not exclusively with the
Renaissance, although many who use the term have heard of the Renaissance.
This is something closer to “humaneness,” as that word is used by what
used to be called the “Humane Society,” an organization that publicly
deplored the cruel treatment of horses. One of the aims of “humanistic”
educationism is to deplore the cruel treatment of children subjected to
the overbearing demands of knowledge, scholarship, and logic by the
traditional powers of authoritarian intellectualism.
We will return to that strange “humanism,” for it is one of the two
fundamental principles that can be said to make up the underlying theory
of education in America. The other is what might be called the iron law of
behavior modification. Like Free Will and The Omniscience of God,
educationistic humanism and behavior modification are ultimately
irreconcilable, and their collisions are at the heart of our educational
disorders. The theologians, at least, are not unaware of their stubborn
little problem, but the educationists seem oblivious to the contradictions
inherent in their two favorite principles. Nor could they abandon either,
for in their “humanism” they can pose as philosophers and priests, and as
modifiers of behavior they can claim to be scientists and healers. We can
consider their claims by looking first at the roots of the presumed
science of educationism.
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