Foreword
THIS book started out to be a large collection of pieces from The
Underground Grammarian, a dissident if tiny journal that has achieved
notoriety if not fame, and to which I am a party. Such a collection was
proposed by a publisher (not, I am happy to say, my publisher) and
recommended as a not-too-difficult task. My own publisher, Little, Brown,
although wise enough not to suggest such a venture, was nevertheless not
as prudent when it came to signing a contract.
I spent several months choosing, ordering, and contemplating selectionsf rom The Underground Grammarian, intending to sort them by themes and stitch them together with running commentaries, elaborations, and second
thoughts. Even third thoughts. It turned out a stupid and pointless
exercise. If there is anyone who thinks that the world needs such a
collection, let him make it.
What stopped me was this: As I went through scores of essays on the
relation of language to the work of the mind and critical commentaries on
displays of ignorance and stupidity in the written work of academicians, I
could see that some were more important than others. They suggested a
single theme. They were all more or less about the same thing, that
special and unmistakable kind of mendacious babble that characterizes not politicians or businessmen, not Pentagon spokesmen or commercial
hucksters, but, always and only, those members of the academic community
who are pleased to call themselves the “professionals” of education. Those pieces, taken together, seemed to me at least a skimpy outline, or,
better, scattered reference points suggesting something much larger and
more momentous than a mere collection of ponderous inanities. It seemed to
me that I could, from certain of those small articles, make out the murky
form of the hidden monster whose mere projections they were, breaking here
and there the oily surface of some dark pool.
As a result, I abandoned the collection and undertook the task of
describing, by extrapolation from one visible protuberance to another, and
with a little probing, the great invisible hulk of the beast, the brooding
monstrosity of American educationism, the immense, mindless brute that by
now troubles the waters of all, all that is done in our land in the
supposed cause of “education,” since when, as you see, I can rarely bring
myself to write that word without quotation marks, or even fashion a
sentence less than nine or ten lines long, lest I inadvertently fail to
suggest the creature’s awesome dimensions and seemingly endless tentacular
complexities. I will try to do better. The somber subject requires
clarity.
Thou canst not, however, draw out this Leviathan with an hook either. A
complete, thoughtful history and analysis of American educationism would
require several fat volumes, and even the author’s best friends would not
read it. It is, after all, a boring subject. I have done my best to make
it interesting by dwelling on its startling and horrifying attributes,
which are, in any case, the most important indicators of its harmful
powers. It’s not a pretty sight. I have been, too, as brief as possible.
In consequence, there is probably no understanding in this book of which
it is not possible to say: “Well, true, but there’s more to it than that.”
Quite so. I hope that many will someday look for the “more,” but I will be
content, for now, with the “true.” I have everywhere provided as true an
understanding as I can discover, and I am persuaded that a comprehensive
and detailed historical analysis will, if it ever appears, show that my
assessment of American educationism is encyclopaedically incomplete but
right anyway. The prodigious monster is down there, I know, and even if
its tentacles and appendages, its gross organs and protrusions, its subtle
convolutions and recesses, are invisible, I have still seen enough to know
the nature of the beast.
|