The Graves of Academe ......................................................................................................................................1

Richard Mitchell......................................................................................................................................1

Contents...............................................................................................................................................................2

Foreword .............................................................................................................................................................3

Propositions Three and Seven ...........................................................................................................................4

The End of the String......................................................................................................................................11

The Wundter of It All......................................................................................................................................20

The Seven Deadly Principles ...........................................................................................................................32

The Principles March On ................................................................................................................................41

The Pygmies' Revenge.....................................................................................................................................52

ProblemSolving in the Content Area...........................................................................................................65

Every Three Second .........................................................................................................................................80

Afterword: Plus Ça Change ............................................................................................................................91

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be

Praised by critics across the nation, The Graves of Academe is Richard Mitchell's angry and brilliant tour

through America's bloated public school system whose mangled, selfserving language and policies

would make Orwell wince. Stamped with vintage Mitchell wit and laced with stinging examples from The

Underground Grammarian, The Graves of Academe pinpoints the historic sources of the mindboggling

``educationist'' bureaucracy and reveals why today's schools are riddled not only with illiterate students but

The Graves of Academe is a book of the highest importance...its slashing and irrefutable attack, not on

teachers, but on the educational establishment that trains them and which his trained us...Mr. Mitchell is

``This is one of those books that seem to make such eminent common sense that you feel compelled to read

aloud selected passages to those within hearing regardless of whether they want to listen.'' Dallas Times

``Mitchell is a brilliant stylist, a shrewd observer and a genuine wit.'' National Review

``...a delightfully satirical book on the malaise of the American educational system, `the professional

educator,' the people who, in the eyes of the authors Richard Mitchell, are responsible for the deplorable state

of American English...Amen and hallelujah, this is fine reading.'' Charleston Evening Post

``...this angry, witty, and very accurate assessment of the current educational scene should be required

reading for every parent who has or will have children in what Mitchell calls `The Great Dismal Swamp' of

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 nottoodifficult task.

My own publisher, Little, Brown, although wise enough not to suggest such a venture, was nevertheless not

I spent several months choosing, ordering, and contemplating selections from 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

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

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.

In the country of the blind, the oneeyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of

the witless, the halfwit is king. And why not? It's only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The oneeyed man knows that he could never be king in

the land of the twoeyed, and the halfwit 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 neverfailing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the

halfwit and the oneeyed man, it is clear that other halfwits and oneeyed men are potential competitors

and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a

onesandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies

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 oneeyed man and the

halfwit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command

the construction and perpetuation of a statesupported and legally enforced system for the early detection and

obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 2020 vision will trouble the land as little

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 selfdenial. 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 oneeyed man and the halfwit 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 don't 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 claim to 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 Jefferson's terms, we can derive exactly eight propositions to think about:

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:

And, of those four, Propositions 1 and 6 are explicitly Jefferson's, while 3 and 7 are implicitly Jefferson's.

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 Jefferson's 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

And to what end were the people to exercise the power of their informed discretion? The answer, of course,

shouldn't 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 knew isn't 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 Jefferson's terms. Which

would you rather face, even considering your own conviction that the cause in which you want to command

liberty and property is just citizens 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 illinformed and undiscriminating can easily be persuaded by the

recitation of popular slogans and the appeal to selfinterest, however spurious. It is only informed discretion

And that's how government works. There is nothing evil about it. It's 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 selfconfessed 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

That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have those things, don't we? So all is secure,

Just as we cannot assume that what we call ``education'' is the same as Jefferson's ``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 neverending succession of breathless articles on lowbudget decorating for the executive couple in the

big city, career enhancement through creative haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through

enlightened selfinterest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of ``the important'' as composed primarily of

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, they'll have

them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered why so many people wanted such things, but that's 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

Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can make out many words, but all is not

secure. Wait. That's 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 oneeyed 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 it's 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,

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

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 teachertrainers can judge the work of teachertrainers. That

wasn't hard to do, for boards and legislatures are made up largely of people who have, in their time, already

been blinded by the oneeyed man, having been given, as helpless children, what we call ``education'' rather

than practice in informed discretion. The very language in which the teachertrainers 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 statesupported monopoly. There are other schools. But the

teachertrainers are certainly a statesupported monopoly. There are no other teachertrainers 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

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 I'm 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

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 don't teach geography anymore and that high school graduates aren't 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 alltooinevitable 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

selfinterest; however, they will also be correct, and, if taken all together, will indeed tell us much about our

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 can't

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 won't 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 coppertubing 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. That's good, but so long as the state is willing to go that far,

the coppertubing makers seek and achieve a regulation requiring some absolute minimum quantity of

copper tubing in every new house. Now you must suppose that the coppertubing 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

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. They'll 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, he'd tell

you that our schools are full of supposed teachers of mathematics who have studied ``education'' when they

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 JellO each flavor equally

(Well, that analogy fails, too. JellO is at least a colorful and entertaining treat with no known harmful side

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 teachertrainers.

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 I'm afraid to find out), a high school mathematics teacher who is arrogant

enough to take a master's 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

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 wellknown opinions. We decide how to vote or what to buy according to

whim or fancied selfinterest, 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 doesn't 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

That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and everywhere is not to the point. They just

won't 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 people those are the requisites of informed discretion then 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

Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of illinformed and casually thoughtless captives. Even

when we are wellinformed 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 wellinformed 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 won't work, and that may be the single greatest insight of the makers of our

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 clearsighted 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 know if

there are any of us who can know something 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

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

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

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 fiftytwo percent of the grade: ``Draw all the letters of the alphabet,

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 bluebooks, 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

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

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

teachertrainers must be amiable and playful folk with welldeveloped 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

And I began to watch the teachertrainers 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

All in all, I thought the teachertrainers 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

wellmeaning 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

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 teachertrainers 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 teachertrainers 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 teachertrainers 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 comicbook 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 teachertrainers 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?

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 selfcontained 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

Public education, because it is so nearly universal and because, notwithstanding minor variations, it is a

monolithic and selfsustaining 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 selfinterest. ``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 teachertraining, 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

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,

Here is the brief statement of editorial policies that appeared in the first issue of The Underground

The Underground Grammarian is an unauthorized journal devoted to the protection of the

Mother Tongue at Glassboro State College. Our language can be written and even spoken

correctly, even beautifully. We do not demand beauty, but bad English cannot be excused or

tolerated in a college. The Underground Grammarian will expose and ridicule examples of

jargon, faulty syntax, redundancy, needless neologism, and any other kind of outrage against

Clear language engenders clear 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

confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as we darken counsel by words

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 frontline teacher feels for administrators. So many of them seem to be born

aluminumsiding 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 frontline 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

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

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

During the 198081 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

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 likeminded 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

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 footsloggers 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,

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:

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

selfpromoting grantgrabbers 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 jargonbesotted

clergy are bestowing upon each other rich benefices of experiential continua and peddling

cheap remediational indulgences, fighting to keep their teachertraining 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

It's not always easy to tell the pontiffs from the peasants. The sumptuary laws no longer apply. In the time of

lovebeads, both classes wear lovebeads; 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

Here's a typical passage of the latter as it appeared, unfortunately without attribution, in an otherwise splendid

``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

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

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 selfdefense, 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 so good with semicolons

That point is important. Although inflated with fake erudition, Pfaffesprache always reveals, inadvertently,

its roots in the vulgar, but usually honest, Lumpensprache. Thus we find in that passage the defensive errors

of the ignorant, who always use too many modifiers and achieve thereby either redundancy or incoherence.

There is no need to specify that a student's ``disposition'' is ``personal'' or to elaborate ``subject'' into ``the

particular subject field.'' We are not enlightened by hearing that a property is organizational or that the

relevant is immediately relevant. ``The hypothetical learning mode'' tells us only that this pontiff is hazy

The pontiff, of course, preaches what he practices in some teachertraining academy. Nevertheless, in spite

of his baleful influence, many of his students do not adopt his ignorant babble. They cling faithfully to their

They become schoolteachers and compose ``thought'' questions for study guides: ``What did the sculpture

told the archologists?'' They admonish parents: ``Scott is dropping in his studies he acts as if don't care. Scott

want pass in his assignment it all, he had a poem to learn and he fell to do it.'' When asked to demonstrate

their own literacy, they go out on strike, demanding on the placards ``quality educacion'' and ``descent

Maybe you can't fool all of the people all of the time, but the pontiffs can fool all of the peasants forever.

That accounts for the fact that the society of educationism is made up of two apparently dissimilar classes.

Deep down where it really counts, they're equally less than minimally competent.

We can understand why the educationists defend so truculently that bizarre article of their faith which

pronounces superior intelligence and academic accomplishment traits not suitable to schoolteachers. Well,

they may have a good point there. There's more than enough violence in the schools already. If we were to

send a bunch of bright and able students to study with the hypothetical learning mode pontiff, they'd ride him

out of town on a rail and hurry back to burn down the whole damn teachertraining academy.

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

teachertrainers 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 teachertraining 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

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 teachertraining 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

teachertraining 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 teachertraining

business for outstanding intellectual accomplishment in wouldbe 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 teachertrainers, 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 selfinterest, 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 pseudoreligions. For the institution of teachertraining 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

And there is such a defense. Over and against the overweening demands of scholarly intellectualism, the

teachertrainers 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

The true grandfather of modern educationism is neither Horace Mann, who has a bit more to answer for than

we usually imagine, nor John Dewey, who in fact has less to answer for than you would conclude from the

deeds of people who haven't read him. Mann had very good intentions, and if he was unable to predict the

future of state supported education in an age of ballooning statism, he was hardly alone. Dewey's thought was

so complicated and diverse, and often so muddily expressed, that it is not (much) to his discredit that facile

faddists have seized slogans from his books and elaborated them into strange pedagogical practices.

The illuminating spirit, or evil genius, of modern educationism was Wilhelm Max Wundt, a Hegelian

psychologist who established the world's first laboratory for psychological experimentation at the University

of Leipzig, where he worked and taught from 1875 to 1920. He dreamed of transforming psychology, a

notably ``soft'' science dealing in vague generalizations and abstract pronouncements, into a ``hard'' science,

like physics. About human behavior, he hoped to make exact and publicly verifiable statements of empirical

fact, from which he could go on to do what scientists must do, formulate hypotheses and make predictions

Those are hardly evil designs, and they are, of course, as Hegel might have warned Wundt had he had the

chance, clearly an expression of the Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. They are not evil any more than

science itself is evil, but their ``scientific'' intentions take on a strange flavor when we consider that

Zeitgeist. That was the age in which Zola embarked on a mighty series of novels, an enterprise that he fancied

a genuinely scientific experiment. That's the point of his nowforgotten book on the novel as a kind of

science, Le Roman Experimental: True, we cannot raise whole generations in miniature worlds in the

laboratory and chart their deeds and destinies, but we can, if we are sufficiently knowledgeable and

disciplined, do pretty much the same thing in a book. Zola, thus, was never without his notebook, in which he

jotted, probably to the consternation of all who knew him, his ``observations'' of (presumably) unguarded

That was also the age of Marx and Freud, and the growing suspicion, the worm that late Victorian

intellectuals were bound and determined to eat even if it didn't kill them, that Darwin had shown us only one

of the mighty determinisms that governed human behavior and destiny. Who can blame Wundt, therefore, if

he imagined that one who knew enough could measure, predict, and even elicit all those things that we call

feelings, sentiments, emotions, attitudes, and ideas, to say nothing of mere deeds. But while we are

considerately not blaming him, let us call on his own ``science'' in a rough and ready way, without precise

People who make their livings in ``soft'' sciences and the arts are not entirely at ease in the company of

chemists and physicists and other ``hard'' scientists. In such company, the psychologists and sociologists and

the professors of English feel like touchfootball enthusiasts who have wandered by mistake into the locker

room of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Only true philosophers, not professors of philosophy, are entirely immune to

that nasty suspicion that rises in the heart of the ``humanist'' when he hears about recombinant DNA or

quarks. (Well, that's not quite true. The untempered clod is also immune, a fact whose importance will appear

later.) This is a modern condition, and quite unlike that of older times, in which the fledgling ``hard''

scientists were held in contempt by those who did their work entirely in the mind without the help of

apparatus, proper only to artisans. It seems only fair; it's the alchemist's revenge.

Wundt, with his laboratory and machines, was certainly trying to better himself and win for his discipline a

new kind of legitimacy. It was just for that reason that he attracted so many students, many of them

Americans who came home to found schools of educational psychology and psychological testing and to

impress upon our whole system of schooling the indelible mark of clinical practice. One of them was a

certain James Cattell, who, while playing with some of Wundt's apparatus, made a remarkable and portentous

discovery. Here, in brief, is the story, as told by Lance J. Klass in The Leipzig Connection (The Delphian

Press, 1978), a useful little book on the influence of Wundt in the history of American educationism:

One series of experiments Cattell performed while at Leipzig examined the manner in which

a person sees the words he is reading. By testing adults who knew how to read, Cattell

``discovered'' that individuals can recognize words without having to sound out the letters.

From this, he reasoned that words are not read by compounding the letters, but are perceived

as ``total word pictures.'' He determined that little is gained by teaching the child his sounds

and letters as the first step to being able to read. Since individuals could recognize words

very rapidly, the way to teach children how to read was to show them words, and tell them

what the words were. The result was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of

teaching reading, and its replacement by the sightreading method in use throughout

The consequences of Cattell's ``discovery'' have surely been enormous, for they include not only the

stupefaction of almost the whole of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative

industry devoted first to assuring that children won't be able to read and then to selling an endless succession

of ``remedies'' for that inability; but Wundt in fact brought us much worse. He brought us the very

atmosphere in which such silliness can thrive. Out of the internal exigencies of his ``science,'' he was led to

consider ``education'' a human phenomenon similar to other human psychic conditions, a conditioned

response to stimuli. ``Teaching'' had to be seen as the application of stimuli that will elicit whatever response

we choose to call ``learning.'' Contrariwise, anyone who has learned something, to read or cipher, for

instance, must obviously have done so as a result of being exposed not simply to the substance of his

learning, the reading or ciphering, but to some stimulus that probably, but by no means certainly, was visited

The widespread acceptance of the teaching of reading as inspired by Cattell was possible only where there

was already a predisposition to concentrate not on the substance of what can be learned but on some attribute

that can be detected in the supposed learner. Exactly that predisposition was provided by Wundt's view of

teaching and learning as psychological stimuli and responses, an arrangement presumed to have its own

validity without reference to what was taught and learned. This view was gladly received in the United

States, where, as we will see, a growing educationistic establishment made up mostly of people with little or

no academic expertise was looking for attractive alternatives to the constricting demands of ``subjects.''

Thus it is that our educationists prefer not to treat the multiplication table as something that just has to be

learned. They rather think of multiplying as a desirable ``student outcome,'' a ``behavioral modification'' of

one who does not know how to multiply. This would be only a harmless playing with words if it weren't for

the fact that not all students learn to multiply with equal ease. If we simply think of the multiplication table as

a set of numbers that must be learned by brute force, we can demand more force of those who fail to learn. If

we think of the ability to multiply as a ``behavioral objective,'' an appropriate response to stimuli, then the

student who doesn't learn to multiply must drive us to seek other stimuli and perhaps, in stubborn cases, to

decide that learning the multiplication table has only limited value for the student outcome of multiplication.

The folly at hand, the wordrecognition teaching of reading, is the result of just such tormented thinking. It

is perfectly true that people who can read do not stop to sound out letters. That, therefore, is an attribute of

readers. So, to the mortally wundted, the path to reading requires the not sounding out of letters as a student

outcome, and student behavior must be modified accordingly. Thus, the rare and pesky student who has

learned the sounds of some letters must be discouraged, which stimulus will elicit a response characteristic of

Leaving aside the incidental, if momentous, destruction of a whole nation's ability to read, we have still two

far more important and ominous legacies from Wundt. We can afford to leave the reading problem aside

because it is only a practice, a practice that can change, and, in fact, does show signs of changing. But the

major principles that generated and maintained that practice show no signs of changing, and those principles

generate and maintain numerous other unnatural practices and will yet bring us more. They can be put thus:

1. Mental and emotional conditions and events are natural phenomena subject to natural law

In another context, of course, there would be no need to make of the second a ``principle'' equal in weight to

the first, but here it seems useful. These principles are ominous legacies not because they are false. For all I

know, and for all anyone knows, they may be true. But that wouldn't make them ominous either, although it

certainly would lead me to drop this project, and all others, here and now. What makes them ominous is that

they are utterly, for humanity in its present state at least, beyond our powers to test. They require what we

seem unable to achieve, the total understanding of human beings by human beings. We lack that. And, for all

the promises of our Freuds, Marxes, and Wundts, we seem no closer to it then ever before. We may assume

what suits us, of course, about the nature of humanity, and when we act on our assumptions, consequences

will flow accordingly. American educationists have assumed the truth of Wundt's principles, in spite of the

fact that few of them have ever heard of Wundt, and the consequences are what we see.

It is possible to imagine in fact, you don't have to imagine, for Marx makes a good example some

meticulously logical and disciplined thinker who, having made assumptions something like Wundt's, could

derive from them an iron system, complete and internally consistent. Such might have been the nature of

American education today had Wundtian psychology been adopted by expert and learned thinkers. But it was

in fact adopted by the educationists, who already saw themselves as the appointed democratic supplanters of

learned and expert thinkers, remnants of an elitist authoritarianism. When the principles of Wundt are taken

up by people actually hostile to academic learning and traditional intellectualism, strange consequences will

flow. Thus it is that educationistic thought and language have a disconcerting hermaphroditic quality, for the

educationist is committed on the one hand to the proposition that human qualities are quantifiable and

predictable (through the work of the intellect, presumably, for how else can we quantify and predict?), and on

the other hand to the proposition that the practice of the intellect is of less significance and ``value'' than the

Here is an excerpt from The Underground Grammarian that shows how the automatic if unknowing

adherence to Wundt's principles, in combination with the disorder of the intellect enforced by

antiintellectualism, causes things to happen in the schools and teacher academies:

In March of 1979, we printed some gabble by a thenunidentified doctoral candidate at New Mexico State

University in Las Cruces. It was about ``a short extrapolation to the prediction of transpersonal innovations

from selfactualization traits.'' Ten months later, the writer was identified as Robert D. Waterman. The man

who fingered him was a colleague, James Dyke, who wanted not the handsome reward we had offered, but

Having pointed out, as though it made a difference, that Waterman's degree was not in guidance but in

I hold little faith in your critical abilities with respect to Bob Waterman until such time that

you can demonstrate that you can handle the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas without

And he even sent along an actual piece of the cutting edge, Waterman's complete abstract and a thin slice

from Chapter II of the dissertation, ``Value and Philosophical Characteristics of Transpersonal Teachers.''

We admit that we have no ``critical abilities with respect to Bob Waterman,'' but Dyke may have meant

something other than what he wrote. The critical abilities that we do seek are those that enable us to write

exactly what we mean. They would also find ``until such time that'' a silly inflation of ``until,'' and an

Well, no matter. Dyke doesn't claim to be the cutting edge. So let's take up his challenge and try to handle the

edge itself. We'll start with the very edge of the edge, Waterman's first paragraph. Mind your fingers:

Though an increasing interest on the part of the educational community is being shown in

transpersonal teaching, the literature reflects a lack of empirically based studies concerning

the teacher characteristics associated with its adoption. The purpose of this study, therefore,

was to attempt to identify characteristics (values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy)

pertinent to transpersonally oriented nonpublic school teachers and to compare and contrast

We expected some incisiveness out there on the cutting edge, but the first paragraph is clouded by uncertainty

Like other educationists, Waterman evades clear declarations and active verbs, as though he were

afraid to take any chances even on a bland generalization like the assertion that somebody is showing

interest in something. He retreats into an awkward and periphrastic jumble, saying that increasing

interest ``on the part'' of somebody is ``being'' shown in transpersonal teaching. (Let's get to

The timidity of educationistic prose is not simply a stylistic twitch. It expresses an uncertain mind

and the fear of challenge. That ``literature'' named by Waterman either lacks something or it doesn't,

but he will say only that it ``reflects'' a lack. Likewise, he assigns himself not exactly the task of

``identifying'' but only of ``attempting'' to identify something or other just in case.

In what way, we wonder, is a characteristic ``pertinent to'' some teachers different from a

characteristic ``of'' some teachers? What can we suppose about the mind that prefers the former to the

Are those ``public school oriented teachers'' actually teachers in public schools, or could they be

teachers anywhere who just happen to be obsessed with thinking about the public schools? Could

Enough. The cutting edge in New Mexico is indeed blunted and ragged, and probably septic as well, and it

was thoughtful of Dyke to warn us of the horrible wound it might inflict. Let's get out the long tongs.

Educationists feel secure, or as secure as they can feel, when they can prattle about the unmeasurable. If you

natter about attitudes and values, no one can prove you a fool by pointing to some facts. However, while the

retreat from the measurable provides comfort for the educationist, it makes it hard for him to claim, as he

would so dearly love to, that ``education'' actually is a body of knowledge and that his Faculty Club card

should not be stamped: ``Valid only when accompanied by an adult.'' What a dilemma.

Many doctoral candidates in education just head for the nearest exit. They bestow upon us ``conclusive

findings'' as to the efficacy of yellow traffic lines on the cafeteria floor and the number of junior high school

For those who want to do serious research way out there on the cutting edge, however, a trickier dodge is

needed, and the education academy is quick to supply it. Most D.Ed. programs require of their candidates no

competence in foreign languages, which makes them attractive and accessible to those whose verbal abilities

are meager. It assures that those abilities will remain meager, too, lest the teacher academies hatch out some

thankless bird capable of seeing, and telling the world, that the teachertraining professors just can't make

sense. The teachertrainers, therefore, make virtue of necessity by claiming that an educationistic scholar

doesn't need verbal skill anyway, but a onesemester course in statistics instead. And that's why their

``research'' bristles with commensurate model analyses and stepwise regression strategies.

Now we can look at Waterman's ``transpersonal teaching.'' In the pages that we have, there is no definition,

the personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching are: (1) a view of man as

essentially and inherently good at his core, (2) that the locus of power and authority in one's

life is within the individual, and (3) that when dealing with life situations it is most effective

to apply one's values to a solution with flexibility, and free of preconceptions or prejudice.

We already know how Waterman writes, so we're not surprised by redundancy or jargon, or even that

disconcerting violation of parallelism. What does surprise us is that the work of the mind way out there on the

cutting edge of the exploration of ideas sounds so much like a mimeographed prospectus for a

nondenominational Sundayschool class to be taught by some amiable but slightly addled addict of popular

selfhelp paperbacks and magazine articles about the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas in Marin

Waterman's values, quasitheological and pseudophilosophical, can become objects of ``research'' only to

educationists. First they circulate questionnaires, either homemade or, as in Waterman's case, prefabricated

by other educationists. Then they tabulate the ``answers,'' which are usually spaces filled in or numbers

checked by captives eager to finish a stupid questionnaire. The answers reveal, of course, only what the

answerers have chosen to say, which may or may not reveal what they feel or believe. In fact, it probably

does not, especially in this ``research.'' Even non transpersonal teachers know enough not to give straight

Most of us can see a difference between a study of angels and a study of testimony about angels. Waterman

sees that the R2 of SelfRegard is .0123, and, of InnerDirected, a hefty .4544. Existentiality's R2 is a

modest .0460. Yeah. And next year he's going to whip off Weltschmerz and Ennui, and we'll know

exactly how we feel about the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas in New Mexico.

In the meantime, though, we are going to cook up a little ``empirically based study'' of our own. We're just

It would surely be an injustice to Wundt, who was meticulously intelligent, by all accounts, to think that

he would be a party to the granting of a doctorate, even in Educational Management/Development, for such

cloudy work. Nevertheless, he asked for it. The presumed method of Waterman's ``empirically based study''

promises to quantify mental and emotional conditions and events in publicly verifiable measurements. Those

strange numbers, left unexplained in the original article, are typical of the measurements. They are

determined statistically by counting up and manipulating the answers to the questionnaires. Such is the

educationist's equivalent of the scientific method, and even Wundt would reject it.

There is no counting the doctorates in education that have been awarded to those who have done nothing

more than tabulate the answers to questionnaires. That such degrees are so common, however, is not only

because the work is easy, bad enough, but also because the supposed objects of study often cannot be known

directly. When they can, in fact, they are obviously trivial. When all the badminton and archery coaches have

sent in their completed questionnaires, then you know something about the junior high school girls in the

suburbs of Duluth. Or, to be more exact, you know what the badminton and archery coaches say about those

girls. Nevertheless, the nature of the knowledge is such that it is publicly verifiable through direct

observation. But it is of very limited use and will not bring great renown to its discoverer.

On the other hand, the nature of knowledge about the ``values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy'' of

``transpersonal teachers'' does not recommend such knowledge as verifiable through observation. We do not

``see'' such things; we can only make inferences about them. We do not even know what ``transpersonal''

might mean, for its form, analogous to ``transcontinental,'' suggests nothing rational. Nor can we figure it out

by imagining its antonym, i.e., what would we mean if we said that some teacher was ``nontranspersonal.''

When we are told the ``personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching,'' we learn only that teachers

who seem to have these certain beliefs rather than others are being called ``transpersonal,'' but the term

distinguishes them only from the nontranspersonal teachers, who, presumably, do not have those beliefs. And

Never mind. Educationists love to sound technical, and they have a penchant for giving importantsounding

names to things that need no names at all. In that fashion, for instance, they do not call a very small class a

very small class or helping one student helping one student. They decide that such things are properly named

``microteaching.'' It may seem to you that it doesn't make any difference, but it turns out to make a big

difference indeed. You cannot write dissertations and articles, you cannot teach courses in teacher academies,

you cannot get grants of public money, you cannot hire out as a consultant, you cannot set up a project and

assemble a staff, if all you're going to do is talk about very small classes and the fact that a teacher will often

help one student. You can do all of those things, and more, if you are an expert in microteaching. Thus

Waterman, by giving a classy name to people who would otherwise be nothing more than reasonably kind,

confident, and resourceful teachers, provides himself with a topic worthy of serious study.

Well, nice people are nice, no doubt. But how do we know that, and how can we decide which are the

nicer nice people and by precisely how much they are nicer? This is the kind of concern that modern

educationism has inherited from Wundt's by now muchdebased principles. And answers are sought not by

recourse to evidence but by the gathering of testimony, testimony invariably and inevitably tainted by

subjectivity. It would be bad enough that such methods nullify the value of educationistic ``research.'' What is

far worse is that such research becomes the pattern for the study of ``education'' generally. Students of

teachertraining are continuously exposed to such presumed methods of inquiry. Since they spend so much

of their time in education courses, they can have little training in rigidly scientific disciplines, even if they

intend to teach them, and they are easily bamboozled into thinking that this kind of exercise is science. Their

bewilderment has to be compounded by the fact that this putative science is about things which, for other

purposes than dissertations, educationists will claim as human ``values'' to be inculcated as separate from

``mere'' intellectual attainments. Those are things like Waterman's SelfRegard, Existentiality, and

The educationistic mind is deeply divided against itself. It wants to follow Wundt and believe that teaching

and learning are objectively measurable phenomena and that those who study teaching and learning are

therefore scientists and worthy of chairs in colleges and universities. At the same time it wants to contend that

the profoundly important results of an education, especially the education of a teacher, are attitudes, values,

and ``philosophies'' that transcend cognition. Waterman, an educationist, asks this kind of question: How do

public and private school teachers compare with each other in their Existentiality? He who asks after the

degree of your Existentiality may just as well ask for a numerical value for your hunger, and will, in either

case, simply have to accept what you tell him. Such ``research'' wouldn't even make an interesting parlor

But what else can Waterman, or any orthodox educationist, do? He is not likely to ask, for instance: How do

public and private school teachers of mathematics compare with each other in their knowledge of

mathematics? That question could be answered in publicly verifiable measurements. But it is not an answer

that a prudent educationist would want, and it would probably not win you a doctorate in any graduate school

of education in America. Your committee will throw you out for several reasons: Since the teaching of

anything is the design and application of appropriate stimuli, the teacher's knowledge of mathematics,

although there ought to be some, is not what makes him a teacher. We do not teach mathematics just so that

students can do mathematics, but for a higher purpose, for the inculcation, perhaps, of an appreciation of

Logic and Rationality; so you would be better to seek findings about Logic/Rationality Appreciation, which

is exactly as easy to measure as Existentiality. Your research is, in any case, likely to give a false impression,

since many private school teachers, to the detriment of their professionalism, are not legitimately certified

and have probably taken more courses in mathematics than in education, which makes their possibly superior

In other words: Measurable things are not important; unmeasurable things are paramount. Let us therefore

measure only the unmeasurable. Of course, Wundt never dreamed of measuring the unmeasurable. He

claimed rather that the psychological conditions and events of humanity were not unmeasurable at all, and

that the task of psychological science was to discover how to measure them. He did not suggest that we go

around asking people how they felt, however, for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anyone with any

rudimentary understanding of science. But he did hold, for equally obvious reasons, that the study of human

psychology required the direct observation of human beings. That tenet of Wundtianism, hardly startling, has

been happily accepted by educationists, for if there is one thing they have always at hand it is a large

You have surely heard of ``childcentered'' education, that process that will educate the ``whole child.'' It

sounds so decent. What could be better than centering on the child, the whole child, no less? But what,

exactly, do halfbaked neoWundtians mean when they speak of ``childcentered'' education? Here is an

The Nonredundant Interactive Relationship of Perceived Teacher Directiveness and Student

Recent research has shown that a number of student variables authoritarianism, dogmatism, intelligence,

conceptual level, convergentdivergent ability, locus of control, anxiety, compulsivity, need for achievement,

achievement orientation, independencedependence, and extraversionintroversion may moderate the

relationship between teacher directiveness and grades and satisfaction. There is a fair degree of moderate

intercorrelation among these student variables and such intercorrelation suggests that some of the found

interactive relationships may be overlapping or redundant. The purpose of the present research is to develop

multivariate mathematical models of the interactive relationships using stepwise regression strategies. Such

models should facilitate a more parsimonious interpretation of the interactive relationships which are...

We were going to show you all of that mess and even give you the name and address of the chappie who

made it, but we can't. Before our typesetter was able to finish, a member of our staff borrowed the original

(and only) copy and took it to Texas. There, while fumbling for his entry permit at the Immigration Control

Office, he lost the evidence. Maybe it's just as well. There's no telling what those Rangers might have done

had they caught him with a smoking dissertation abstract. They don't cotton much to that kind of stuff down

We can tell you, at least, that the original came from Calgary, Alberta, and we have to hope, if justice is ever

to be done, that the Mounties don't want any of this stuff in their country either. They shouldn't have much

trouble getting their man and his sidekick in this case. The author and his dissertation adviser were so

proud of themselves that they had their photographs printed right on the page with the evidence. Perfectly

decent and respectable young fellows they seemed, too. Who would have thought it?

Since personology must be too subtle a science for the likes of us, we cannot explain how ``personological''

variables might be different from differences in persons. We would guess, though, that ``student'' variables

are young variables studying to become teacher variables. And we're a little disappointed by that list of

student variables, a measly twelve items. In the better teacher academies, you'd never get a doctorate for such

a skimpy, or ``parsimonious,'' elaboration of the obvious commingled with the incomprehensible.

The most instructive thing about the passage is that its pretentiousness is eloquently, although inadvertently,

undone by its timidity. Notice that all those nifty variables may ``moderate the relationship.'' Educationists

won't take chances, even on the obvious and simple. After all, how can we be sure, without multivariate

mathematical models of the interactive relationships, that different people feel different about different

Of course, should this research achieve its goal, we might have to change our opinions. A ``parsimonious

interpretation'' of a ``fair'' degree of ``moderate'' intercorrelation is not to be sneezed at. Before such an

awesome discovery, we'd just have to back off, treading cautiously in our best stepwise regression strategies.

Let's try to imagine some possible facts and events that might incite such an undertaking, that is, the

development of multivariate mathematical models of interactive relationships. First, be careful to remember

something that might easily blow away in the storm of jargon all of this has something to do with children

in school. So we can imagine: There are some children in school. They are, in some ways, different from each

other, that is, they have (could that be the right word?) different student variables. They get grades in school,

probably some good, some bad, some indifferent. They are, or are not, as the case may be, ``satisfied,'' either

by school, or by their grades, or by both, in various degrees. They ``perceive,'' or not, maybe, something

called ``teacherdirectiveness.'' How can these things be seen as functions of one another?

Before we can begin this research, we have to be clear about some things that might confuse mere laymen.

Notice first that whether a teacher actually is ``directive'' or not is not at issue; all that matters is whether a

student ``perceives'' a teacher as ``directive.'' This is childcentered research. Although grades do go into the

hopper, it's not because we are interested in what a student has learned or how that can be measured, but

because we want to know about the student's ``satisfaction,'' which depends only in part on his grade, which

must be factored in with his own perception of directiveness and his own student variables. This is still

Bearing in mind those warnings, we can now proceed with our research. If we are successful, we can expect

Who will be more satisfied with a B plus, a moderately intelligent student with better than

average convergentdivergent ability but little if any locus of control, or a very bright,

dogmatic student who shows normal achievement orientation but no compulsivity to speak of

You can devise other such examples for yourself. The possibilities are probably infinite. None of them,

however, will have any objective meaning, which would require a precise numerical evaluation of hosts of

human traits, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and emotions. In fact, that kind of study must end exactly where it

begins, in a vague generalization. You and I, if asked and forced to answer, could also have said that there

may be a fair degree of moderate intercorrelation between a person's characteristic traits and the way he

feels about things. This is the kind of revelation that educationistic research provides.

It does that useless work, obviously more for profit than for fun, since it is impossible that even the dullest

educationist can find the ecstasy of discovery in such an enterprise, precisely because it is childcentered.

Here in the shadow of Wundt, education and the presumable content of an education are not the objects of the

educationist's concern. It is the children, the students, who are to be studied, for the education is something

that is being done to them with certain modifications in mind. While the originally intended modification

may be nothing more than changing children who can't add into children who can, the process of

modification itself is obviously more likely to produce a ``scholarship'' of the kind just cited than a mere

counting of those who can add and those who can't. That scholarship, you surely noticed, is not about what

children may have learned and how, but about how they feel; and it isn't even about how they feel about what

they may have learned, but about how they feel about their grades and their teacher. If we could hope to

learn anything from such research, it would be not about education but about children. But, following Wundt,

that is exactly what we need to know, for ``education'' is the psychologically appropriate manipulation of

That view of ``education'' is not entirely without merit. Some things can be taught to some people just that

way, although the system works far more dependably with horses and dogs. But human beings are immensely

different from one another even while they are very much alike, and even the most avidly childcentered

educationists have not yet suggested an educational system in which every child, after a stupefying battery of

psychological tests, is assigned a perfectly matched teacher, who has also had all those tests. Therefore, the

teaching of anything has to be a compromise, a generalized set of stimuli aimed at producing the desired

responses in most of the children. In some cases, therefore, it is bound to fail.

Several things can happen when education fails, none of them good. No. I will be more precise. None of them

can be good as long as we think of education as the design of appropriate stimuli to produce certain behavior

in an individual human being. If we do think that, then there are three things we can think of doing when

some students fail to learn, since there are three factors in our equation the stimulus, the student, the

We can change the stimulus. This is a big job, for it requires changing an already institutionalized

compromise designed to elicit the right response from as many children as possible, a massive system.

Nevertheless, it has been done. Every simplified revision of some already simplified text is just such a

change, and so is the widespread use of films and even television programs in place of books. When such a

change is made, of course, it is made in the supposed interests of those who have failed to respond

appropriately. That accounts for the fact that methods of instruction are designed to accommodate not the

We can also change the expected response. If some children do not seem to learn history, we can decide to

teach them civic pride and responsibility instead. This is especially attractive if we have already decided that

civic pride and responsibility might well be the proper student outcomes of the study of history anyway. This

We can even try to change the student. This is hardest of all, but educationists never give up. On this matter,

too, there is much to say later, but for now we must look at what happens in the Wundtian system before or

unless such a change can be made. What follows, along with some notably ghastly language, is a display of

one of the educationist's most cherished devices, the psychological manipulator's last resort:

The works of Weischadle, associate professor of education at Montclair State College in New Jersey, can be

studied at length in the New Jersey section of The New York Times for July 16, 1978. His piece is called,

Mass illiteracy he easily dismisses as a matter of ``problem youngsters,'' but those uppity parents who are

beginning to complain about illiteracy they need to be taught a lesson. They can vote! If we don't

straighten those malcontents out right away, they might end up listening to demagogues and voting against

some of our favorite monies. Worse yet, and it's with this fear that Weischadle begins his fingerwagging,

some of them might win those malpractice suits that they're discussing with their lawyers.

Weischadle protests that even if illiteracy were the fault of the schools, that wouldn't mean that the schools

Have the critics been fair to the schools? To the extent that schools are responsible for a

youngster's educational growth, the critics have dealt with the right party. However, it does

not necessarily mean that professionals in the schools are inept. It does mean that educational

leadership has failed to articulate the problem effectively and carry out the necessary

It's hard to know exactly what Weischadle means by that ``articulate.'' First we thought that the

``professionals'' had been unable to utter intelligible sounds, for that reading does reflect experience.

However, in this kind of writing, no ``professional'' would ever waste a nifty word like ``articulate'' on such a

simple thought. Next we guessed that the man might be saying that the ``professionals'' had been unable to

define the problem thoroughly and accurately. That, too, we had to reject. Such inability would be

remarkably similar to ineptitude in ``professionals,'' surely, but Weischadle says they're not inept. Only one

possibility remains: ``To articulate the problem effectively'' must mean to find some description that will

keep irate parents from thinking that the ``professionals'' are inept. Of course! That's just what Weischadle's is

He does some pretty fancy articulating as well. Where do they learn that language? In the ordinary graduate

school, candidates are expected to be competent in a couple of foreign languages, but in those education

places they know that skill in language will cripple the budding ``professional'' by enabling him to say things

plainly. You get no monies that way. Straight talk would mean the end of effective articulation as we know it.

Here are some examples of bent talk from Weischadle's little piece. He won't say that people are talking

about something; he says that ``much recent discussion has focused on'' it. He can't say, ``Hurry''; he says that

``delay should not be allowed to take place.'' He can't say that people should use wisely what they have; he

says that ``an enlightened utilization...must be present.'' He can't say that the people who deal out discipline

should be consistent; he says that ``the haphazard application of disciplinary action...must be eliminated.'' He

Still, we worry. For one thing, there is no clear meaning in the settling of uneasiness. In fact, it sounds

ominous. If the settling of uneasiness has the same effect as the settling of terms or plans, we don't want any

part of it. For another, how can we take any comfort from a teacher of teachers who condescends, in broken

English, to explain why we should have ``complete confidence'' in him and other ``professionals,'' so that

they may get on, unhampered by our illinformed and amateurish complaints, with the ``acquisition...of

monies to enact better programs'' that will, this time around, solve the illiteracy problem ?

In these examples of Weischadle's tortured English, the grammatical subjects are things, not persons, and

abstract things at that. All things that must be done by people, but we see no people. This language suggests a

world where responsible agents, the doers of deeds, have been magically occulted by the deeds themselves. A

weird structure of that sort, ``utilization must be present,'' for example, has the merit (?) of excusing

somebody from an obligation to use something. If things go wrong, therefore, it's not any person's fault; it's

Such structures, furthermore, often generate certain morally flavored auxiliary verbs: ``delay should not''

``application must,'' etc. This is another grammatically symbolized copout which implies that moral

obligation falls upon deeds rather than doers. It is up to those negligent deeds to get themselves done. This is

Normal English, in its typical structure, a simple sentence in the active voice, implies a world where agents

perform acts. There are times when we would wish it otherwise, and in our minds we can devise subterfuges

that will make it seem otherwise. We do the business of the mind in language, and we make our subterfuges

of the same stuff. Weischadle, in his grammatical gyrations, is not just writing bad English; he is positing a

certain kind of world. In that world, one can parler sans parler like Castorp and reject in advance all

responsibility for what one says. Here's how Weischadle does it indeed, how almost anyone of those

``professionals'' would do it: ``The preschool years have been recognized as being important formulative

He probably means ``formative,'' although he may be thinking that the preschool years are the years spent

sucking a formula from bottles but no matter. The important thing is the grotesque contortion by which he

escapes having to say that the preschool years are formative, or, if you like, formulative. It matters not at all

to the ``professional'' that what he has to say is obvious and banal and widely enough known that it needs no

saying; he still finds a way to evade responsibility for having said it. In this timid language of misdirection

and abdication, no one would dare stand forth and proclaim that a turkey is a turkey. He might mutter,

tentatively, that a turkey has been recognized as being a turkey although not necessarily by him.

Into such prose, human beings vanish. No wonder we couldn't discover Weischadle's salary. He has

withdrawn into the precincts of the passive voice. He has given over all doing of deeds and drawn up about

him the mists of circumlocution. Far from our ken, he has sojourned in the land of the selfeliminating

application and followed the spoor of the placetaking delay. He is, by now, by gloomy night and

periphrastics compassed round. He is, in short, or sort of short, no longer recognized as being Weischadle.

What could be more obvious? When the object of a psychological manipulation fails to respond in the usual

way, there must be something wrong with him. This conclusion is the same as the neurologist's, for whom the

failure of a knee to jerk has one ominous significance. In Wundt's psychology, the mind itself is held to be,

must be if the system is to be concretely scientific, a neurological phenomenon, and a predisposition against

arithmetic must be a psychoneurological aberration. Thus we must conclude, when children fail to respond

appropriately to tested stimuli, that they have learning problems. That being so, it becomes the aim of

educational research to find out all about learning problems and to discover, naturally, that the schools are

full of ``problem youngsters'' harboring hosts of hitherto unsuspected ``learning disabilities.'' From this

preoccupation with pathology, the teachertraining profession takes many benefits.

One of them, of course, is simply the opportunity to do what can pass for scholarship or research, which leads

to promotion and pay and to government grants. There would be little hope of such things in a simpler calling

like plumbing. Plumbers install plumbing, and, when something goes wrong with the plumbing, they fix it.

They don't care how the pipes feel about it. Teaching reading and arithmetic is much more like plumbing than

you probably think. If you know how to read and cipher, you can, if you want to, teach those skills to almost

any child in America. The chances are, too, that you will do a better job of it, and in a shorter time, than the

schools. If you know a lot about mathematics and have paid thoughtful attention to language, you can do a

much better job, and better by far, probably, than anything you can manage with your plumbing. But if the

teaching of children were handled that way, simply by people who knew the skills and knowledge they were

teaching, and who wanted simply to teach them, then a vast and comfortable empire would fall.

That empire is not, however, the empire of the schools. It is the empire of the teachertraining establishment.

Most of what is taught and studied in the teacher academy has nothing to do with the subject matter that the

teachertrainees will someday teach. Teachertraining is itself ``childcentered,'' and the teachertrainees are

themselves among the children. That's why so many education courses are devoted either to ``enhanced

selfawareness'' or to a clinical scrutiny of children as psychological entities. The training of teachers is thus

a miniature lampoon of the training of the psychoanalyst, who must first be analyzed so that he may do unto

others as has been done unto him. The incipient teachers are to be, in fact, therapists, keen to discover, if

unable to treat, vast arrays of ``learning disabilities'' and ``problem youngsters.'' Teachertraining, therefore,

is a colossal and terribly serious enterprise. It calls for more and more courses and workshops and

``handson'' laboratory ``experiences'' and in and preservice training, all of which require larger and larger

faculties and counselors and facilitators and support services and more and more money. Without Wundt,

none of this would be possible, and the teaching of children would be degraded into nothing more than an

Wundt may have been wrong, but he was honest. He just wanted to know what he thought could be known.

His bequest to us, marvelously transformed, is essentially a metaphor, an ideal paradigm of the process of

education. We seem to imagine that there is something ``wrong'' with children, and that we must fix it. But by

that ``wrongness'' we don't mean something simple to fix, like the perfectly normal ignorance of arithmetic in

one who has not been taught arithmetic. We mean something more like a perverse bias against arithmetic, an

innate predisposition whose remedy lies in some ``treatment'' or other. We can see that the treatment,

therefore, must take priority, for the arithmetic depends on the treatment, the modification of behavior. Thus

we will first make the student whole, through devising and applying appropriate stimuli, so that he can, if it

still seems desirable, learn his arithmetic. This paradigm does not include the proposition, certainly

questionable but just as certainly intriguing, that we can make the student whole by teaching the arithmetic.

After sober and judicious consideration, and weighing one thing against another in the interests of reasonable

compromise, H. L. Mencken concluded that a startling and dramatic improvement in American education

required only that we hang all the professors and burn down the schools. His uncharacteristically moderate

proposal was not adopted. Those who actually knew more about education than Mencken did could see that

his plan was nothing more than cosmetic and would in fact provide only an outward appearance of

improvement. Those who knew less, on the other hand, had somewhat more elaborate plans of their own, and

Those who knew less, to be specific, were the members of the National Education Association's Commission

on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, a.k.a. The Gang of Twentyseven, now long forgotten but

certainly not gone. They builded better than they knew, and their souls go marching on in every school in

America today. The Commission was established in 1913, the year that also brought us the income tax. Many

of its members were functionaries of school bureaucracies, from the United States Commissioner of

Education himself down through supervisors and associate superintendents and principals and even a high

school inspector, whatever that was, to no less a personage than a senior educational secretary of the YMCA.

Professors and assistant professors of education represented the higher learning. One of them was chairman

of the committee on mathematics, naturally, while the committees on lesser disciplines, notably classical and

modern languages, were directed by high school teachers. The stern sciences were served by a professor of

education, while the smiling sciences like social studies and the other household arts were overseen by

federal bureaucrats. In the whole motley crew there were no scientists, no mathematicians, no historians, no

That was surely no accident, for it seems to have been an article of the Commission's unspoken agenda to

overturn the work of an earlier NEA task force that had been made up largely of scholars, the Committee of

Ten, called together in 1892 and chaired by Charles W. Eliot, then president of Harvard University. That

committee had come out in favor of traditional academic study in the public schools, which they fancied

should be devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and the training of the intellect. But what can you expect from

a bunch of intellectuals? The Eliot Report of 1893 was given to things like this:

As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of

observation; as mathematics are the traditional training of the reasoning faculties; so history

and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable

Obviously, the Eliot committee did its work in the lost, dark days before the world of education had

discovered the power of the bold innovative thrust. All they asked of the high schools was the pursuit of

The Gang of Twentyseven, unhampered by intellectual predispositions, found that proposal an elitist's

dream. They concluded, in other words, that precious few schoolchildren were capable of the pursuit of

knowledge and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment. That, of course, turned out to be the most

momentous selffulfilling prophecy of our century. It is also a splendid example of the muddled thought out

of which established educational practice derives its theories. The proposals of the Eliot report are deemed

elitist because they presume that most schoolchildren are generally capable of the mastery of subject matter

and intellectual skill; the proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, on the

other hand, are ``democratic'' in presuming that most schoolchildren are not capable of such things and

This bizarre principle is still very much with us as a generator of educationistic theory and practice. It shows,

among other things, the immense power of words, especially nasty ones like ``elitism,'' notably abhorrent to

our egalitarian society. It is certainly true (and puzzling as well, since the men who made us this egalitarian

society were indubitable intellectuals) that we distrust intellectuals. They do seem to be an elite, although,

thank goodness, a powerless elite. They butter little bread. Nevertheless, when we ask those intellectuals what

we should do in the schools, they tell us to do everything we can to bring forth swarms of other intellectuals,

which must lead us to conclude that the intellectual elitists can't be too smart. What kind of an elitist can it be

who wants to generate his own competitors, and lots of them at that? But the champions of a ``democratic''

public education, righteous enemies of elitism, rejoice in the profitable belief that hardly any of the children

in their charge can expect to rise to the level of curriculum facilitator, to say nothing of superintendent of

In the cause of ``democratic'' public education, the Gang of Twentyseven compounded illogic with

ignorance by deciding that the education proposed by the Eliot committee was primarily meant as

``preparation for the college or university.'' True, relatively few high school graduates of 1913 went on to

college; but even fewer had done so in 1893. Indeed, it was just because so few would go on to more

education that the Eliot committee wanted so many to have so much in high school. But the Gang of

Twentyseven decided that since very few students would go on to the mastery of a discipline and the

rigorous training of the mind in college, which colleges were still fancied to provide in those days, there was

little need to fuss about such things in high school. They had far more interesting things to fuss about in any

case, their kinds of things. They enshrined them all, where they abide as holy relics of the cult of

educationism to this day, in their final report, issued in 1918 (and printed at government expense, like all the

outpourings of educationism ever since) as Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.

Cardinal Principles was a small pamphlet, not much larger than The Communist Manifesto or a man's hand.

It rejected the elitist and undemocratic education of the dark past and provided in its place ``preparation for

effective living.'' It made us the effective livers we are today, and it sends forth every year from our public

schools and colleges all those effective livers who will make the future of the nation.

The seven cardinal principles were put forth as the paths to the seven ``main objectives of education,'' which

had finally been discovered once and for all after twentyfive hundred years of intellectual floundering. The

first of those main objectives was Health. Health. Its primacy is justified by that firm grasp on the obvious

that was to become the very foundation stone of educational theorizing: ``Health needs cannot be neglected

during the period of secondary education without serious danger to the individual and the race.'' How true.

You can't make effective livers out of dead children. And think of the race! Suppose they all die! How then

will we get the taxpayers ``to secure teachers competent to ascertain and meet the needs of individual pupils

(It is interesting to notice that, like this one, all of the proposals in Cardinal Principles will call for vastly

increased faculties and administrative bureaucracies both in the high schools and in the teachers' colleges.

This has since become the Eighth Cardinal Principle, which you can see doing its work in your local school

system whenever any remedy to any problem or shortcoming is proposed: Whatever we do will require more

money, more teachers, more administrators, and more mandated courses in education.)

Cardinal Principles even proposed that there be in each school a kind of health officer, whose job would

range from looking around for insanitary conditions in the building to inquiring into the social lives of the

students, who might well be risking their health in the streets and in icecream parlors. It was in the cause of

health, I believe, that my own firstgrade teacher used to hold fingernail inspection every morning and cry

out now and then to some slouching young reprobate: ``Posture!'' It was in this cause, too, that what was

called ``physical education'' became the oppressive monster that it is today and, by the very power of its

name, compounded beyond remedy the educationistic delusion that ``education'' and ``training'' are the same

thing. It is not a coincidence, nor is it without large consequences, that so many of America's high school

The second ``main objective'' is, at first, slightly surprising: Command of Fundamental Processes. In 1918

that meant just about what Basic Minimum Competence means today. Although it certainly did not mean

anything more than Basic Minimum Competence either, it did at least mean a higher minimum. Nowadays

we count ourselves lucky if the students can read and write at the ninthgrade level, whatever that means this

year. Cardinal Principles says that such a level of competence, even in 1918, ``is not sufficient for the needs

of modern life.'' (I must say, too, that Cardinal Principles, although stilted and dull, is not written in the

selfserving, mindless jargon of today's educationists. This credit, however, must be balanced against a large

debit. It was in the ensuing scramble of silly, pseudoscholarship required for the justification of the cardinal

principles that our educationists discovered the power of mendacious gobbledegook and adopted it as their

Furthermore, it is clear that, while the drafters of Cardinal Principles do put Command of Fundamental

Processes second only to Health, they do so apparently as an involuntary bend of the knee to that discredited

old elitism. About the other ``main objectives'' they have a lot to say, and many suggestions as to how

curriculum might be manipulated in their accommodation and many new people hired in their cause. When

they have called for Command of Fundamental Processes, that's it. They proceed at once to Worthy

Cardinal Principles admits, affirms, in fact, that ``In the education of every highschool girl, the household

arts should have a prominent place because of their importance to the girl herself and to others whose welfare

will be directly in her keeping.'' It presumes, too, that even girls who do idle away a few more years in

college or in ``occupations not related to the household arts'' will someday have to face their ``actual needs

and future responsibilities'' and ``understand the essentials of food values, of sanitation, and of household

Although Worthy Homemembership obviously has a lot to do with cooking and sewing, it also provides for

The social studies should deal with the home as a fundamental social institution and clarify

its relation to the wider interests outside. [That will disqualify history, a discipline notably

unconcerned with ``the home,'' as a worthy study.] Literature should interpret and idealize

the human elements that go to make the home. [That knocks out the study of literature, which

is remarkably unlikely to do what some educationists decree that it ``should'' do.] Music and

art should result in more beautiful homes and greater joy therein. [They really had to stretch

for that one, but it will call to order pretentious art and music teachers who peddle their

subjects as intrinsically worthwhile, and it will even justify the inclusion of interior

It is exactly that, the dilution of ordinary academic study, that makes this kind of ``education'' so pernicious.

Obviously no one can object to housekeeping skills or to beautiful homes and joy therein. But beauty and joy,

and even housekeeping skills, are either diminished or destroyed by ignorance and stupidity, which are likely

to flourish in a place where history is subordinated to a ``social study'' of the home as an institution and where

Those funny ``educations'' are all the more powerful and longlived because they are designed to grow fat

and sassy through eating the bodies of their victims. When we embark on an ambitious program of Worthy

Homemembership Education, we justify ourselves by naming some indubitable benefits we intend to

bestow: an understanding of ``the essentials of food values, of sanitation, and of household budgets,'' for

instance. Those benefits, of course, can be had, along with a great deal more, by those who study and learn

such things as biology, chemistry, and mathematics, but those stern old disciplines offer little scope for the

bold, innovative thrust and the increased budget. So we pretend, or some of us may actually believe, that

home budgeting, which is a skill all these girls need, can be learned in the absence of mathematics, which is

And sure enough little by little the study and practice of such subjects as science and mathematics decline,

and fewer and fewer students take such courses. We have helped this decline by providing easy and

``democratic'' options for those who seem to have a little trouble with the demanding elitism of traditional

academic study. Now the day has come when very few high school girls can do any arithmetic at all. Now is

our triumph. We can redignify Worthy Homemembership Education with a trendy new name, Consumer

Education, and teach nutrition and wary shopping to girls who are innocent of science and unable to figure

out the price of an ounce of macaroni. Those deficits, which flow from our very existence, we can now put

forth as arguments for our continued existence. This pattern, of course, can describe the growth and triumph

Another such education was the fourth main objective in Cardinal Principles: Vocation. The Commission's

proposals for a vocational education program that would take up ``much of the pupil's time'' derive from its

own cardinal principles: that few students can do academic work and would best spend their time in learning

homemaking skills and trades, and that the larger purpose of public education was to bring about a certain

social order. They urge vocational education not only to ``equip the individual to secure a livelihood for

himself and those dependent on him,'' but also so that he may ``maintain the right relationships toward his

fellow workers and society.'' The Commission does not, of course, explain what ``right relationships'' might

be, perhaps presuming that all the other educationists who read their report would surely favor right

relationships over wrong relationships without giving the matter any thought. As usual.

But vocational education, as imagined in Cardinal Principles, was not to be a separate program within the

schools; it was intended that even those students who did not spend ``much of their time'' in the wood shop

would nevertheless ``develop an appreciation of the significance'' of vocations ``and a clear conception of

right relations [there they are again] between the members of the chosen vocation, between different

vocational groups, between employer and employee, and between producer and consumer.'' All such things

can be studied, of course, in the context of several wellknown disciplines, but study can provide only

knowledge. Cardinal Principles does not call for knowledge of these matters, however, but for

It is a thematic illusion of our educational enterprise that understanding can be had without knowledge, that

the discretion can be informed without information, that judgment need not wait on evidence. Before we can

ask what are the right relations between producer and consumer, for instance, we must know what are all the

possible relations between producer and consumer. We must know antecedents and consequences; we must

know functions and contexts. We must, in fact, know more than we can hope to know, which is why

thoughtful people only reluctantly and armed with as much knowledge as possible leap from knowing into

On the other hand, Cardinal Principles, in speaking of its fifth main objective, Civics Education, leaps

blithely into: ``Too frequently, however, does mere information, conventional in value and remote in its

bearing, make up the content of the social studies.'' Mere information. What the Commission might mean by

``conventional in value'' I just don't know, but I do know, along with all who have ever studied, that only a

fool is willing to take the risk that this or that bit of mere information is ``remote in its bearing.'' Facts seem

As you might expect, Civics Education what a noble cause! is given enormous power to alter and

History should so treat the growth of institutions that their present value may be appreciated.

dependence on nature. Civics should concern itself less with constitutional questions and

remote governmental functions, and should direct attention to social agencies close at hand

and to the informal activities of daily life that regard and seek the common good. Such

agencies as childwelfare organizations and consumers' leagues afford specific opportunities

The work in English should kindle social ideals and give insight into social conditions and

into personal character as related to these conditions. Hence the emphasis by the committee

on English on the importance of a knowledge of social activities, social movements, and

And, not content with prescribing an ``appreciation'' of institutions that would satisfy Lenin, ignorance of the

constitution in the name of responsible citizenship, and literature as an instigator of social compliance, the

Commission decides also that `` all subjects should contribute to good citizenship.'' (My italics.) While they

would probably not suggest, in that cause, that the binomial theorem be put to a vote in class, their

descendants and adherents will, in fact, suggest that mathematics, obviously ``remote in its bearing'' on good

While its concrete proposals for Civics Education are very much like its proposals for all the other

educations, Cardinal Principles, in the name of ``attitudes and habits important in a democracy,'' goes an

extra step and prescribes what should actually happen in the classroom. It urges ``the assignment of projects

and problems to groups of pupils for cooperative solution and the socialized recitation whereby the class as a

whole develops a sense of collective responsibility. Both of these devices give training in collective

thinking.'' Here we can see the theoretical foundations of the rap session, the encounter group, the values

clarification module, and the typical course in education, but also something far worse.

For thousands of years, many decent, knowing, and thoughtful people have hated and feared democracy, and

with good reasons. We don't think of it that way any longer, probably because we have all been to schools

devoted to the cardinal principles, but the framers of our society took great pains to guard us against the

obvious (to them) dangers inherent in majority rule. It was precisely to commend and elucidate the

constitution's ability to protect the few from the ignorance or selfinterest of the many that Madison wrote

the tenth Federalist Paper; which is, of course, not included in the Civics Education curriculum. The children

who are to generate ``cooperative solutions'' and ``socialized recitations'' are to do so without concern for, or

even any knowledge of, ``constitutional questions and remote governmental functions'' like checks and

balances. They will do their ``collective thinking'' unencumbered by ``mere information.''

It is another of the educationists' selfserving delusions that if enough of the ignorant pool their resources,

knowledge will appear, and that a parliament of fools can deliberate its way to wisdom. This delusion is not

entirely groundless. It is grounded in another delusion, the one that flows from a halfbaked adaptation of the

You will recall Cattell's curious conclusion that learning the sounds of letters was not useful in learning to

read because those who could read did not sound out the letters. Recall also that Wundt saw learning (he did

not say ``education'') as a conditioned response to stimuli. For American educationists, such ``facts'' were

absorbed into a generalized notion that might be put something like this: We notice that educated people,

whatever that might mean, have certain attributes and that they do things in certain ways, or, since we are

educationists, that they ``exhibit certain behaviors.'' So, if our students come to have those attributes and

Educated and thoughtful people have indeed often met and deliberated together and solved problems and

found wisdom. Just look at the Constitutional Convention, for example, or, if you're a little short on mere

information, consider the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. Therefore, if we

assign projects and problems to groups of students we will instill in them the same ``sense of collective

responsibility'' that we see so often among the educated and thoughtful. In that fashion, furthermore, we will

engender in them an appropriate appreciation of ``the ideals of American democracy and loyalty to them,'' as

An analogous line of reasoning would begin with the observation that musicians have been known to play

``Lady of Spain'' and end with the determination to train seals to play ``Lady of Spain'' on bicycle horns and

And there is another ominous and farreaching implication in the Commission's assignment of projects and

problems hidden, not very deeply, in ``collective thinking.'' This phrase reveals an appalling ignorance and

thoughtlessness out of which terrifying educationistic malfeasances have been growing for decades.

Schooling is done in public places, but the roots of an education can grow only in the hidden ground of the

mind. Lessons are taught in social institutions, but they can be learned only by private people. The acts that

are at once the means and the ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all

committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done. There is no such thing as

``collective thinking.'' Our schools can be an instrument for socialization or an incentive to thoughtfulness,

Thus it is, for instance, that such elementary skills as reading and writing, public analogues of private

thinking, are so ill taught in the schools. It is not sufficient explanation of this failure to point out that the

educationists who design the schools are themselves notoriously poor readers and writers, although they are.

That leads us only to ask in turn why that should be so. At the root of our widespread and institutionalized

illiteracy is a fevered commitment to socialization and an equally unhealthy hostility to the solitary, and thus

probably antisocial, work of the mind. In school, the inane and uninformed regurgitations of the ninthgrade

rap session on solar energy as a viable alternative to nuclear power are positive, creative,

selfesteemenhancing student behavioral outcomes; the child who sits alone at the turning of the staircase,

reading, is a weirdo. The students did not bring that ``appreciation'' to school; they learned it there.

Somewhat later in their history, the educationists will justify and formalize their hostility to the intellect, with

which they never did feel comfortable, by inventing the ``affective domain'' of feelings and attitudes and

appreciations and setting its gracious virtues over against the tedious and unimaginative ``rote'' learning of

the merely ``cognitive domain.'' But they will only raise walls where the Gang of Twentyseven has dug the

foundation. We can see the marks of their shovels in all those appreciations and attitudes and values and

``worthy'' attributes of this and that. And when they come to their sixth main objective of secondary

education, Worthy Use of Leisure, they outdo their successors in a sublime presumptuousness possible only

Heretofore the high school has given little conscious attention to this objective. It has so

exclusively sought intellectual discipline that it has seldom treated literature, art, and music

so as to evoke right emotional response and produce positive enjoyment. Its presentations of

So. Intellectual discipline is not compatible with ``right emotional response'' and ``positive enjoyment.'' And

a pack of manual arts teachers, educationists, and bureaucrats can tell us what a right emotional response

would be, presumably. They can clarify for us, without any tedious attention to inorganic chemistry or the

laws of motion, not only an appreciation of nature but a genuine appreciation of nature. They are bestowers

of blessings on the benighted. Their discoveries, however, would probably come as a sad surprise to

Jefferson, who, in spite of his command of intellectual disciplines, labored all his life under the delusion that

he did take ``positive enjoyment'' from literature, art, and especially from music.

One of the characteristics of the mind of educationism, just as much now as in the days of Cardinal

Principles, is an apparent inability to follow paths of thought far enough to discover contradictions in logic. If

scientific research, or technological craftsmanship, for that matter, were as little given to selfexamination as

educationistic theory, we would have practically nothing that worked. The notion that intellectual discipline

is somehow an impediment to ``right response,'' a notion that we find not only in the context of the arts but

everywhere in Cardinal Principles and in subsequent educationistic theorizing, must eventually lead us to the

conclusion that those who hold it cannot be believed. It is, after all, by virtue of some fancied ``intellectual

discipline'' in themselves that educationistic theorists claim to prescribe the ``right'' responses, attitudes, and

This is not only illogical but even antisocial, which is another disabling contradiction in a theory proposing

schooling as a means of socialization. They say, in effect, that students who are needlessly led into

intellectual discipline will not achieve right emotional response, but that educationists are not thus

handicapped. It is a strange sort of teacher who says in his heart that his students need never know what he

knows. That goes far beyond elitism; it is cultism. If a teacher is dedicated to knowledge and thought, he

works in the hope that his students, some of them, one of them, will come to know and think more than he

does, for only thus can knowledge and thought be served. To treat his students, or some of them, or even one

of them, as though they could never know and think what he knows and thinks, suggests a dedication to

something else. Perhaps to his job. Perhaps he fears to raise up what such a teacher would surely think of as

competition. While an individual teacher, of course, need have no realistic fears that some student will

supplant him, the same is not true of the ideologues who claim to define the whole system of teaching and

learning. How convenient it is, we notice, for the future welfare of the commissioners that they are immune

to the nasty side effects of intellectual discipline from which they will magnanimously shelter the children.

I must note, at this point, that the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education was assembled

by the National Education Association, a widely misunderstood outfit. The ordinary citizen reads its

pronouncements in the newspapers from time to time and notices that it gives its seal of approval to treacly

television shows and elementary dramatizations of popular ``classics.'' He has the impression that the NEA is

something ``official.'' But it is, of course, as it was in 1918 and long before, a trade union. That it should be

called on to set national policy in the public schools is like putting the teamsters' union in charge of traffic

laws and the licensing of drivers, but even more so. We have accepted the determinations of a teachers' union

as to how America should be educated only because the job of designing an educational system is so

hideously boring that only those whose selfinterest is clearly at stake will undertake it. Our corporate

selfinterest, to be sure, is also very much at stake, but not clearly , at least not clearly enough for the

ordinary citizen, who cannot see beyond the fact that all questions of education and schooling are hideously

The selfinterest of a massive educationists' trade union is evident on every page of Cardinal

Principles. Whether that selfinterest influences the document in partnership with shabby habits of thought,

or whether those habits are themselves the consequences of the selfinterest, who can say? But the result is

the same. In every ``main objective'' we can find generous provision for the employment of growing hosts of

duespaying members of the NEA. It is also assured that much room will be made in the academic world for

a new class, the arrivistes of educationism, the guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators, the physical

education and typing teachers, the appreciation experts and the right emotional response imparters, the

fingernail inspectors, and the right relationships inducers, who can launch themselves easily into secure and

respectable careers without worrying about the burdensome demands of mere information and intellectual

In the world projected in Cardinal Principles, there is no place for scholars or scholarship. The whole, vast

enterprise of training the minds that will shape the thought and knowledge of the future is dealt with in

exactly one sentence: ``Provisions should be made also for those having distinctly academic interests and

needs.'' Exactly what provisions the Gang of Twentyseven might have had in mind, we'll never know,

although their provisions for the supervision of habits of hygiene and social events are detailed at length. We

have to wonder, too, how such provisions could be made at all, given that ``Each subject now taught in high

school is in need of extensive reorganization in order that it may contribute more effectively to the objectives

outlined herein, and the place of that subject in secondary education should depend on the value of such

contribution.'' By that principle, any course of study that might attract those wretched misfits with academic

interests, an intellectual discipline clogged with mere information, would have to be either diluted into the

(All is not lost, however. In any school there are a few teachers who didn't know what they were getting into

when they went to the teachers' college and have stoutly and usually silently retained their devotion to

intellectual discipline and even improved their stores of mere information in spite of having to give most of

their time to education courses. They are the unintended ``provision...for those having distinctly academic

interests and needs.'' That's why every educated person you know will give special credit to this or that

certain teacher. Such teachers, however, are seldom popular with their colleagues, and never with the

administrators, so they often have to work underground. No matter. Those weird students will find those

weird teachers and will learn from them, in any subject at all, something of the work of the mind.)

In fact, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education was simply not interested in students

with ``distinctly academic needs and interests.'' It began by assuming that there were few of those in any case,

and ended by projecting an ``education'' that would make them even fewer. In the Commission's plan there

was as little concern for academic talent as there was space on the page for naming the provisions, for the

commissioners were, deep down where it really counted, not teachers at all but Sundayschool supervisors

manqués, officious and illinformed laymen busily hastening to good makeworks and armed with the

serene selfconfidence that only ignorance can provide. They wanted to be not teachers but preachers, and

prophets too, charging themselves with the cure of the soul of democracy and the raising up in the faith of

true believers. They made concrete and formal the antiintellectual dogmatism that characterizes our schools

The seventh and last of the Commission's main objectives of secondary education was nothing less than

Ethical Character, which they pronounced ``paramount'' in a democratic society, as if Plato, Epictetus, Saint

Augustine, Voltaire, Kant, Spinoza, and so on, for countless thinkers who lived under all sorts of

governments, had somehow missed the point now perfectly clear to certain manual arts teachers and associate

superintendents. They were as smugly confident of their ability to engender Ethical Character through ``the

wise selection of content and methods of instruction in all subjects of study'' as they were of their ability to

tell right emotional response from wrong. All it takes, after all, is what they are certain they have: wisdom.

I have more to say later on the vexatious question of the role of public education, all too accurately described

in Cardinal Principles as ``the one agency that may be controlled definitely and consciously,'' in the

supposed formation of Ethical Character. For now, it is useful to point to the obvious fact that you will have a

hard time finding a citizen who is opposed to the formation of ethical character. Or to worthy use of leisure

time. Or to health, or any of the ``main objectives'' of secondary education as discovered in Cardinal

Principles. Those objectives can be seen to constitute what is essentially a political platform eminently

acceptable to all those who are in favor of good and against evil. Public acceptance of that platform was all

And how could there be? In this case, opposition could hardly be the simple recommendation of contrary

``main objectives.'' No one would vote for some educational splinter group calling for sickness and

degeneracy. The opposition, if there were to be any, would require in its adherents a precise and thorough

attention to detail, the pursuit of logical argument, the formulation of hypotheses as to consequences, an

underlying theory as to the means and ends of education, and some considerable knowledge of the history of

human thought. Such a constituency will never be large. There was such a constituency, of course, as there

always is, made up of thoughtful and educated people of all kinds, some of them actually in schools. But the

scholarly, academic wing of that small party was not asked to the table with the members of the Commission

on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, who didn't want to hear any more of that ``traditional training

of the reasoning faculties'' stuff in the report of the Eliot committee. And the other political dissidents, the

ones you might call the civilians in the school war, had other and far more important things to do. Most of

them had probably never heard of Cardinal Principles, and those who had would surely have found it of little

interest. The theorists of American public education, actually feeble and helpless creatures, have evolved an

amazing power to protect themselves against predators by emitting an unbearable cloud of dullness and

If there is such a thing as an intellectual and cultural elite in America, and there may well be a far larger one

than even its detractors imagine, it is surely worthy of condemnation, for it is selfish and lazy. Jefferson and

his friends indubitably thought of themselves as an elite, a natural aristocracy of talent. So thinking, they saw

themselves not as privileged but as obliged by their gifts, obliged to serve the common good by the simple

fact of their ability to do so. This attitude is not rampant among us. It is especially unrampant in the academic

community, where those who more or less secretly do think of themselves as an elite have trained themselves

to imagine that the dull business of public education has nothing to do with their high endeavors.

The underlying attitudes and beliefs in Cardinal Principles have not been mitigated by the passage of time or

the pressure of momentous events. Quite to the contrary, they have been regularly reaffirmed and

reinvigorated, both in theory and practice. The devisers of the Seven Deadly Principles set out not to teach

certain skills and knowledge to hosts of children but to change the nature of American society. They

succeeded. They didn't, of course, make the vast mass of the people stupid and uninformed, for that happens

in the course of nature without any need for deliberate effort, but they did arrange that fewer and fewer would

reach escape velocity and rise out of the vast mass of the stupid and uninformed. As the consequences of the

deadly principles become evident, sometimes one by one and sometimes in whole hosts of troubles, the

descendants of the Gang of Twentyseven point them out as justifications for even more of the same, more

The seven ``main objectives of education'' are still the main objectives of education, although one of them,

Command of Fundamental Processes, was always somewhat less main than the others and remains so now

that it has been renamed Basic Minimum Competence, in which term the important word is ``minimum.'' And

it is exactly toward the achievement of those objectives, especially the greater six, that the training and

indoctrination of schoolteachers is directed. Earnest attention to the seventh is just not possible in this

scheme, for it would require precisely those things that Cardinal Principles finds inimical to ``right'' and

``worthy'' values: stringent intellectual discipline and great stores of mere information. The professors of

education are not interested in those things, for their own training and indoctrination are no different from

what they visit upon their students. After all, what else have they to bestow? And the professors of everything

else just don't want to be bothered, and what they do have to bestow they save for a few favored students who

will in turn become the professors of everything else who just don't want to be bothered. Mencken was right.

The educationism that now informs our schools and teacher academies is an amalgam of postWundtian

misunderstanding and the Sundayschool dogoodism of Cardinal Principles. From the former it takes its

characteristically therapeutic and manipulative methods and devices, and from the latter its pious pretensions

as an agent of social harmony and guardian of the public virtue. In one way, therefore, it is pseudoscientific,

and in the other, pseudoreligious. It is the devotion to contradictory principles of dubious validity that

generates the mental climate of educationism and leads to that special fatuousness so typical of American

As recently as 1971, the National Education Association undertook a project called ``Schools for the 70's and

Beyond.'' The ensuing ``main report,'' ``written primarily [sic] by Warren T. Greenleaf and Gary A. Griffin,''

was published as a slim volume: A Call to Action. Although it was clearly written in the shadow of growing

discontent about schools, it urged at least consideration of ``the thesis that school excellence narrowly

defined, not school failure narrowly defined, has given us most of the problems that divide our nation in

1970'' an entertaining proposition, and one that would surely confirm the assertion in Cardinal

Principles that too much attention to intellectual discipline inhibits right understanding. And the ``argument''

put forth in support of that thesis is itself a dramatic example of worthy disregard for mere information:

It was not illiterate, backward men who spiked our residential skylines with steel forests of

television antennas, spoiled our rivers with the defecations of a hundred ``growth'' industries,

fouled our air with the sooty contrails of a thousand jet planes taking off daily, or choked our

cities with automobiles that cost as much to park as to buy. That work was accomplished by

men whose schooling enabled them to develop transistors, nodepositnoreturn bottles,

You say you want to understand how a modern technological society works? Well, now you know. Men with

schooling cunningly trick the multitudes into buying television antennas and driving expensive cars.

Educated elitists force decent citizens to travel in airplanes and callously require them to dispose of bottles at

their own expense. It isn't the ``illiterate, backward men'' who visit these horrors on us; untainted by

``excellence narrowly defined,'' they can manage only rape, murder, arson, and an occasional gasstation

This amazingly stupid oversimplification is perfectly typical of educational theory. It is typical, too, in its

confusion of ``education'' with the ability to design transistors and to pressurize cabins, which is precisely the

sort of thing Cardinal Principles had in mind when it spoke of vocational training. Such a confusion is

inevitable, however, when the pursuit of intellectual discipline is seen as hostile to right and worthy

understanding. Even a fairly elementary technology, that of the electrician or plumber, for example, depends

on certain disciplined habits of mind and a suitably large mass of information. The designing of transistors

may be more complicated, but it is essentially the same kind of enterprise as plumbing. A distrust of

intellectual discipline must eventually become a distrust of any disciplined habits of mind and any traditional

store of ``mere information.'' Logically, therefore, the writers of a Call to Action might also have indicted

plumbers and electricians, the plumbers for having connected us to sewage systems and thence to the spoiling

of rivers, and the electricians for making it easy to plug in the television sets for whose sake we have bought

Antiintellectualism is like antiSemitism, which only begins with the hating of Jews. From there it goes on

to the ferreting out of hithertounsuspected manifestations of Jewishness, and antiintellectualism goes on

even to the denigration of technology, and thus of the very vocational training that schools offer as one of

many antidotes to intellectualism. One could reasonably expect, therefore, that vocational training in the

schools must become a halfhearted and halfbaked enterprise, whose obvious purpose is not the teaching of

even a relatively simple technology but the segregation of students for whom even ``appreciation'' seems too

The writers of A Call to Action do not rest their case on the malefactors who brought us industrial waste and

installment payments, outrageous impositions probably dating from neolithic elitism. They go on to say that

``It was not ignorant men who designed a rifle bullet that could spin end over end to increase its fleshtearing

capacity.'' That, they remind us, was done by men with ``schooling in the far reaches of physics.'' Well,

maybe to an educationist a tumbling bullet, like the barb on a spear or the juice on an arrowhead, really

They name also those devious ``men sufficiently well educated to cite precedents from 200 years of

American law'' as the ones ``who juggled school boundaries...to keep black children separate from white.'' It

was not, they assure us, ``backcountry bumpkins'' who evilly studied law in order to ``manipulate city

ordinances.'' The backcountry bumpkins left that sort of thing to the overeducated gentry and just went on

It is fascinating, of course, to hear those who operate the schools argue that because there are people who can

build aircraft for profit and cite law in their own cause we may conclude that the schools have actually

provided too much ``excellence.'' What is even more fascinating is that this bewildering and ignorant line of

reasoning should find, apparently, no detractors among the vast membership of the National Education

Association, many thousands of whom must have read and taken comfort from A Call to Action.

When I still fancied that the mindless and illogical utterances so common in Academe were the results simply

of haste or carelessness, and long before I began to study the educationists' selfjustifications in works like

Cardinal Principles and A Call to Action, the following ominously suggestive article appeared in The

There is a kind of thoughtlessness that is not exactly stupidity. It is a failing seen in ordinarily intelligent

people who, under the influence of selfinterest, prefer to evade clarity of thought in precise language, giving

themselves instead to recitation of the vague and comfortable. They write prostrate prose in which they let

themselves be walked all over by verbal inaccuracies and the failures of logic that those inaccuracies always

cause. Such prose is especially dangerous because it often sounds like common sense around the old

potbellied stove. We will consider a case of crackerbarrel cant from the ruminations of one James P.

Connerton is the new executive director of the New Jersey Education Association. All we know of him is

what we read in the NJEAReview of January, 1979, to wit, that he has now returned to New Jersey after ten

years spent in unspecified enterprises ``in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, and

other states.'' How many other states, deponent saith not, but he doth say: ``His goals are our goals. Our

aspirations are his aspirations. Our joy and our pain are his joy and pain.'' The pain probably has to do with

Together we are the NJEA. All of us have made us what we are today. What we will be in 10

or 20 years depends on our determination, our forsight, our hard work, and our togetherness.

Jim Connerton is determined, farsighted, hardworking and one of us. As in the past, we'll do

it together. We will determine our future and the future will be better because we have

Welcome home Jim. We need you. The present and the future will be better for us because

That has a quaint charm, no? It sounds like the language in which invocations are spoken at the firemen's

annual clambake and certificates of achievement awarded at Little League banquets. Very American.

However, we'd be readier to accept it even to applaud it if only it had begun with the traditional

Unaccustomed As I Am. In this case, though, we might feel more confident about the future of civilization if

one of the state's bestknown schoolteachers seemed more accustomed to written English, even to such trivia

Never mind. Totten is only a harbinger. The har that he binges is an article in which Connerton speaks

Strictly speaking, we can not name more than one priority, or first thing , but the plural is irresistible to those

who want to dignify anything they think they may someday prepare to begin to get ready to do something

about or even just to think about. When a word means almost anything, it means almost nothing. To name

At the NJEA, they seem to have so many priorities that they have to distinguish them from one another,

calling some of them ``top'' priorities. We must assume that they have also some middle priorities and bottom

priorities. Of top priorities, Connerton explores a mere twelve. Here's what he says about a vexatious top

Every reasonable person concedes that we can't hold the parent accountable for the color of a

child's hair, that we can't rate the minister by the number of parishioners who break the

Commandments, and that we can't blame the coach when a linebacker misses a tackle. Most

people also concede that we can't judge teachers by the scores their students make on tests

especially on tests approved by some state office in Trenton that does not mesh with the local

curriculum. Students should be evaluated by a variety of relevant measures, and so should

That ``every reasonable person'' is a rhetorical gimmick similar to a speaker's promise to make no mention of

the wellknown fact that his opponent is a thief and a pederast. In this case it is less effective, for it

introduces either a shocking inanity or some hitherto unimagined cataclysm in genetics. But Connerton

knows his audience. His pains are their pains, you'll recall, and they feel an almost intractable pain whenever

they hear ``accountable.'' By using the word in this context, he deludes readers into swallowing his absurdity,

because they are predisposed to think that to hold parents ``accountable'' for attributes passed on to offspring

is to castigate them for dereliction. If Connerton had said that in plain English, he would have avoided the

absurd only to fall into the irrelevant. ``Every reasonable person,'' and even some members of the NJEA,

Having grounded his argument firmly on a proposition that is either preposterous or pointless, depending on

how we understand ``accountable,'' but having thereby won the hearts and minds of thoughtless readers,

Connerton offers two further propositions meant to be analogous to the first. However, if they were plain

statements of fact, which they are not, they could be analogous only to the irrelevant version of the first

proposition. In order to be analogous to the other possible version, the absurd one, they would have to be

obvious misrepresentations of fact, which they also are not. Therefore they are not analogous to the first

proposition. In one way, that's lucky for Connerton, since even schoolteachers might be able to spot three

logical monstrosities in a row. In another way, it's unlucky. His second and third propositions are analogous

to the business of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, and they suggest the opposite of what Connerton

We can expect some normal amount of oxcoveting and idolatry in any congregation; but, should sinning

increase inordinately and persist obstinately, as illiteracy has in the schools, we might indeed think to ``rate''

the shepherd of the flock. Furthermore, meek as they are, ministers would probably reject the implication that

their work can be presumed to have no effect at all. Are teachers defending themselves by claiming that what

they do cannot be presumed to have any effect? Why else would Connerton imply as much about the

ministers? Maybe that's why we don't see those cute billboards anymore, the ones that used to say, ``Teachers

And those hardeyed entrepreneurs who invest in football teams do indeed blame coaches and fire them,

too when more and more linebackers miss more and more tackles. It's only amateurs who want to talk

about ``how you played the game.'' Does this analogy tell us that schooling should be judged as leniently as

amateur athletics, and that we should be good sports, saying of each newly graduated illiterate, Well, that's

how the ball bounces? If we were willing to concede that, do you suppose that Connerton would then concede

that teachers should get the same salaries as those guys who coach the Little Leagues?

We have to presume, having heard of no mass defection from the NJEA, that most of the schoolteachers in

New Jersey read this passage and found no fault in it. They were apparently content to find themselves

defended in a ragged mishmash of nonsequiturs and false analogies that would earn a big fat F in any

freshman logic course in the country. It must have reminded them of the papers that always guaranteed a big

fat A, and perhaps even a cheerful, rubberstamped smiling face, in all their education courses.

Whether or not Connerton knew what he was doing, who can say? But we can say that if he did he is an

exceedingly clever writer, who knows that teachers are not too good at noticing fallacies. If he did not know

what he was doing...well, that's not our problem. He is paid for the work of his mind not by taxpayers but by

This tiny passage raises colossal questions: Does it reflect accurately the intelligent power of the average

teacher in New Jersey? If so, we have given the teaching of our children into the care of the slowwitted. Or

can it be that our teachers can see through this stuff but choose to let it stand because they like it, presuming

(oh, so correctly) that it will prove effective in persuading a slowwitted public? Must we choose between

dullness of mind and selfserving cynicism? What can we hope for where the interest of teachers is best

served by the stupidity of the people? Do you want a world in which reasoning like Connerton's is accepted

This is the most depressing text we have ever examined. It suggests a horrifying hypothesis, to wit, that, far

from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim

is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system. What educationists may

say or even believe that they are doing is not to the point. Their selfinterest is evident, and the cogency of

their thinking is at least questionable. A hypothesis must be tested by reference to facts and its ability to

Now do your homework. Find some facts to test that dismal hypothesis. Brace yourself. You're going to have

It may be only a coincidence that the passage cited is the work of a man who is in charge of an affiliate of the

National Education Association, the people who brought us not only Cardinal Principles but our new

Department of Education, but I don't think so. His pretense at argument is remarkably like that earlier bit

about the wicked antennamongers. His audience is the same. His intention is the same: corporate

selfjustification. And, like the writers of A Call to Action, he can obviously write utter nonsense without any

fear that his fellow educationists will expose him and call him to account. He is exercising the privileges of

his membership in an extremely unusual sort of conspiracy, an unconscious conspiracy, if you can imagine

such a thing, whose members are, in a very special sense, indubitably ``innocent.'' They have no idea at all of

I want to repeat now a passage that appeared earlier and that may have seemed to you a trifle rash:

We are people who imagine that we are weighing important issues when we exchange

generalizations and wellknown opinions. We decide how to vote or what to buy according

to whim or fancied selfinterest, 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 attitudes and abilities that characterize authority.

We do not notice elementary fallacies in logic; it doesn't 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

Well, perhaps that sweeping ``we'' was rash, but the rest of it seems to me a fair description of people who

can read about the antennamongers or Connerton's clergymen and coaches without dismay and fury. There

is no evidence whatsoever that reasoning of that sort, which can be found wherever educationism is preached,

arouses either fury or dismay or even a mild discontent. That fact, intriguing in itself, suggests some further

It can lead us to take a closer look at educationistic ``humanism,'' which, as you will remember, is the virtue

for whose sake the educationists can hold that curious article of faith that finds intellectual achievement an

inhibitor of effective teaching. In 1918 the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education

concluded, as we have seen, that the high schools had ``so exclusively sought intellectual discipline'' as to

preclude ``right emotional response.'' Although that inappropriate emphasis on intellectual discipline was

soon replaced by hundreds of easy electives intended to ensure a satisfactory adjustment to life, the writers of

A Call to Action discovered, in 1971, that there was still far too much of it. ``We have,'' they say, speaking

presumably for the NEA members who could read with gladness about those innocent backcountry

bumpkins, ``overemphasized the intellectual development of students at the expense of other capacities.''

They called for less intellectual development and more attention to ``other categories of human potential

emotional, social, aesthetic, spiritual, and physical which suggest other directions for curricular reform.''

There you have the beginnings of an understanding of the educationistic concept of ``humanism.'' It has to do

with those ``other categories of human potential,'' other than intellectual, that is. This is a drastic

transformation of a more wellknown kind of humanism, in which it was quite specifically the human mind

and its power of reason that gave the idea its name. Educationistic humanism is, in fact, so utterly unlike the

system of thought ordinarily called by that name that I prefer to call the former by the name given it, although

not exclusively in the cause of clarity, in the pages of The Underground Grammarian: ``humanisticism.'' In

humanism, it is the mind of man that is the type and discoverer at once of knowledge and understanding. In

humanisticism, various feelings, or, as Cardinal Principles called them, ``right emotional responses,'' seem to

be thought of as the quintessential signs of being human. If we say of someone that he is a humanist, we

suggest that he does the work of his mind in the expectation that he can devise knowledge and discover truth.

The humanisticist, on the other hand, distrusts the work of the mind and seeks rather to be a certain kind of

person than to do a certain kind of thing, expecting, it would seem, that knowledge and truth, relative things

The passage cited above, the one about the television antennas, is a splendid example of humanisticism, but

certainly not of humanism. The humanist, too, would be repelled by filth and ugliness, but he would not find

in it evidence of the inhumanity of the intellect in the ``men whose schooling enabled them to develop

transistors.'' On the contrary, he might lament the plight of the millions in whom the inadequately schooled

intellect makes possible and profitable all those expensive automobiles and the forests of antennas. He would

find in all our ugliness and filth a sad comment on the meagerness of mind out of which we so prize material

comfort and convenience that we transform perfectly human and ingenious technological achievements into

common nuisances. He would even be able to suggest a remedy in the form of a populace sufficiently skilled

in the work of the mind so as to consider the probable consequences of materialistic appetite and thus make

The humanisticist sees that ugliness and filth as the work of those in whom the work of the mind has

engendered wrong feelings or, just as bad, an absence of feelings. In this he finds the baleful influence of

``excellence narrowly defined,'' by which he seems to mean the development of intellectual, or at least,

technical, skills without the simultaneous development of right feelings. He may also imply, but who can be

sure, that intellectual discipline is hostile to the development of right feelings. That would seem to be the

point in the later passage, where ``other categories of human potential'' are urged as an antidote to intellectual

development. In effect, where the humanist says, If only we were thoughtful, the humanisticist says, If only

Humanisticism is sentimental, and in both senses of the word. The humanisticist sees the sentiments, or

perhaps the human propensity to feel sentiments, as the quintessentially human attribute. He also puts faith,

itself a sentiment, in what he considers either the evidence or even the conclusions of feelings, provided, of

course, that they are ``right'' feelings. The delicious glow of sated greed, for instance, which might well have

been the portion of those who sold all those antennas, although not of those who developed the theoretical

understanding out of which they come, can not be trusted. It is not, in the language of Cardinal Principles,

We can now reconsider a passage cited above, in which an educationistic ``researcher'' names ``the personal

(1) a view of man as essentially and inherently good at his core, (2) that the locus of power

and authority in one's life is within the individual, and (3) that when dealing with life

situations it is most effective to apply one's values to a solution with flexibility, and free of

Those are surely decent sentiments, and they were almost certainly accepted and even applauded as such by

the committee that granted the man who approved them a doctorate in education. They are also, of course, for

what other kind can there be, ``received'' sentiments, often expressed, often approved, and sometimes even

As a program for the practice of ``transpersonal teaching,'' however, they may fail to satisfy. The goodness of

man ``at his core'' needs some defining, and even some thought. Many will surely profess a belief that man is

good at his core without having any idea what they mean by those terms and without any knowledge of the

great history of human attempts to understand exactly what those terms might be taken to mean and whether

such a belief could be justified by anything more than sentiment. Nevertheless, one who holds such a belief is

free to hold it, of course, in a total absence of knowledge and thought. But what about one who not only holds

that belief but even recommends it to others, or, as in this case, puts it forth as a belief that teachers should

have if they want to be good, i.e., transpersonal? Or, to put it more practically, how can the teachertrainers

provide their students with ``a view of man as essentially and inherently good at his core?''

Let's leave aside for now the question of why they should want to do that and ask only how it might be done.

The intellectual study of the history of that belief will not suffice, for it is simply a fact that many who have

pondered the proposition have concluded that it was either false or meaningless. In any case, the

teachertrainers are little likely to turn to intellectual study, which they already know to interdict right

emotional response and to encourage the skepticism out of which men design transistors with no concern at

all for the fact that transistors can be used in weapons. Where study will not serve, only precept and example

remain. That's why the teachers of teachers, and then, of course, the teachers themselves, give much attention

to the skill of ``exhibiting behavior'' of a certain kind. (That girl in the bunny outfit, whom you have probably

forgotten, but I have not, was practicing just that exhibiting a behavior calculated to arouse appropriate

sentiments in little children.) If you behave like one who believes in man's good core, although exactly what

deeds that might require I can't begin to imagine, then your students will come to believe, or at least come to

believe that you believe. The behavior by itself, of course, will be ambiguous, perhaps even baffling, and

unless you also tell your students what your behavior means they may well conclude that you're just a bit

smarmy. Your acts and demeanor are ``reinforcement'' of the precept, the assertion that man's core is good.

The intrusion of the intellect at any point in this process is disastrous. Even a simple question, ``Miss Jones,

why exactly do you view man's core as essentially good?'' will undo many months of exhibited behavior and

reiterated precept. Notice, please, that the disaster lies in the question, not in the answer, although that would

surely make things even worse. It is the asking of the question that marks the intrusion of the intellect, and it

is no less devastating to humanisticism when the question is, as in fact it usually is, unspoken.

The inevitable collision of intellect and sentiment has even more frightful consequences. In a Sunday school

it would be a simple demonstration either of dogmatism or typical grownup hypocrisy, either of which

children can easily recognize and shrug off. But classes in school, although they are in fact dedicated to the

inculcation of beliefs, are often ostensibly devoted to some small work of the mind. In a biology class,

therefore, intellectual inquiries are sometimes appropriate and sometimes not. The resultant confusion

between what is knowable and what is not, and between statement of fact and assertion of belief, is usually

sufficient to last any schoolchild for the rest of his life. And, for all the recitation of precepts and exhibitions

of behavior, the lesson that he learns best is that his teachers could not make such distinctions either. Nor

To the incipient transpersonal teacher's view of man's core as good, we must also add, if we are

teachertrainers, the belief that ``the locus of power and authority in one's life is within the individual.'' This

curious proposition bristles with terms that are going to need very precise and narrow definitions if we are to

find it credible. We will probably find that its very attractiveness as a sentiment will be drastically diminished

when definitions are provided, and it is only in the absence of such definitions that anyone can recommend it

as a major virtue. It becomes ludicrous when we imagine how the precept must be translated into practice in

the teacher academy. Gumchewing girls, still troubled by acne and addicted to movie magazines, will be

persuaded that their chubby frames are loci of power and authority, notwithstanding the fact that their skills,

the instruments of power, are minimal, and their knowledge, the root of authority, is meager. And, thus

persuaded, they will go forth to exhibit the appropriate behaviors and recite the appropriate precepts in order

Now that we have given our wouldbe transpersonal teachers the belief, contrary to all evidence, that they

are selfsufficient loci of power and authority and that man's core is inherently good, it remains only to see

that they apply these values in ``life situations'' ``with flexibility, and free of preconceptions of prejudice.''

Decisions, decisions. Well, what the hell. Let us by all means hold unalterably to that value about man's good

core, until we flex it in a life situation, that is. On the other hand, though, can it be that that very belief, that

is, the belief that we must be flexible about out beliefs, is one of those preconceptions and prejudices of

which we must be free? Or can it be that the value out of which we flex our values is itself flexible, thus

permitting us, in certain life situations, to be flexible enough not to be flexible and to free ourselves from

that preconception about being free from preconceptions? Or can we just lie down and forget the whole damn

thing? Such absurdities must always occur when the mouth runs off in the recitation of precepts couched in

vague generalizations and undefined terms. But they do not trouble the educationistic humanisticists, who

never seem to notice them. The important thing is that the precept sounds good. And it does quite good

enough, in fact, to be elevated into a principle of teacher education, where the disruptive questions of the

I have been talking, of course, not of the specific program of any teachertraining academy but of

Waterman's notions of ``the personal characteristics related to transpersonal teaching.'' It may be, I admit, that

there is somewhere in America a teacher academy that rejects such notions and also the notion that such

notions have anything at all to do with effective teaching, but I don't think so. Waterman's ``characteristics''

are painfully familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the loudly proclaimed humanisticism of

teachertraining. That's exactly the sort of thing they all say, and that they all champion as our only

protection against the unbridled ruthlessness of intellectual discipline, also known as ``excellence narrowly

Excellence broadly defined, however, is a mild master. It can be anything you like. And when broadly

defined excellence is understood as the goal of a pious and humanisticist education, any sanctimonious

amateur can fancy himself a teacher of anything at all. In the teacher academies this permits some startling

but not at all uncommon courses, in which ``appreciation'' is the aim, in despite of knowledge.

A splendid example of the hokum thus generated came in the mail one day to the editorial offices of The

Underground Grammarian. It was a mimeographed sheet, headed by one of those silly smiling faces and

announcing a course in the Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction at the University of

Tennessee. The course, ``The Existential Student,'' was for seniors and graduate students, and the ``teacher,''

who billed himself as ``Seminar Coordinator,'' was a certain Anand Kumar Malik. His powers must be

OBJECTIVES: Aim is to introduce the students in an informal situation to the major themes

in existentialism and humanism; to make them aware of their basic inner freedom to lead an

authentic life, to sing their own song, to dance their way through life, to relate themselves to

themselves through selfunderstanding, to relate themselves to others through nonego love,

to accept their complete academic responsibility to their own growth and to enrich their own

educational curriculum and life experiences. All in harmony with their basic responsibilities

There follows a description of the intended ``Learning Experiences,'' on which I would like to comment, but

cannot. My power of language is just not sufficient. Fortunately, however, a letter was enclosed with the

announcement. It was printed in its entirety in The Underground Grammarian thus:

Dear Underground, I have been reading and studying you magazine for sometime and I truly

do enjoy reading it. The onliest thing is, is that it is hard to study out what it means. A least

always. I don't mean the Latin or whatever it is in the ``headlines'' which I can skip them

anyway but it seems to me that folks up North make things out harder than they have to be

some time and you could learn from us as well. You take Philosophy, as any one would call

it a hard ``subject'' (but not in Knoxville) because you would want to read about the material

dialects and the rational. Still, I think you would very seriously do it but end up finally with

book learning that is alright in its place, however, life must go on as they say. You will see

from the ``enclosed'' that Philosophy does not have to be hard, and not even Existentialism

that is the hardest known Philosophy. It tells about Anand Kumar Malik and his course he is

teaching called The Existential Student, and very well put by the ``headline.'' ``You are

hereby invited to become no one but yourself.'' It gives a good feeling and the smiling face

picture really gets the message across. Any one who could get themselves down to the

and Humanism thrown in as the flyer says in only four (4) weeks in the dept. of Education,

and that's what it is about after all. If I may give some quotes from the flier you will see that

school can be fun, when the students learn ``to sing their own song'' and ``to dance their way

through life.'' It gives some selected writings too, and as I said there is not a thing wrong with

book learning, but I have to admit that I don't recognize the names, except Elizabeth Lacey

tells me that a friend of hers has a whole book of Philosophy by that Mr. Kahlil Gibran, or

probably Prof. Gibran, and she says that he is ``very good.'' ( Exact quote!) They will have

existential music and existential art slides, and ``making your own existential painting.'' Best

of all is they will ``relate themselves to themselves through selfunderstanding'' and that

makes good sense if you ask me in my humble opinion. Maybe you shouldn't think school

should be all that hard as you seem to think some times, because here is Mr. Malik whose not

only an education teacher but he can teach Existentialism too, and he even lets the students

figure up their grades so there won't be all that worry about flunking (failing.) Now that is the

whole difference right there between the teachers and the others, and I bet you you won't find

any cheerful smiling face picture drawn up at the top of any fancy medical school flyer. You

take doctors and lawyers and even I hope you don't mind my saying so some of your college

professors and you will find there is more than just one stuffed shirt between them. That is

because all those ``subjects'' they study they make them so serious as though somebody's or

other life depended on it. Life isn't all a rose colored glass, you know, and it is good to have

faith that our school teachers can learn Existentialism and dance through it with a song in

their heart nevertheless. I know you hate mistakes, so I looked up the hard words.

To that breathtaking commentary I can add only a few trivial footnotes: The writers whose ``existential

themes'' are to be studied in four weeks are eighteen in number and range from Kierkegaard to Susan Polis

Schutz, and include Carlos Castaneda as well as that celebrated existentialist, Kahlil Gibran. The students,

who will, of course, determine their own grades, even as they sing their own songs and dance their own ways,

will also keep ``a small diary of...brief reactions to some existential ideas.'' Small. Brief. Some. And

naturally, reactions. Knowledge is not at issue. Each student is promised ``an annotated bibliography on

existentialism and humanism (for...continuous selfdevelopment after the seminar is over.)'' Continuous

selfdevelopment. As to how (or whether) existentialism and humanism are distinguished I cannot say.

The ordinary citizen, contemplating such a juvenile parody of scholarship, is inclined to protect his sanity by

assuming that such a course is a freakish anomaly. That, alas, cannot be so. This instructor, after all, is not an

independent entrepreneur peddling selfhelp and uplift down at the Community Center on Tuesday evenings

from seven to nine. This course is offered with the approval and connivance of his colleagues and

coconspirators in that Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction and the entire administrative

apparatus of the University of Tennessee. And that means, dear citizen, that not one of all those professors,

committee members, chairmen, deans, vicepresidents, and who can say how many other functionaries,

probably including legislative committees and the governor himself, had either enough knowledge or concern

It would probably be a mistake to assume that the students enrolled in such a course were taken in by it,

although there will be a few in any teachertraining program slow and gullible enough to mistake a small

diary of brief reactions for the work of the mind. Students take those courses precisely because they are silly

and easy, and you would do the same. Those credits are worth money. And on the other side of the

transaction, the existence of such a course is also worth money and professional respectability, and job

security to the one who teaches it and the system that permits it. That makes me suspicious. Although I

think that I can understand why those seniors and graduate students, in search of certificates and raises, might

gladly take courses like ``The Existential Student,'' I find it less easy to be tolerant of those who teach and

sponsor them and of what can only be called the corporate complicity of the entire system of public education

Furthermore, it is discouraging to notice that the graduates of our teachers' colleges do not, as you might

think, all forswear the nonsense to which they have been subjected once they have their certificates in hand.

Or, if they do, they are remarkably secretive about it. In the kingdom of educationism, outspoken dissidents

are rare. This is because those few who do dissent and shake off the childish humanisticism of their education

courses have good reason to know that nothing can be done about anything. But it must also be because there

are in any teachers' college enough of the slow and gullible to form a permanent population of committed

humanisticists who will never change. I conclude that this must be so, for there is no other way to account for

the existence and growing numbers of institutions like the Connecticut Teachers' Center for Humanistic

The center cannot hold, you say? Poo. Come with us now, up some tranquil New England waterway leading

to the uttermost ends of the earth and into the heart of an immense darkness. There, we will come at last to

the Connecticut Teachers' Center for Humanistic Education, and it's holding very well indeed, thank you.

Dark humanistic shapes we will make out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the

forest, and, chief among them, brooding over some inscrutable purpose, Emily, the Assistant Director. All we

know of her is what we read in Centering, the Center's little newsletter. Here it is sic:

Emily has experience training in the areas of Bioenergetics, Psychosynthesis, Gestalt

Therapy, Arica Psychocalesthenics, Yoga and Tai Chi. Emily has been a consultant to

Connecticut Public Schools...in selfawareness training, confluent education, and

organization development...Emily is committed to working with individuals wholistically

facilitating the integration of their emotional, intellectual, physical and transpersonal aspects.

In the hush that falls suddenly upon the whole (or ``hole,'') sorrowful land, do remember that Emily is only

the Assistant Director. What must he be, who can direct the labors of such an assistant? And whose heads are

those, their transpersonal aspects hideously integrated on selfawareness training poles, that fence these

We are lost, lost in an area. Is it the area of Psychosynthesis or the area of Tai Chi? Could we be in the

neighborhood of Bioenergetics or even in the immediate environs of Arica Psychocalesthenics? Who knows?

They look so much alike. That's why we all need Assistant Directors, real professionals of education, with

rigorous ``experience training'' in areas. Oh, what a mistake we made studying junk like geography when

what we ought to have had was experience training somewhere in the areaawareness area. Now we just can't

seem to facilitate the integration of any of our aspects. The horror, the horror.

We have, of course, no idea at all of what teachers do in a teachers' center, and we obviously never will, for

the gravity of the Black Whole of Connecticut is so enormous that no light escapes. We can only guess,

therefore, that teachers hie themselves there to have their Gestalten therapized in the lotus position,

performing the while, quietly within the psyche, synthesizing calesthenics, whatever those may be,

interspersed with an occasional aspectintegrating and bigenergizing round of Tai Chi, perhaps a confluent

That's all we can tell you. Like that other cryptic screed, our source gave ``no practical hints to interpret [or

even to understand] the magic current of its phrases...unless a kind of note...scrawled evidently much later,

may be regarded as the exposition of a method,'' or, at least, of a course in methodology. ``It was very simple,

and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed...luminous and terrifying, like a

flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Excruciate the brats!' '' And that, of course, would explain everything.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it isn't out of cynicism but something worse that students in teachers' colleges take

courses in selfrelating through life experiences. Maybe it's folly. Maybe stupidity. Maybe it's just the

paralysis of the mind that may well befall anyone who has taken enough of such courses and listened to such

cant and endured, bored and thus uncritical, the foolish circular arguments, generalizations, and non sequiturs

of educationistic vaporizing. The teachers who frequent that Connecticut Teachers' Center for Humanistic

Education, and there must be some, perhaps many, go there of their own free will. They must

want Psychosynthesis and Tai Chi. They must want to be worked with ``wholistically'' in the cause of the

facilitation of the integration of their aspects. And the educationist bureaucrats who take our money for the

support of the Connecticut Teachers' Center for Humanistic Education must want the teachers to want such

things. And the schools must have wanted to consult with Emily, again at our expense, on selfawareness

training and organization development. In a world where all of that is not only possible but even usual,

But it is precisely in such a climate, where selfhelp facilitations and puerile popularizations can blossom,

that the pseudoscience and pseudoreligion of educationism can spread and flourish. In a climate of hard

knowledge and rational analysis such flamboyant weeds would wither and die in a season. But that won't

happen. To their unique blend of the illogical and the sentimental, the educationists have added the

techniques of a man to whom they owe far more than they do to Horace Mann, or John Dewey, or even

Wundt, poor Wundt. The guiding spirit of the methods of educationism, if not the ideology, is, of course,

Peter's wellknown Principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew nothing at all about schools. In

schools it just isn't true that the people who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves,

at last and forever, in the jobs they can't do. This is because the most difficult and demanding jobs in

education are what industry calls ``entrylevel positions,'' teaching in classrooms. That's the bottom rung of

the school ladder, and there are many people who just can't do that work. It isn't, in itself, very difficult work;

all it takes is intelligence, diligence, talent, and a little bit of luck. Those who have some of the first three,

however, often run clean out of the fourth when they start taking education courses and start worrying more

about enhancing their personological variables than about collecting more knowledge. (Furthermore, teaching

obviously has to be done in a school, and many of our schools, after decades of eschewing ``mere

information'' in the cause of ``worthy citizenship,'' have turned into lawless encampments of armed barbarians

where no one can teach and no one can learn.) Those who are short on intelligence, diligence, and talent,

however, find their luck much improved by the fact that the teachers' colleges are designed for just such

Thus, partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and partly because so many are born to

incompetence, in every faculty there will be people who just can't handle the entrylevel position. In

industry, or even in a fastfood restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don't do that kind of thing in

the schools, especially since public school teaching is more and more used by government as a jobs program

for the less able. In the schools, those who cannot do the work at the lowest rank are simply promoted into

higher ranks. Weirdly enough, given the nature of the educational enterprise, this makes perfect sense.

In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true that higher rank and higher pay do go along

with harder work. In the schools, where there is no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly the

opposite is true. In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly splendid school in which there are only

teachers and one clever and industrious handyman who can also type. On the other hand, think for a moment

about the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving, a school made up almost

entirely of administrators and their own ``support services.'' (They usually call them that.) In such a school

we would see clearly what we now can see only darkly, through the frosted glass of governmental mandate

and educationistic dogma: that almost all of the work done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so

that there may be more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in schools is

intended not to do work, as a physicist would use the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of

It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated jargon, superbly suited to the darkening

of logic and the interminable belaboring of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic

administrator needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn't need doing. If you want

to rise in the school business, you have to master the lingo. This is another reason why good teachers don't

become principals and superintendents: The very attributes that make them good teachers also make it

impossible for them to talk about experiential remediation enhancement strategies with straight faces. And if

there is one attribute a principal or superintendent needs, it's a perfectly straight face. You have to believe.

When those who can't teach want to improve themselves by becoming supervisors of those who can teach,

they must go through, once again, the strait gate of the teachers' college. Outside of that church, there is no

salvation. They must return, perhaps on Monday and Thursday evenings, to the study, if that's the word, of

such arcana as Curriculum Development and Supervision, Career and Guidance Counseling, and Educational

Administration/Management. Since there is little to be learned about such matters, the courses are easy,

requiring mostly the ability to tolerate ponderous recitations of the trivial and obvious and a mind just weak

enough to fall without a struggle into an habitual inanity in language. These are the very proclivities that have

made the poorer teachers what they are, so there is no shortage of suitable candidates for graduate study in

the schools of education. While the steady stream of aspirants to lofty (nonteaching) rank assures perpetual

public funding for the teachers' colleges and pleasant, permanent employment for professors of education, it

has some even more unhappy consequences. It assures that the antiintellectual climate of the public high

schools will prevail in the colleges and universities as well. Except for the uncharacteristically depraved,

professors of chemistry or history, or of any traditional discipline with a concrete and growing body of

knowledge, simply don't want to do the boring and empty work of administration. They gladly leave that to

the educationists and other nonacademic arrivistes in higher education, who gladly take it. Thus it comes to

pass that in most of our colleges and universities policy decisions about academic matters are regularly made

by direct descendants of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, to whom

intellectual discipline and mere information are pesky impediments to worthy ethical character and right

The work of school administration, therefore, usually has two typical attributes: Because it must justify the

very existence of school administration, it must seem timeconsuming and difficult. Because it is an

instrument of educationistic ideology, it must be ``humanistic'' and ``democratic,'' as the educationists

understand those terms, which is to say emotional and collective rather than coldly knowledgeable and

authoritarian. You can recognize in the typical administrative committee, therefore, a longtrouser version of

the social studies class envisioned in Cardinal Principles, where it is imagined that ignorant but rightfeeling

Here, from the pages of The Underground Grammarian, is an example of how the administrative work of an

Glassboro has so many lowranking, junior administrators that it's hard to find them useful work. We don't

George Wildman and Robert Harris are cochairmen of the Task Force on Recruitment, Retention, and

Image. We don't know how they produce their prose whether by one as told to the other or by taking turns

In the first two sessions of the Task Force, the group explored the task facing them.

Discussion ensued during these sessions concerning the goals and objectives to be

accomplished. The Committee began the task of gathering supporting data by virtue of

reports supplied by the offices of Admissions, Counseling, and the Registrar. Considerable

time was spent attempting to define terminology as a basis for functioning, and much thought

was given in an attempt to identify some of the major concerns which the Task Force would

The first, second, and fourth sentences of that paragraph say the same thing, although the fourth does add that

bit about defining ``terminology [terms?] as a basis for functioning.'' The third sentence actually has its own

thing to say, but only that they ``began the task of gathering.'' Does that mean that they began gathering or

that they began getting ready to gather? This sentence also uses ``by virtue of'' as though it meant ``from.''

Never ask a junior administrator to say something straight out. He'd rather be knocked flat in an airport by O.

Since the combined salaries of the twenty members of the Task Force must be more than half a million

dollars a year we're glad to report that their labor has had some results. As early as their second meeting, they

divided themselves into three ``interestarea subcommittees'' (shouldn't that be subTask Forces or Task

Now you would think that any fool could define recruitment, retention, and even image, although why that

should be necessary is not clear. We have to guess that many members of the Task Force were unacquainted

Discussion ensued by virtue of input, and tasks were explored. Thought was given in an attempt, and time

By the next meeting, each ``interestarea'' subcommittee had defined ``its term.'' Here's what they found

recruitment: the institution's philosophy and procedures by which we attempt to attract

retention: the ability of the college to hold students who are pursuing a degree program

The language of these administrators is symbolic, as language always is, although in this case not consciously

symbolic. They do on the page exactly what they do in their jobs. They say over and over again a thing that

needs no saying in the first place. They set themselves, at public expense, to the silly task of defining, in

groups no less, terms (or, as they prefer, terminology) that need no defining. If their labors were successful,

they would learn at great expense of time and money what any thoughtful person could have told them at

their first meeting, and they will inevitably propose the obvious. They will urge more recruitment and

It is important for the ordinary citizen to realize that such committees, through whose agency almost

everything is done in Academe, are not composed entirely of administrators. There will always be some

members who are only incipient administrators making themselves useful and noteworthy, some junior

professors bucking for promotion and not at all reluctant to be parties to a lengthy and arduous reinvention of

the wheel, and other faculty members somewhat less than passionately devoted to their chosen disciplines.

The latter, of course, are usually from an education department, where a passionate devotion to discipline is

precluded not only by the questionable nature and content of what is taught but by the traditional animosity to

If you can assemble enough such people and assign them an especially ambiguous errand, neither of which is

at all difficult in a school, you can easily devise an educationistic enterprise that can go on, literally, forever:

Early in the Fall, the Needs Assessment Task Force was asked to study the process of

Academic Planning as it presently exists at Southwest Texas State University and determine

whether we should implement a different process. (From the works of Joseph Caputo, VP for

As the time for dinner approaches, the standard American amateur looks in the refrigerator. He notices some

food. He takes some of it out and cooks it. Then he eats it. It's so crude; any savage could do it. Here in

First we establish a committee to consider whether or not there should be any dinner, and, if so, whether or

not it should actually be eaten, and, if again so, where, and when, and by whom. Then we form a

subcommittee to decide what, if anything, to cook, and how. Now we discover that we need a study group to

consider whether or not dinnerplanning is, in fact, all that simple, and to establish its parameters and to

explore the implications of fiscal, curricular, and societal restraints that may be perceived as existing. Or

maybe not. But the study group cannot do its work until we have definitive findings from the Needs

Assessment Task Force, which is ``to study the process of Academic Planning as it presently exists...and

The Needs Assessment Task Force down at Southwest Texas State University, where the squirrels also rush

An Academic Planning Model must involve a futures planning component. Goals should be

set for some time in the future. These goals should be translated into shorterterm objectives

for which the degree of detail and concreteness varies inversely with the lead time. There

should also be reasonable suspense dates for implementation of plans and a definitive

methodology for evaluation and feedback. The interfacing of longterm...and shortterm

So, you thought that only a herd of nerds would set themselves to wondering whether or not to plan how to

plan, eh? No siree! It takes some of the sharpest thinkers in Academe to discover and announce that plans are

They're even smart enough to call for the involvement of a component, which would never occur to an

ordinary human being, and a definitive methodology, where any simpleminded taxpayer would have settled

That's not all, of course. The Task Forcers also urge ``update features,'' prudently left unspecified so that yet

another task can be forced on yet another task force, and warn against the ``counterproductive hurdle,'' the

worst kind. One of their main conclusions, solemnly pronounced, probably after much deliberation and

searching of heart, is that an Academic Planning Model (they always capitalize it) should actually work, or,

as they put it, ``be functional.'' They further opine, cutting right to the bone, that any plan that will work, will

in fact work: ``Any Academic Planning Model to be considered...would positively impact [wham!] our

decisionmaking process to the extent that it accomplishes its designed purpose.''

To proclaim the obvious in language that is odious is, of course, the regular practice of the educationists, who

love to serve on task forces (they put that kind of stuff in their resumes and grant applications), and have no

moral or intellectual objections to writing at length about nothing. However, at least one member of this task

force was not an educationist, but an agent provocateur and a subtle ironist. On his backward colleagues he

foisted the one sentence that says it all: ``An Academic Planning process must not become viewed by the

participants as activity to be finished so that they may return to the real business of the university.''

Then again, to be sure, the revelation of that last sentence may have been due simply to ineptitude. But the

revelation is a true one, for, as far as the educationist is concerned, ``the real business of the university'' is not

For years, I have been looking around for the key, the master metaphor, the one striking analogy that would

clarify and dramatize the nature of our schools. They are, of course, something like the asylum where the

inmates have taken over, but that doesn't do the whole job. They are more like some island nation in which

the traditional, mild, but inefficient governance once exercised by a genteel but effete and distracted

aristocracy has been taken over, without any bloodshed at all, by bands of persistent pygmies from the

unexplored interior. The less than worldly aristocrats, far more interested in watching for comets and

collecting Lepidoptera than in zoning rules and customs control, were not displeased to accede when the

pygmies drifted in and offered to do all the hard work. It seemed such a good idea at the time, but by now the

pygmies are in charge of everything, and the bemused aristocrats, whose ancestral estates have been

converted to miniature golf courses, find that they are sipping their soup out of very small spoons.

But that metaphor isn't enough either, for it does not provide a place for the only slightly rationalized

vengefulness that characterizes the educationists' almost complete governance of what was once an academic

and intellectual confederation of semiautonomous principalities. We might do better to think of Bolsheviks in

the Winter Palace, or the moneychangers in the temple who have it in mind not only to do a flourishing

business but to preach the doctrine as well, thus ensuring that business will always flourish. I think that latter

analogy especially good, but not very entertaining. The former, however, while even less entertaining, may

be even better, for educationism is in fact an ideological collectivism devoted to social change through

Perhaps the best metaphor, although unfortunately the nastiest, is that of racism. If we could divide the world

of schools roughly, and it would be very roughly at best, into two ``races,'' the academicians and the

educationists, we would find some useful analogies. The educationists, although long released from slavery,

have indubitably been treated like secondclass citizens and kept in the ghettos. From the point of view of the

academicians, the department of education, where not even the educationists have been able to identify a

concrete body of knowledge out of which to make a ``subject,'' is as much a ghetto as any local public school.

The educationists, although they eagerly do the scutwork of administration, have never been admitted into the

society of the ``learned,'' and they have had to make their own subsociety complete with its own subPhi

Beta Kappa and countless subjournals of subscholarship. (It is an interesting irony that the learned journals

of literary criticism, for example, are often as pretentiously impenetrable as anything you can find in any one

of those apparently countless journals of educationistic research into perceived personological variables, but

the diction is more noble and the verbs almost always agree with the subjects.) In faculty dining rooms all

over the country, historians and biologists and professors of Renaissance literature happily lunch together, but

the educationists usually keep to themselves. The very degrees that educationists award one another are held

to be inferior to the degrees that the academicians award one another. Although the traditional ``original

contribution to scholarship'' expected of the academic doctoral dissertation is often ludicrously picayune, the

dissertation in education, often nothing more than a report on the results of some questionnaire, ordinarily

deals with either the obvious, like the conclusion that children who want to learn will learn more than those

who don't; or the trivial, like the mechanics of pencil distribution; or the utterly ineffable, like the perceived

personological existential variables. Furthermore, the doctorate in education almost never requires that signal

cachet of the learned scholar, competence in foreign languages. This often cited distinction is enough by itself

to ``prove'' to the academicians the innate inferiority of the race of educationists.

The prejudice is real, and the educationists, naturally, resent it. Much of what they do, therefore, can be

understood as an expectably hostile thirst for revenge. Cardinal Principles is only superficially a plan for

secondary education; it is essentially a Summa contra gentiles, a stickittotheintellectuals manifesto. The

Consider, for example, the proposition that a disciplined academic study of literature, whatever that might

mean, precludes ``right emotional response.'' On the one hand, that shows the ``humane'' intention to provide

students with the ``best'' that literature has to offer, certain feelings, presumably good to have. It asserts, and

who would deny, that the pity and terror of tragedy will strike even those who are utterly ignorant of the

textual variants, although it also provides the possibility that pity or terror might not be included among the

``right'' emotional responses. On the other hand, it makes clear that the ``teachers'' of literature in the

secondary schools can do their jobs without having to go through all that disciplined scholarship by which

those lofty academicians make their livings. From that notion it is not far to the next, to wit, that the

academicians are in fact preventing right emotional response with their footnotes and critical editions and

that the only path to right emotional response is the deliberate neglect of such things. With the next step we

can see that ignorance is better than knowledge, an idea singularly attractive to those who have not read any

The dream of putting down the scornful mighty from their chairs also informs another cardinal tenet of

educationism: the notion widely held in the teacher academies that all a teacher needs is training in how to

teach, with which he can teach anything at all, perhaps with a little boning up. Thus it is that the high school

social studies teacher, already inoculated against the dehumanizing effects of the ``mere information''

associated with the disciplined study of history, can readily be retreaded into a teacher of English. After all,

we all speak English, don't we? In any case, what is important is not what a teacher knows but how he relates

to the students. Such ideas are impossible where academic subjects are held important in themselves, but

where they are seen only as the devices by which to generate feelings it is inevitable that existentialism (

and humanism, in the same package deal) boils down to singing your own song and dancing your way

Such Jackofalltradesism, although long a regular practice in the public schools, is a little harder to get

away with in colleges and universities. But just a little. Anand Kumar Malik, you must have noticed, seems

to have had no trouble at all in setting up shop as a teacher of philosophy and even of painting at the same

time. Here we can see the mighty consequences of the fact that educationists are eager to serve on committees

and to undertake the dull labors of administration. Without powerful coconspirators in the superstructure at

the University of Tennessee, Malik would have been laughed off the campus and sent to sing and dance for a

It probably isn't exactly true that we become what we hate. It seems more likely that we become a parody of

what we hate. Certainly the oppressed and scorned educationists, driven in part by oppression and scorn to

denigrate the very intellectual powers they are said to lack, are pathetically eager nevertheless to lay claim to

those powers for themselves, and also to the expertise that such powers can provide. Thus they put

themselves forth aswell, not exactly professors of philosophy, but at least as easy professors of easy

philosophy. Students like that, of course, but it makes professors of philosophy glum.

Given the principle that any subject matter is a useful device for the generation of socially desirable feeling,

and given also the fact that policymaking in colleges and universities has been conceded to the educationists

who proclaim that given principle, it follows that ``higher'' education will have its analogues of the phys. ed.

teacher who takes over when the biology teacher gets pregnant, of course. But it also follows, even more

ominously, that there is really no need for a biology teacher in the first place. And in college, where the

biology teacher is firmly entrenched in tradition and tenure, it further follows that the study of biology itself

might just as well be replaced with something else, something that can be ``taught'' by one who knows little

of biology but who has been trained as a teacher and whose eye is on not the biology itself but on whatever

worthy attitudes that may, or should, arise from the study of biology. Since those attitudes are the worth of

the study, why bother with the study when one can jump right into the attitudes?

Here is an example of exactly such a leap of faith, which legitimizes a startling educationistic Anschluss of a

The Department of Foundations of Education has proposed a workshop in ``intercultural education'' to tack

three more hours onto a course in the same thing, if that is a thing. From reading the proposal, we guess that

both course and workshop call for lots of ``relating'' and ``interacting,'' and, naturally, ``problemsolving,''

with ``foci on direct field experience'' and ``working on real school or/and community problems.'' (That sure

beats indirect field experience and fake problems; but these folk are into ``professional'' matters, not amateur

dabbling like math or history.) As far as we can tell, there will be no study of any identifiable body of

knowledge, just rapping, preferably with someone who says Mama mia! now and then.

This workshop is not expected to have results; it anticipates ``outcomes,'' outcomes of some ``nature.'' One

of the nature of...development of ability to anticipate factors likely to influence proposals for

What this means, of course, is that they hope the student will be informed, rational, and prudent. So hope we

all; but to suggest that there are forms of rationality and prudence specifically germane to ``intercultural

relations'' is fatuous. To suggest further that someone knows how to instill those virtues is patently absurd, if

not mendacious. Who is rational and prudent needs no workshop to teach him how to be rational and prudent

about Bulgarians any more than a man who can find the diameter of circle needs to be schooled in the

methodology of finding the diameter of a pizza; and who is neither prudent nor rational will scarcely be

helped through chatting with Bulgarians. Furthermore, who would become knowledgeable about Bulgarians

[d]evelopment of ability to apply selected tools or procedures for analyzing, assessing, and

And how will students show that they have (get? interact with? what?) these outcomes? The proposal looks

for ``taped evidence of interaction with other cultures'' (they probably mean a person from another culture),

``oral presentations that exemplify good intercultural education practices,'' ``peer performance assessments,''

``records of participation'' (in what, would you guess?), and even ``practical written tools'' (try to figure

We must put aside small questions (how, for instance, is a good intercultural education practice different

from other good education practices?) to explore the central question: What, exactly, is the subject matter

here? Is it information about diverse cultures? That is availableinescapable, in factin the study of

anthropology, art, economics, geography, history, language, literature, philosophy, religion, and many other

traditional disciplines. Is this the study of the collisions of cultures and their effects upon one another? Ditto.

The proposers cannot intend either of the first two, for if they do, there is no need to propose anything. Let's

hope they don't mean that third possibility. There must be some limits to what they can teach.

If intercultural education is in truth some new subject matter not yet widely known, it must have been

described somewhere in clear English and with concrete reference to things in the real world. We deserve to

hear such a description, since the language of the proposal tells us little (that's often the aim of this kind of

We must in fairness say that the proposal has been given comprehensive, penetrating scrutiny and analysis by

the very Dean of Professional Studies, so it seems only honest to print her commentary in full:

The background of that proposal is instructive: In the State of New Jersey, as in many other states, students in

teachertraining programs are required to have some instruction in what is generally called the

``appreciation'' of other cultures. This seems to be all the more important as the public schools, especially in

the cities, fill up with children of recently arrived immigrants from many different lands. I say that it ``seems''

important, because I'm not sure that it is really necessary to ``appreciate'' Bulgarian culture, whatever that

means, in order to teach arithmetic to children whose parents came from Bulgaria, although it would

obviously do a math teacher no harm to have knowledge about Bulgarian culture. But the mandate, in any

case, is not for knowledge. The incipient teacher is to appreciate other cultures so that he can relate and

Here we see again we see it everywhere the shadow of Cardinal Principles. Knowledge, generally a

matter of mere information, is untrustworthy as a generator of right response, so that intercultural

appreciation can be taught through learning some folk dances and sampling the traditional cookies of many

lands. But it must be taught, for those who award teaching certificates require it. They require it because their

cousins in the teacher academies, whose enrollments are falling, need some more required courses with which

to justify their continued employment. In the same cause, and with the great weight of the tradition of

Cardinal Principles, the teachertrainers must hold that such academic studies as anthropology, history,

literature, or language can not provide a worthy appreciation of other cultures. Since the teachertrainers, and

the certifiers, and the managers and bureaucrats of entire systems of state education are all from the same

litter, and since legislators all have more important things than education to think about, especially in New

Jersey, where someone has to pay attention to casinos, basic minimum intercultural appreciation speedily

becomes the law of the land. And the professors of education who get to ``teach'' it have assured their

continued employment and proved yet again that a teacher can teach anything, anything at all.

Educationists can say that, of course, only when ``anything'' means ``anything that should be taught,'' in the

system of worthiness enunciated in Cardinal Principles, and when ``taught'' means ``produced as a response

to stimulus,'' as defined in the methodology of behavior modification. You will notice that the

statesupported monopoly in intercultural education does not concede that a professor of anthropology can

teach ``the appreciation of other cultures.'' Far from it, he is all too likely to teach mere information, which

may or may not lead to what should be taught, appreciation, the worthy response.

That's why the word ``appreciation'' is so important both in Cardinal Principles and in all educationistic

theorizing thereafter. First, it sounds good. Who can be against it? More important, it is a code word with

which to indicate, without having to be concrete and specific, any or all of the ``worthy'' attributes that we

may expect as the student outcomes of anything that is done in school, however trivial or trendy. In one

sense, ``appreciation'' is familiar to anyone who has been through ``Music Appreciation,'' a course that

usually does not require any study or knowledge of harmony, counterpoint, or even the classification of

elementary forms, although it often does provide uplifting or entertaining vignettes from the lives of

composers. In another and far more important sense, the meaning of ``appreciation'' is what is embedded in

the notion that when we have learned some Bulgarian folk dances we will better ``appreciate'' Bulgarian

culture, and that that will be good. ``Appreciation'' seems to be used to suggest an amiable tolerance of that

which someone thinks we ought to tolerate but probably wouldn't if we were left alone.

A student outcome of the order of appreciation has another tremendous value in an antiintellectual

education: No one can measure it. No one can measure ``right emotional response'' or ``worthy ethical

character'' either. The value of such student outcomes is in fact double. They make it impossible to check up

on the effectiveness of a curriculum, and they permit the bogus ``research'' of educationistic theorizing, in

which such things as existentiality and commitment to the goodness of man at his core are put forth as

measurable quantities. Who is to say, after all, exactly which students, and with what ardor, are indeed

singing their own songs and dancing their ways through life after two weeks of harmony and smallgroup

discussions at the University of Tennessee? Unfortunately, someone probably will undertake to do just that,

perhaps the very chappie who told us all about the ``values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy pertinent to

The Student Outcomes Principle (it seems to deserve capitals) is the Prime Mover of American education. It

is our equivalent of the Death of God, after which everything is permitted. It arises inevitably from the

intersection of that sentimental humanisticism that has made the schools into virtuenurseries where guards

patrol the corridors, and the iron law of behavior modification that has made them laboratories where all the

experiments fail. But that's all right. As schools, and consequently the rest of society, become more anarchic,

the educationists can point to an ever greater need for the inculcation of values, and every failed experiment

But the Student Outcomes Principle has brought us even worse abominations than the fads and gimmicks that

have been tripping over each other's heels for the last sixty years. Since the proponents of that principle have

become the makers of policy at all levels of public education, they have been able to refashion even the most

traditional courses of study into exercises in the inculcation of right emotional response and the clarification

of values. Such was proposed, of course, in Cardinal Principles and in some cases easily effected by the

ouster of history for the sake of social studies, for instance, in which the especially civic virtues, whatever

they happen to be at any given time, are fostered by idle gossip about current events and some illinformed

The process, however, has only begun when social studies are implanted in the secondary public schools.

Imagine what happens thereafter: At first, of course, the history teachers must be the social studies teachers.

The less committed they are to the traditional study of history, the more likely they are to welcome this

opportunity to escape the tyranny of mere information and develop instead an ``appreciation and...a clear

conception of right relations.'' History itself now becomes nothing more than a social study, and by no means

primus inter pares but rather an aging and demanding relative less and less acceptable in a rapidly growing

family of trendy issues. The next generation of social studies teachers cannot be students of history, or

certainly not merely students of history. This means that whatever is to be done in the high schools in the

name of social studies must also be done in the teachers' colleges where the social studies teachers are to

learn their trade. The professors of such things as history and economics, therefore, have to be reeducated.

They must welcome into partnership the sociologists, who are cousins to the educationists both in language

and ideology, and learn to appreciate the priority of values over mere information. This is done in the name of

``meeting the needs of the students,'' which is another way of expressing the Student Outcomes Principle, and

which can have any practical effect you please depending only on the ``needs'' chosen.

Imagine that you are a bright young history scholar who has become an instructor in a college where there is

a school of teacher education. After a year or two of teaching the basic freshman course in Western

Civilization, which is already a social studies course, devoted to a little bit of everything and anything that

probably ought to be appreciated, you discover that you would like to spend more time in teaching about the

Renaissance in Italy, a body of knowledge in which you are especially well informed. Since the history

department is small and offers no course in the Italian Renaissance, you write a description and a syllabus and

send off a course proposal to the curriculum committee, with the blessing of your fellow history professors,

Now your proposal comes before the curriculum committee, where the educationists and wouldbe

administrators are serving with gladness and where the rules and procedures, as well as the ideology, have

long been established by others of their kind. When they look at your proposal, they do not think about the

intrinsic value of the study of the Renaissance in Italy; they ask rather about the projected student outcomes

and the measurable behavioral objectives. They don't really want to hear what you could probably tell them:

that those who study the Italian Renaissance can come to have knowledge. They want to know what kind of

people your students will become, what they will appreciate, and whether they will be able to relate the

Renaissance in Italy to the goals of selffulfillment. In short, they will want to know, although the chances

are good that no single member of the curriculum committee has ever heard of Cardinal Principles, exactly

what it is that makes your course ``worthy'' in spite of its distinctly academic taint.

In response, you can, of course, lie. You can trump up some noble and plausible outcomes and objectives.

That would probably work, for it is standard practice in any case, especially in the courses in education, and

your interlocutors would be receptive to loose talk about appreciation of cultural heritage and the relating of

self to self and others both as groups and individuals. You can say such things about the study of anything or

even about dabbling in anything, cookery or karate, for that matter. But such a maneuver has, for you at least,

two nasty consequences. First, you become either a fool or a liar. You may actually come to believe your

concoctions, in which case you become a fool, but you can escape folly only by knowing yourself a liar, or,

as we in the academic world prefer, a pragmatist. You lie in good cause, naturally, and in the company of all

the other pragmatists who devise student outcomes and behavioral objectives in order to get past the

curriculum committee, but still you lie. Lying and scholarship cannot live together, but Iying and

indoctrination are made for each other. Where scholarship is not practiced for its own sake but only in the

service of doctrine, everybody has to lie or be a fool and your proposed course in Renaissance Italy

must be put forth only as a means to some higher (and socially more acceptable) end than the mere learning

And there is the other nasty consequence. If you do lie and cook up some lovely student outcomes and

behavioral objectives that can justify the study of the Italian Renaissance, you explicitly admit that the higher

end is more important than the means, since the latter can be justified only because of the former. That being

so, your cunningly devised outcomes and objectives, which sound amazingly like the outcomes and

objectives of many other courses, are obviously ends that might be achieved by many other means. Thus,

whatever it is that makes your proposed course ``worthy'' also makes it unnecessary. But that fact doesn't

doom your proposed course, although it may doom you. If you have lied well enough, your course will be

approved, since the continuous multiplication of courses is a profitable practice in any case, because it is now

an admission by a humbled elitist academic that disciplined study is no more than a means to certain student

outcomes. And once you have admitted that, you have become a de facto educationist. If you are willing to

teach the history of the Renaissance in Italy as a way of engendering right appreciation of a cultural heritage

and an exercise in relating self to self and others, then you must admit the academic validity of any other

course, including cookery, that can make the same claims. You must also admit that students might just as

well take cookery as your history course, for the student outcomes are the same. And, worse yet, you may

someday have to admit, since, by your own confession, knowledge, or mere information, is not in fact the

main point of your course, that it could just as well be taught by someone who is not a scholar of the

Renaissance in Italy. And that is why it is that educationists can find permanent work teaching tencentstore

equivalents of anything in the catalog, and, far worse, why onceserious scholars can end up doing the same

It is interesting to notice that there are some studies that are by nature resistant to this process, and even more

interesting to discover that they are the very studies where the failures of public education are most obvious.

No amount of prattle about ``right emotional response'' to literature can for long disguise the fact that students

can't read literature, and worthy appreciation of the logic of mathematics rarely assures the ability to cipher.

The failure of the schools to teach these and other ``fundamental processes'' briefly mentioned and dismissed

in Cardinal Principles is nowadays well known, but we have not yet given enough thought to the reason for

that failure. It is not sufficient, although it is more and more true, to say that the children cannot read and

write and cipher because their teachers cannot read and write and cipher. That just puts the question off one

more step and leaves us to wonder how the teachers came to suffer that disability. The answer is to be found

in that intellectual miasma emitted by the Student Outcomes Principle, which always holds, remember, that

the truly desirable outcomes of any study at all are attitudes or values of some sort and not mere skill or

information. Because they insist on teaching what is unteachable, educationists must denigrate the teaching of

Having seized power from the wicked elitists, the pygmy educationists are always busy stamping out vestiges

of the old regime and its discredited ideals and practices. If you want to make an educationist wince, all you

have to do is cite some ``facts and dates,'' which you could know only as the result of ``rote learning.'' Such

things are all characterized in Cardinal Principles as notorious impediments to the true goals of education.

They are not only elitist but oppressive and antidemocratic as well, and it may even be that a detailed

knowledge of the constitution, for instance, would prevent the proper appreciation of our institutions and their

values. It follows inevitably that those studies that depend heavily on memorization, mere ``rote learning,''

will be given very short shrift indeed in our schools and the same in our teacher academies. Just as the

instructor of Renaissance Italian history forswears himself by proposing anything other than knowledge as

the goal of study, the educationist forswears himself and all that he stands for in permitting the suggestion

that the goal of study is just knowledge. Thus it is that the educationists just don't know what to do with

subjects that cannot, like history or literature, for example, be diluted for the sake of noncognitive student

It is for that reason, in fact, that along with reading and writing and ciphering, another equally ``basic'' study

has fallen out of favor in the schools, and that is the study of foreign languages. We make a virtue of

ignorance and sloth by claiming that a distaste for foreign languages is an American attribute, and while

perhaps lamentable, nevertheless a tribute to the tough independence of our pioneer forebears. Many of those

forebears, however, obviously saw the knowledge of other languages as an elementary part of an education

and nothing more esoteric than literacy itself. Our supposed distaste for foreign language has in fact been

fabricated in the schools. Foreign language study is not mentioned in Cardinal Principles, and it must be

precisely what is excluded when that document, asserting that the language skills of elementary school

children are ``not yet sufficient,'' points out that ``this is particularly true of the mother tongue.'' And foreign

language is, no doubt, one of those ``provisions'' that might be made for ``those having distinctively academic

interests and needs.'' What we think of now as the lack of interest in foreign languages, and the obvious and

unpleasant social and economic effects of that lack, to say nothing of the intellectual, is simply the inevitable

consequence of the antiintellectual educationism that informed Cardinal Principles.

The ideological distortion that can twist the study of literature into the inculcation of right emotional response

just won't work with the study of irregular verbs. And, while any halfbaked teacher of social studies can

peddle appreciation of institutions without any tiresome concern for facts and dates, a teacher of German

actually has to know the prepositions that take the dative. Furthermore, the results of foreign language study,

and thus perhaps even the efficacy of teaching, can be measured concretely and objectively. Either you have

learned those prepositions, and ``by rote'' at that, or you haven't. The Student Outcomes Principle just won't

stretch far enough to cover the study of foreign languages. The only thing left is neglect, which is made all

the more acceptable by the implication, already visible in Cardinal Principles, that a knowledge of French or

God forbid! Greek is an esoteric dabbling in the arcane and nothing more than an antiquated social

adornment suitable only for elitists. (Indeed, something very much like that same judgment is nowadays

made of expertise in ``the mother tongue'' as well, which makes it much easier to apply the Student Outcomes

Principle to the study of reading and writing English, where creativity and selfexpression are held more

Because of the educationistic hegemony in public ``higher'' education, which is more often than not a clumsy

apparatus built around a teachertraining academy, the neglect of foreign language study is just as common

in the colleges as in the high schools. The neglect of foreign language, in fact, is a splendid case in point out

of which to show that whatever happens in the realm of educationism must eventually have an effect not only

As foreign languages are less and less studied in the public schools, fewer and fewer language teachers are

needed, and enrollments decline in foreign language departments in teachers' colleges. As enrollments

decline, the numbers of language professors decline, and some languages disappear entirely from the

curriculum. That's not bad; it's good. It justifies still further neglect in the high schools, where, when the last

old Latin teacher finally retires, the principal can replace her with an auto mechanics teacher since, whatever

the students may want, you can't find a Latin teacher nowadays. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer

students enrolling in foreign language courses even in those colleges that are not teacher academies, and

there, too, faculties will shrink. One of the first to go and you can believe that the pygmies will be damn

glad to get rid of him will be the the only surviving professor of Attic Greek, a notoriously

unreconstructed elitist. He will be replaced by a woman with a rightsounding surname who will teach

remedial English as a second language, and she, just as soon as the doddering professor of Old English packs

it in, will be joined by another of the same, and a new department will be born.

While all of that has been happening, foreign language study has been continually a victim of propaganda.

Because it is not reducible to appreciation, and especially because it requires such antihumanistic behavior as

memorization, it has become widely known as a ``hard'' subject, which is furthermore tainted with elitism. As

a result, high school graduates who go to college are less and less likely to choose a foreign language. Where

such requirements were once common in anything from English to political science, they must be abolished,

lest enrollments shrink, which is the worst thing that can happen in any department. This leads, of course, to

further shrinking in the already embattled language department, but what can we do? Surely it is better for the

few to suffer than the many. But it also leads to one more abandonment of an intellectual standard and one

more submission to the lifeadjustment ideology of Cardinal Principles, and after all, those now

forgotten language requirements have to be replaced to one more lie about student outcomes and

behavioral objectives for a course in the appreciation of foreignlanguagespeaking cultures. And, when we

have finally reached something like our present condition, when the bad name of language study has provided

that few college graduates can even speak English, never mind German or French, and when businesses find

that their memo writers can't understand each other, and when thousands of workers are driven out of jobs by

foreign competition, then we discover that every Japanese salesman speaks fluent English, and we wonder if

To whatever other woes it may bring us, of which diminished ability to compete in international trade is only

one, we must add another step in the general decline of the intellectual enterprise as a whole, which ought to

be the principal business of the schools. This decline, which we can see in science and technology just as well

as in the study of the humanities and languages, must continue as long as the inheritors of Cardinal

Principles continue in all the committees and administrative posts and in all the centers, both public and

private, of educationistic``research.'' Even when they are unaware of it, as indeed they often are, all their

notions and theories and programs have an underlying theme, the theme that is sounded when the ineffective

and thus discontented social studies teacher decides that he would rather go to those evening classes in

educationism and become, instead of a mere teacher, a curriculum facilitator or a guidance counselor or even,

oh joy, an assistant principal. That theme is compounded partly of a distaste for the work of the intellect,

which he has never been able to do with pleasure, and partly of the desire to take some revenge on those who

do seem to find that pleasure and in whose eyes he is a secondclass citizen. And the whole apparatus of

theory and governance established in the shadow of Cardinal Principles and now in complete control of

public education in America makes it not only possible but even easy for the failed social studies teacher to

rise above his more intellectual colleagues and tell them what and how to teach or, even better, find a place in

the eternal task force where needs are assessed within the parameters of planning whether to plan. The

soughtafter jobs in education are the ones that take you as far as possible from the classroom.

That, by itself, would be splendid, for it would take the silliest people in the education business away from

the places where they can do the most harm. Unfortunately, however, all the follies they commit in offices

and meeting rooms and administration buildings and taxsupported agencies are visited not on their own

heads they pay each other to think up new follies but on the heads of the students and teachers whom

they have gladly left behind. Thus it is that, after about sixty years of organized and militant

antiintellectualism in the schools, every disorder in education brings power and profit to those who have

made that disorder, and every problem is given for solution into the hands of the only people who cannot

possibly solve it. The pygmies have been in charge for so long now that we are all cracking our skulls on the

doorways of the public buildings; when we go to them for remedy, they urge on us the value of crawling.

When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and events, it is always useful to ask,

who profits? The problems and disorders in education have become more and more visible in the last few

years, of course, and even the ordinary citizen who happens to have no children in the schools suspects that

something is very wrong, but he will never understand exactly what is wrong until he realizes that all our

educational problems and disorders, none of which are new, although they are more obvious, provide endless

and growing employment for the people who made them. Barely literate children may be suffering and facing

whole lives of deprivation, but consultants and remediationists and professors of reading education and

taxsupported researchers and the editors and publishers of workbooks and handsome packets of materials

are doing very well indeed and looking for even better days to come. It is important to note, too, that all those

profitmakers have not suddenly appeared among us like the wandering bands of looters who can reasonably

be expected to show up after the earthquake. They've been around a long time, diligently turning the wheel,

professing what must be remediated and remediating what has been professed and enlarging in our society

the role of what can only be called the educationistindustrial complex. Anything that may seem to us a

disorder in education is for them a golden opportunityindeed, since they live by tax money, they cannot

make their profits until we do see a disorder in education and thus feel obliged to shell out.

Curiously enough, therefore, it is very much in the interest of the policymakers and theoreticians of public

schooling that there be problems and failures and that we know about them and also, even more curiously,

that any kind of social disorder at all be made the business of the schools. We are encouraged thus to hand

over to the educationists not only the problem of widespread illiteracy but also the notorious disinclination of

the American voter to trouble himself by going to the polls, the fear and hatred of each race for the others,

Sometimes, especially when defending themselves against the charge that they just don't know how to teach

reading and writing and ciphering, the educationists complain that they are unfairly burdened by ``public

demand'' for all sorts of social but nonacademic services and instruction. But, in fact, as any reader of

Cardinal Principles would know, they chose long ago to be social engineers rather than academicians,

claiming, too, that they had chosen the nobler calling. It would be interesting to put them to the test, offering

them the opportunity to give up all that thankless inculcation of right and worthy feelings and habits and stick

to teaching only what can be objectively taught and measured. It would, however, take an enlightened and

thoughtful public to make that offer, and the influence of Cardinal Principles makes an enlightened and

thoughtful public impossible. For all their occasional whimpers, therefore, the educationists are delighted to

take upon themselves the right ordering of society, which is, in any case, even more profitable than the cycle

Now here is an interesting and suggestive fact: The seven cardinal principles can be divided, and were in fact

divided by their propounders, into two categories. In one category, the category that the educationists

themselves have come to call the ``cognitive domain,'' we can put only one principle, the Command of

Fundamental Processes, or Basic Minimum Competence. You will recall that once the principlemakers had

named the Command of Fundamental Processes they could think of little more to say about it. There is a

fascinating truth hidden in that fact: Educationistic research flourishes where it is possible to say a lot about

what is vague and withers where there is little or nothing to say about the concrete. About right emotional

response to literature you can natter forever; about adding numbers to each other, what else is there to do but

teach it? It is partly for that reason, of course, that all the other six principles are in what they now call the

``affective domain,'' where there is no limit to talk. Even vocational education, which you might think would

be very concrete indeed, is to be a vehicle for various worthy responses, ``right relationships toward fellow

workers and society,'' and even that ``clear conception of right relations'' between employer and employee,

the sort of thing thought useful in East Germany, too. And it is perfectly clear, from Cardinal Principles itself

and from educationistic theory and practice thereafter, that educationists are much more interested in the six

other principles than in the Commend of Fundamental Processes. This is so not only because the Six can

generate more verbiage than the One, but because the consequences of schooling in the One are

embarrassingly measurable, while the consequences of schooling in the Six are not only impossible to

measure but usually not even discernible for so many years that, when they do begin to appear, the people

who caused them will all be dead, or at least retired. Thus it is that our educationists are far readier to offer

Consider, as a trendy example, sex. In a sane civilization, to be sure, the citizens would tell the school people

that the sexual attitudes and values of the young were none of the school's damn business and that they ought

to stick to facts, but we don't do it that way. Our schools have been granted the sex concession by virtue of

those cardinal principles that put them in charge of Health, in one context, and Worthy Homemembership,

in another. And then there is also the Worthy Use of Leisure. Thus chartered, the educationists who have long

dabbled in what they call sex education have now, now that unabashed and selfindulgent libertinism has

brought upon us great plagues of divorce, illegitimate births, venereal diseases, and all the social and

economic and personal disorders attendant on such things, come into their kingdom. Sex education is in

And what form does it take? What form can it possibly take when it is devised by the inheritors of the

cardinal principles and the manipulators of stimulus and response? We can, for the sake of convenience

although not in any absolute sense, partition the study of sex, and especially human sexuality, into the

educationists' own categories, the cognitive and the affective. In the one category we can put everything that

we can name and know, all that is objectively demonstrable and subject to reasonable hypothesis and

prediction. In the other category we will have to put the other things, the feelings, attitudes, values, and

responses, worthy or not, that so fascinated the makers of the cardinal principles. Thus, while the latter

considerations can be included with the Six, the former must go with the One. The teaching of certain facts

about sex and sexuality is like the teaching of reading and writing and ciphering. Knowledge about sex is like

any other knowledge, publicly available and publicly verifiable and not variable in accordance with attitudes

or emotional responses, however worthy. It is what educationists call ``subject matter''often ``mere subject

matter''and can easily be learned without the help of any teacher at all. Most of it is in books, to which a

good teacher can, of course, provide useful footnotes in the form of newer knowledge, further description,

and the devising of analogies by which facts can be seen as functions of one another and from which

hypotheses and principles can be formed. The books do exist, and if students had the habit of reading books

there would be no shortage of knowledge about sex. But, because of decades of neglect of the mere subject

matter of those fundamental processes, they do not have the habit of reading books any more than the schools

have the habit of using books as the primary medium of what is called an education.

The books used in the public schools are almost exclusively books designed specifically to be used in the

public schools. This is in keeping with the mandate of Cardinal Principles that every course is ``in need of

extensive reorganization in order that it may contribute more effectively to the objectives outlined herein.'' A

history written by a historian is therefore disqualified unless, by some extraordinary coincidence, it happens

to foster the approved responses and appreciations, and that without dependence on mere information. Even

should that be so, the book probably would have to be rewritten and simplified for students in whom the

Command of Fundamental Processes is meager. A scientist's book on biology, furthermore, would find no

place in the schools because it will not be ``properly focused upon personal and community hygiene [and] the

principles of sanitation, and their applications.'' To find a welcome in the schools, a book must be simply

written``childishly'' might be the better wordand carefully designed to elicit worthy responses, in which

cause mere information can be not only dismissed but even distorted. Because it must meet those standards, a

schoolbook can never be a mere book, as we ordinarily understand the term, a record of the controlled and

thoughtful discourse of a knowledgeable, individual mind. To guard against every possible occasion of

unworthy response and to root out every appearance of mere information displayed in no cause other than

that of mere knowledge requires the diligent labor of a committee in collusion with rightminded consultants

In America Revised (AtlanticLittle, Brown, 1979) by Frances FitzGerald, you will find a full and

demoralizing description of how school history books come to be the perversions that they are. And more

recently there was a littlenoticed but illuminating example of the nature of school ``learning materials'' in a

Hilton Kramer essay in The New York Times on the aftermath of the great Picasso retrospective. The schools

are just as good at teaching the right appreciation of art as they are at teaching worthy sexual attitudes, and

the Picasso show brought forth not only an ``educational'' film in which the painter was portrayed, surely to

the stupefaction of those with some mere information, as an exemplary parent and role model, but also a

teachers' guide in which Picasso is identified as a Fauve playing with bright colors. That's bad enough, but his

imaginary enlistment in fauvism is also said to have been a result of his abandonment of experimentation

with bright colors. And the cover of the teachers' guide bore a large ``Picasso'' signature superimposed on a

lovely photograph of a studio littered with painter's paraphernalia and handsome canvases, certainly

appreciable, but, to anyone having a little knowledge, easily identifiable as the work of Miró.

As bad as this ludicrous display of ignorance is, there is something worse, which Hilton Kramer probably

doesn't suspect any more than you do, and that is that no one in the schools is likely to be troubled or

embarrassed by such a display. Well, so what? Looking at Miró's studio is also a worthy use of leisure, and a

niggling attention to trivial details is exactly the kind of elitism that has always inhibited right emotional

response. So there. It is in the same spirit that educationists can blithely justify the omission, in an American

The making of a schoolbook is analogous to the classroom rap session in which the illinformed are

supposed to reach understanding through the recitation of slogans and notions and by relating to one another.

There are differences, however. For the captive children pretending to formulate ``good judgment as to means

and methods'' for the promotion of some worthy social end and developing ``habits of cordial cooperation in

social undertakings,'' as prescribed in Cardinal Principles, the whole thing is obviously a game. Only a

teacher, or an especially dull or cowed student, could take it seriously. But the committees and task forces

that devise (you cannot say ``write'') those nonbooks used in the school take their work very seriously

indeed. There is profit in it Even prestige. So we can be confident that the ``books,'' and all the other

wondrously diverse and cunningly packaged ``learning materials'' out of which sex education will be taught,

will be acceptable to the ideology of educationism both simplified and tendentious, careless of mere

information and careful in the elicitation of right response in the cause of social adjustment. In other words,

this ``new'' campaign intended to remedy whole hosts of social and personal disorders is different from the

old program of education as social manipulation only in extentand, of course, expense. In both cases, much

As our schools now embark on a massive campaign of sexual rehabilitation for all of American youth, we can

naturally expect that they will give it all they have, which means, of course, that what they don't have they

won't give it. What they do have, all they have, is that earnest devotion to the power of suggestion in the

cause of social and psychological manipulation, and, although their decades of devotion to pious social

adjustment may not be the only cause of our present disorders, they have certainly not prevented them. Now

the necessary concomitant of the social adjustment theory of education is the denigration of intellectual

discipline, for the sake of which the command of fundamental processes was slighted in Cardinal

Principles. Perhaps it is a bit rash, however tempting, to say it is exactly because the schools have been

preaching vapid and sentimental sermons for sixty years that hosts of our newborn children and their mothers

will become permanent wards of the state, but it is not a bit rash to suspect that widespread and crippling

social disorders of all kinds are directly caused by ignorance an thoughtlessness. There is only one remedy

for ignorance an thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and million of American children would today

stand in no need of sex education, or consumer education or intercultural education or any of those fake

We have seen above, for instance, that what is called intercultural education is a shabby dodge by which

students and teachers may be excused from the study of history, anthropology, geography, language,

literature, philosophy, and who can count what else. That all makes for a long and detailed discussion, but an

equivalent and simpler model of the genesis of fake educations can be seen in the trendy and popular

consumer education. We are told that we need consumer education because people are easily duped by

misleading advertising, cannot figure out the perounce price of ketchup, and imagine that they can live on

Twinkies and CocaCola. (When teenaged mothers raise their illegitimate children on Twinkies and

CocaCola, that reinforces the need for sex education and also family living education.) The consumer who

is duped by misleading advertising does not need consumer education; he needs to know how to read. The

housewife who can't figure out what ketchup costs does not need consumer education; she needs to know

how to cipher. And as to those who want to live on Twinkies and CocaCola, frankly that's their own damn

business and we ought to leave them alone, but we might legitimately provide them with knowledge about

biology and chemistry first and then leave them alone. Our problems come not from ignorance and

thoughtlessness about sex any more than from ignorance and thoughtlessness about ketchup, they just come

from ignorance and thoughtlessness, which are preserved and nourished in our schools by those whose profits

Literacy is like the kingdom of Heaven. Those who seek it first will find that other things are added unto

them. Literacy is not the same as Basic Minimum Competence, but, if we provide an emphasis that seems not

to have occurred to the principlemakers, it might indeed be described as the command of the fundamental

processes of word and number. The power of number, to be sure, is not usually included in ``literacy,'' but it

should be, for it is through the ability to command the techniques both of word and number that we can

know and think. There is no other way. To say that we can ``know'' or ``think'' in other ways is to blur those

words into uselessness so that rather than making fine distinctions they can point vaguely in the direction of

any events at all that seem to take place invisibly in the mind. It is exactly that reluctance to seek or even

tolerate fine distinctions that makes the muddled jargon of the educationists what it is, and it is not surprising,

therefore, that those who have neglected literacy should look for some presumed other ways of knowing and

thinking. This makes it possible to excuse or even to justify the failure to teach literacy by claiming that it

doesn't have to be taught anyway. Consider the following, a brief and unfortunately oversimplified piece

It had to happen. Last month we granted the world's first DEd, horroris causa, and now everybody wants

one. Two new candidates present themselves, and they are not some silly educationists but bona

fide associate professors of English out at what they call Eastern New Mexico University.

Laidback folk. Arlene Zekowski, Stanley Berne. Hate apostrophes. Rules. Arbitrary. Down sentences! Up

Or, if you prefer, On right! ``We're professors of English,'' says Berne. (Hm. Shouldn't that be ``Were

professors of English''?) ``We are concerned with the idea of expressing feelings. Arbitrary rules of grammar

prohibit that.'' (Cmon, be patient. Sure he talks that tired old grammar, but only because he has to get to we

elitists.) Hes wright. No, thats not expressing feelings. He rite! Wordsworth feelingexpressing fouledup by

verbsubject agreement. Shakespeare shot downDonne undone by nonrestrictive clauses. Whitman

Zekowski: ``Grammar is elitism. I wish to destroy what is dead, lifeless and snobbish.'' Hows that for boring

from within? ``Arbitrary sentence structure is logical,'' she complains, ``but the brain isn't logical. [How

true!] You don't think in sentences. You think in terms of patterns and images. It's random association.'' And

further: ``Many advertisements don't use sentences or grammar. They use words to create images.'' (Exactly

how they use the words she doesn't say. Could be they sprinklem here and there, collagewise. Cool. Just

think. If Das Kapital had been done like that, we wouldn't have all this damn trouble now. There's nothing

more dangerous than a bunch of logical sentences, but what would you expect from an elitist like Marx?)

If there's one thing we love around here, it's the classing of icons, and we support the idea of expressing

feelings 1,000 percent. That's exactly what we should be teaching these kids. For one thing, it's a cinch, like

playing tennis with the net down, as Frost put it. Another: if we let them in on the secrets of logical sentences

and coherent discourse, the ignorant little bastards will go on to take away some of our cushiest jobs, perhaps

even as associate professors of English, and that will be the end of lifeless elitism as we know it.

However, while we applaud Zekowski and Berne for their cunning subterfuge, and while we admit that it

is the first duty of a DEd to cook up schemes for job security, we cannot give them their degrees just yet.

Their plan sounds good off paper, but when they write their grammarless English, we read: ``Once upon a

time ago. But now nevermore.'' Cute and expressive of feeling, sure, but clogged up with grammar. Maybe

Following the appearance of that article, I heard from many readers who accused me of inventing Berne and

Zekowski. How silly. Bernes and Zekowskis are generated spontaneously out of the primordial nutrient broth

of Cardinal Principles. If you find them unbelievable, you might be sobered to know that they have written

many books for the guidance of public school English teachers and are said to go about holding workshops

The ``thought'' of Berne and ZekowskiI know that's not the right word, but we may not even have the right

word in Englishrepays study. Consider: ``You don't think in sentences. You think in terms of patterns and

images. It's random association.'' All of that is true, of course, if you happen to be an imbecile, or maybe a

gnu. All of it is also true even for conscious human beings if the verb to think refers to anything, anything at

all, that takes place invisibly in the mind. The mind does indeed, from time to time and often with dismal

consequences when there is a certain kind of work to be done, find itself occupied with patterns and images

and random associations. And it does many things that have no need of sentences: it regrets, it exults, it

yearns, it wonders, it fears, it expects, it dreams (perchance to sleep), it wanders, it sees, it hears...you can

make your own list. The very fact that there are so many words for the invisible acts of the mind reveals that

our language can and regularly does make, as Berne and Zekowski do not, countless fine and subtle

distinctions among those acts. And the act in which we do , if we have a command of fundamental processes,

make such distinctions may be called thinking; and, in fact, we do that thinking in sentences, in which we say

to ourselves that yearning and thinking are different for such and such reasons. We may perform any number

of mental acts ``in terms of,'' whatever that means, patterns and images, but thinking is not one of them.

Thinking is done in sentences, logical sentences. Principia mathematica is not random association. Nor, for

that matter, is poetry, which Berne and Zekowski are said to write, and which they seem to confuse with

``expressing feelings,'' which could also include smashing urinals in the boys' room. It is one of the great

wonders of poetry that it can be supremely free and individual in spite of countless traditional and arbitrary

restraints, and even in spite of the often greater restraints that poets usually choose to impose on themselves.

Berne and Zekowski, I admit, are probably an extreme case of educationistic antiintellectualism, but they

are, don't forget, professors of English at a state university where English teachers are trained. Their notions

are right at home in the context of Cardinal Principles. They are concerned with expressing feeling, or, as

they put it, with the ``idea'' of expressing feelings. (I don't know what that might mean, but I suspect that it is

not some fine distinction between ``expressing'' and ``the idea of expressing.'') They wish to destroy elitism,

which, although dead and lifeless, somehow manages to remain snobbish. They characterize rules as

``arbitrary'' rules, as though no one had ever put modifiers near what they modify until the rule had been

devised, and assert that the arbitrary rules prohibit the expression of feelings, against which assertion some

evidence could be adduced. They turn, for example, to the demotic, the advertisements that ``use words to

create images,'' as though that were some startling new use of language and especially to be prized because of

its commercial quality. They differ from gardenvariety educationists only in detail (and perhaps in their

taste for the dramaticnotably absent in educationists) but not in principle. They prefer emotional response

to knowledge; they equate technical proficiency with elitism; they imagine grammar as a set of rules, mere

information, and the stuff of rote learning; and they depend for their lessons on the popular or practical, to

When we look around America, we notice, of course, what seems to be a general decline in our young people

of the powers of observation and discrimination and the habits of accuracy and precision that we might

expect in the literate. This is an illusion born of the fact that it is only the young people who are occasionally

tested or measured. The same disabilities are to be found in all groups, because they have been fostered for so

many years now. And those many years of malpractice have fostered the same disabilities within the ranks of

the educationists themselves that we can see in the public at large. The nowretired professors of education

who learned their appreciation of the ``command'' of fundamental processes in the shadow of Cardinal

Principles taught it to the professors of education, who taught the same to all the teachers and supervisors and

facilitators now in the schools, who in their turn can pass on to their students nothing but more of the same.

It follows, therefore, that the formulation and direction of the currently faddish fervor for those fundamental

processes are given into the hands of those who lack the skills of those processes and who have grown up in

the climate of opinion out of which Berne and Zekowski have formulated their principles. The enterprise

cannot succeed any more than pygmies can grow tall by pulling upward on their ears.

You will not be astonished to learn that there are some people in Missouri who cannot manage commas,

cannot avoid sentence fragments, cannot regularly make verbs agree with subjects and pronouns with

antecedents, and cannot help sounding like literal translations from Bulgarian. If you are a regular reader of

this journal, you'll also be unastonished to hear that those pitiable illiterates are members of the Missouri

These poor saps have finally noticed that lots of irate citizens ``have indicated concern of [yes, of ] the

decreasing standardized test scores of students.'' They even know that a ``sensitivity has become quite

manifest in the development in state wide [yes, two words] assessment systems.'' But they don't seem too

worried. They've cleared up the whole mess in a ``position statement'' called Assessment of Basic Skills

The Missouri educationists have also just discovered, or have at least come to suspect that they might perhaps

decide to assume tentatively, what the rest of us have always known. They put it thus: ``Although many

factors may intervene the teacher is viewed by many as a critical variable in the teachinglearning process

``The teacher,'' they say, ``must have a high degree of proficiency in the basic skills. They are expected to

Yeah. And here are some of the precepts and examples through which these Missouri Teachertraining

``The latter ['field experiences'] being principally in student teaching with a major emphasis on institutional

planning, execution, and evaluation of subject matter to be presented.'' And, ``Utilizing the assumption that

the measuring/ascertaining of the competencies of potential teachers should be done on or about the end of

the traditional sophomore year.'' For the Turkeys, those are sentences. So why should they care? It's the

Those, of course, are just supersaturated, freebooting participles, but this one passes understanding: ``If the

student does not meet the prescribed standards of basic skills and the student, before they are formally

admitted into teacher education and certainly before graduation, should have remediation and reevaluation.''

(Wow, these people are tough! Before graduation, no less.) Any competent sixthgrade teacher would flunk

such rubbish, but the Turkeys aren't worried. As long as they're in charge, there will be damned few

``Also,'' say the Turkeys, ``there is a question of the relationship of secondary and cosecondary schools in

terms of relationships. The authors [ ! ] of this position paper agreed that such an assessment process can

have a significant impact [they never discuss insignificant or mere impacts] on secondary school curriculum

in turning to an assessment instrument to which the public schools might be inclined to reach toward.''

Why do the good people of Missouri suffer such humbug, without turning to some blunt instrument to which

they might be inclined to reach toward? We can tell you why. It's because these ugly crimes against nature

are committed in private among consenting Turkeys. How many ``authors,'' do you suppose, conspired to

write, rewrite, edit, and finally to approve all that gibberish? How many of Missouri's teachertrainers,

would you guess, have read it? Was not one of them embarrassed or outraged by this sleazy display of

ignorance and ineptitude? And if there was one, what do you think he did? He kept his mouth shut. It's better

So, unhampered by pesky public outcry, people who cannot devise sentences or make sense or even

punctuate will get on with the business of providing Missouri with teachers. And they don't want

any interference, if you please, as they make, well, not ''clear,`` to be sure, but at least ''quite manifest,`` in

''There is an advantage to each institution in Missouri preparing teachers to have an institutional level

responsibility rather than a state wide...responsibility for assurance of proficiency of basic skills. Alternate

assessment processes allow for diversity of response by each institution. It [?] allows for diversity of response

loads [?] by students, it allows for diversity of interpretation of what is basic [that's the part they like best]

for that institution's student population, and it eliminates conflicts of perogatives [typo?] and rights of

faculties of institution to set curriculum in means of assessing a testing or assuring of competencies.``

We have some advice for the good people of Missouri. Turn those rascals out. Pension them off for life at full

pay, requiring only that the never again set foot on a campus. Don't worry about the cost. In fifty years or so,

there won't be any cost. As it is, you're planning to pay more and more of them for ever and ever. Once

they're gone, on the day they go, in fact, your schools and colleges will become the best in the land.

A knowledge of history is one of the basic skills of which we have been deprived by the educationists' fervor

for shabby social studies and smug civics. We have forgotten that the storekeeper used to pay miscreants to

stay away. It worked We've gotten it backward. We pay them to hang around and smash the windows. Let's

be realistic and pay the miscreants to do that one thing the we most need them to donothing, nothing at all.

I am very sorry to have to award any points at all to the compromisers of Missouri, who are contentedly

unconscious of their own ignorance and the ludicrous pathos of their determination to ensure the

''measuring/ascertaining`` of that ''high degree of proficiency in the basic skills,`` but they do deserve a few.

In the first place, if this is an exculpation, their ignorance was visited upon them by the system in whose

service they labor, and, in the next place, there is much justice in the educationists' routine disclaimer of

responsibility for the literacy of incipient teachers. That, they happily point out, is supposed to be the

business of the English departments. And they are right, although, if literacy is a fundamental process, it

ought to be a concern in every department. But there is no doubt that English departments must be charged

with teaching everything that can be taught about the technical skills that provide a command of literacy. And

Berne and Zekowski, you will surely remember, are professors not of education but of English, who ply their

trade in a school where teachertraining happens. Although it is, to be sure, the very existence of the articles

of educationistic faith that makes Bernes and Zekowskis possible, professors of English are supposed to have

some of their own articles of faith, which ought to double them up with hysterical laughter when Bernes and

Zekowskis appear at department meetings. So the poor professors of education are put in the sad position of

having to lament aloud that even the professors of English have swallowed the potion bottled by the

professors of education. There's a satisfying sort of justice in that, but it still means that there is not much

hope of breaking the cycle in which illiteracy is passed on from generation to generation.

The story of what has happened to English departments in the last few decades, especially in English

departments attached to teachertraining academies, would make a fat and dull book. In brief, that history

can be seen as a conditioned response to the dual role of the study of English as imagined in Cardinal

Principles, where the command of fundamental processes on the one hand and the right emotional response

to literature on the other were obviously assigned to the same people. Since a fervid dedication to the former

has not exactly been a hallmark of the schools, and since the latter can more or less be ''taught`` by anyone,

the teaching of English has evolved into a curious creature that now looks something like a pair of wings with

no bird between them. There is the Right Wing, devoted to the study of literature (pronounced in four

syllables and without any trace of a ''ch``), which has handed over the muchhated and laborious teaching of

composition to graduate assistants and junior department members panting after promotion, who look upon

the work as a necessary apprenticeship to be swiftly accomplished so that they might go on to teaching

The Left Wing is more complicated, because it is divided into two persuasions or parties, the democrats and

the technocrats. The democrats are really true inheritors of Cardinal Principles, for they propose literature as

a vehicle of social and ''interpersonal`` understanding and an incentive to the appreciation of the brotherhood

of all mankind and the human condition. It is the democrats of the Left Wing who have multiplied the

offerings in the catalog by cooking up courses in everything from the Urban Experience to Adolescence in

America and Female Problems in an Age of Lowered Expectations. Such courses all have, inevitably, their

analogues in the high schools, where the study of literature comes down to minicourses in ghost, sport, or

However, while the democrats hold large tracts in the kingdom of government education, the broadest acres

are being deeded to the technocrats of the Left Wing, who have prudently provided for themselves and their

progeny by reconstruing reading and writing as ''communication.`` Communication is socially acceptable.

Even the desultory deliberations of the uninterested ignorant can be called ''communication.`` And the

eighthgrade rap session on free abortions for eighth graders suddenly becomes a skill to be taught as a

legitimate ''fundamental process.`` All the presumed skills of communication, including filmmaking and

taperecorder operation and even (this is true) televisionwatching, become precincts of the great realm of

communications, where writing itself, only one precinct, is subdivided into utilitarian fragments. The study of

writing thus gives way to courses in Personal Writing, Creative Writing, Journalistic Writing, Technical

The innumerable offerings of the communicationiststhey sometimes call themselves

''communicologists`` recommend themselves in the world of educationism by virtue not only of their

collectivist aims but also because of their technical flavor. Idle chatter finds respectability and curricular

justification when it becomes Interpersonal Group Communication Methodology. Furthermore, while a

course in writing needs only some paper and pencils, courses in communicology can generate some very

Here is a case in point, indeed, a case in several points, for whose sake I must provide some background. The

Communications Department in question does its business at the college where I do mine, and it is famous

here for having announced its withdrawal from the division of arts and sciences, as we call them. The

announcement, a portion of which is quoted, was neither preceded nor accompanied nor followed by any

action at all. That in itself was a splendid display of the paramountcy of communication over substance.

Now, however, there is some substance at issue, specifically, a proposal to establish what was then called a

''Flagship`` program of great excellence in the ''field`` of communications. (The word ''Flagship`` cannot be

When the Communications Department blasted off into the unknown regions of interdivisional space, its

But in the sober light of day after the intoxicating elixirs of selfdelusion have begun to fade,

after the sonorous tones of your voices have begun to sound hollow, after the technicolor

hues of your dreams have begun to mute into the blacks and whites of realitythen you may

He was reminding us that we had not yet entered the twentieth century, so he must have chosen that quaint

and antiquated tone of purple fustian for ironic emphasisdon't you think? How subtly he reminds us of our

enslavement to outworn tradition by his innovative use of ''mute`` as an intransitive verb and that multimedia

Now the Communications Department reenters our atmosphere, blazing like another Kohoutek, and

We looked at the part where they tell all about the teaching of writing, twentiethcentury style. Here's the

The communications Department proposes to establish an ideal classroom for the teaching of

the basic writing course...While there is no single classroom prototype that could be

considered ideal for all circumstances, there is a concern that different approaches be taken.

One of the keys in suggesting an ideal classroom is that traditional classrooms have a way of

perpetuating traditional approaches...By bringing together in one room a large variety of

audiovisual implements, creating a relaxed atmosphere by having the room carpeted with

pictures on the walls and easy chairs and tables and by having duplicating equipment and a

variety of newspapers and magazines readily available, we can encourage attempts to change

both students' perceptions and teachers' approaches to the task of learning how to write.

Now why couldn't we have thought of all that neat stuff? Because we've been hung up perpetuating

traditional approachesthings like drill and practice, writing and rewritingthat's why. Even desks! Now

we see. What we need is a dentist's waiting room redone by Radio Shack, magazines and Muzak, comfy

chairs, and a shiny new Xerox so the scholars won't have to fight over the latest number of Popular

Notice a refreshing absence of flat, empty surfaces where a thoughtless student might accidentally write

words on a piece of paper and set the whole class back a century. That's the hard part, all right, putting the

words on the paper. That's why hardly anyone was able to write before the advent of that large variety of

The proposal itself seems to have been put together in just such an innovative, relaxing setting. Notice, for

instance, the creative (or easy chair) treatment of punctuation in that bit about the pictures. The room is

carpeted with pictures on the walls. The pictures are on the walls and easy chairs and tables. It's a

A second prong in the outreach of the department would come from a Communication

Consultancy Center. This would be created as an umbrella from which many different kinds

Stunning. No fuddyduddy of the age of paper and pencil could ever have accomplished prose like that. The

secret is ''vision.`` Only a writer who has learned his craft from long hours of assiduous (but relaxed) scrutiny

of a twentyinch color implement could hope to develop a vision modern enough to see that outreaches have

prongs, prongs coming from their Centers, and that a prong, or maybe a Center, can be created as an

umbrella, an umbrella from which services can be dispensed, services that can help us all to learn how to

Well, you can just bet your Bearcat scanner against a busted quill pen that all our staff writers will be

standing at the door the day they open that Communications Consultancy Center. We're mired in traditions.

We could never, for instance, have come up with these spiffy structures that go the tired old passive at least

...[the] Department can provide leadership that will cause it to be viewed as a resource .

...few of the courses...have been able to be offered on a regular basis....needs should be able

You just can't hope to master that smooth modern style without spending hours, whole seasons probably, in

the old easy chair, beer and pretzels at hand, studying the styles of the greatest playbyplay and color men

And just look at these daring departures from stodgy tradition. We're so oldfashioned that we almost

...the advantages the computer offers...lies in continuous availability....the equipment

All of this is encouraging for anybody who worries about the teaching of writing here at Glassboro. It shows

that the Communications Department is perfectly willing to put some of the taxpayers' money where

somebody's mouth isin a collection of machines. Time was when your basic model communications

teacher would rather watch reruns of ''Washington Week in Review`` than teach a writing course. Now they'll

be clamoring to twiddle the dials and leaf through Cosmopolitan and rap about nontraditional approaches to

So not to worry. We can all go down to the launching in good conscience, sing in our hollow tones one

chorus of ''Anchors Aweigh,`` smash a fifth of faded elixir on the prow of the refitted Starship Triad, newly

home from one uncharted deep, sallying forth into yet another, carrying our hopes and dreams, ere they mute,

In that blazing display of furniture and equipment, you may have missed the fact that the ''ideal classroom``

(certainly ideal for some lucky contractors) is for ''the teaching of the basic writing course.`` Advanced

courses in various ''writings`` will require yet more specialized doodads. The implicit suggestion of all the

paraphernalia and even the carefully designed environment will be the same, to wit, that writing is just one of

many ''skills`` of communication, similar in kind to the making of television commercials and the

grammarless collages that so pleased Berne and Zewokski. And it follows that ''reading`` is the skill of

receiving and registering ''communication,`` which, accordingly, may or may not come in the form of

writing. And it further follows, therefore, that what the schools mean by ''literacy`` is not what you think it is.

Literacy may be ''visual literacy`` or the ability to program computers, although it is hard to imagine how

people who are not interested in punctuation or spelling can meet the even more stringent demands of

But the greatest achievement of the communicationists, and the one that best assures their prosperity, is that

they have transformed writing from a private act into a public one, from a solitary search for understanding

into a public display of some communication. This suggests some deeper reasons, deeper than their obvious

distaste for the mere information required in the teaching of writing, for the pro forma mention and

subsequent neglect of those fundamental processes in Cardinal Principles. Everywhere in that pamphlet, we

can find exhortations to socialization through group efforts, group discussions, group thinking, and even

games and dances. We find specific condemnations of too much knowledge of mere facts and too much

attention to intellectual discipline, characteristic foreshadowings of that later indictment of ''excellence

narrowly defined.`` In an even more recent policy statement from the National Education Association,

Curriculum Change Toward the 21st Century (1977), a reappraisal and expanded reaffirmation of Cardinal

Imbedded in the question of freedom is an educational dilemmathe longstanding enigma

of how to obtain the important output of superior minds without creating an elite of

scientists, politicians, social planners and commentators, military specialists, business

Or, in other words, how can we manage to muzzle the ox while he treadeth out the corn?

The supposed love of democracy out of which the commissioners devised their principles is really just a

hatred of those ''superior minds,`` from which, notice, we can profit not by the study and practice of superior

mindfulness but by ''obtaining their output.`` While we will discourage students from a painful retracing of

the path of Newton's logic, for instance, we will take profit and pleasure from the fact that Newton has made

it possible (for some few of us, who do have to be watched carefully for signs of incipient elitism) to

But we mustn't forget that bullet, the one that ''spins`` end over end in perfect but antisocial obedience to the

laws of motion. (A thoughtful writer would have written ''tumbles,`` but, having done that out of

thoughtfulness, he would probably, out of that same thoughtfulness, have understood that the point of the

example was utterly irrelevant.) Of the output that we might obtain from those superior minds, some must

prove unworthy, which is to say, antihumanistic, which in turn is to say, the work of an individual mind

heedless of collective values. It is thus a primary aim of social adjustment educationism to disarm and

overwhelm the individual mind and replace it with a comprehensive data bank of received and unexamined

attitudes, values, opinions, and worthy emotional responses. All of the curricular dilutions and manipulations

prescribed in Cardinal Principles are means to that end. And, to that end, there is only one certain

impediment. It is the one ''student outcome`` that our schools simply cannot afford to provide, even if they

could, which, out of thoughtless acceptance of their own principles, they can't. It is, of course, literacy.

''Literacy`` needs some redefining. When Jefferson spoke of that literacy that would provide ''informed

discretion,`` he did not mean the ability to read the instructions for assembling a swing set or even for

assembling a nuclear power generating plant. He did not mean the ability to write a correctly punctuated

letter of application for a job. He did not mean the ability to devise, or even to ''appreciate,`` advertisements

that ''use words to create images.`` He did not mean the habit of worthy emotional response to literature. In

short, he did not mean any, or even all taken together, of those ''skills`` that we now put forth as studies in

communications or language arts. He did mean certain habits and powers of the individual mind, habits and

powers that can be learned and refined only by long practice in reading and writing.

Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a portion of education. It is education. It is at once the

ability and the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and, out of knowledge

and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses, however ''worthy,`` to

make judgments. Literate people are not easy prey. They do know an inference from a statement of fact.

They are not easily persuaded by pretended authority. They are attentive to the natural requirements of logic.

They can make distinctions, very fine distinctions, and are able both to notice and to examine their own

predispositions and even their only presumably ''right emotional responses.`` To say that young human beings

But our schools do say that. And thus they not only preclude those powers in the students but in the whole

system. Today's teachers and the teachers of today's teachers are all the inevitable results of the system. They

simply don't know what literacy is. This accounts for one of the most bewildering contradictions to be found

in the current pandemonium of bold, innovative thrusts in basic minimum competencies. On the one hand,

our educationists fancy that literacy is something you achieve when you have developed enough ''skills.`` But

it turns out that many of those skills are in fact the results of much practice and hard knowledge and habits of

rote learning and mere information, things in short supply not only among the hapless students but also

among the teachers and the teachers of the teachers. Therefore, on some other hand, having discovered how

hard it is to teach those skills in a system where no one is very good at them, the educationists can also fancy

that literacy is not simply a matter of skills, which now become ''mere`` skills, and that it might just as well

''Problemsolving in the content area`` is a favorite pastime of educationists. In the case of literacy, it works

this way: Literacy, whatever it is, must be a student outcome. So let's try to teach those basic skills and offer

minicourses and interesting electives in all sorts of communications and language arts and let the students

express themselves and improve their selfesteem. Then we'll find out what the student outcomes are and call

them ''literacy.`` Put in those terms, the proposition sounds too preposterous to win approval even among

educationists, unless you happen to be one of millions of American parents who have wondered how

compositions full of uncorrected and perhaps unnoticed mechanical errors could earn such good grades.

The convenient redefinition of literacy, however, is not merely a happy dodge for teachers. It is national

policy in the realm of educationism, which embraces even those outlying provinces that we mistakenly deem

buffer states between us and the traditional expansionism of governmental social adjustment. The same

comfortable and undemanding redefinition is a matter of policy at the Educational Testing Service:

Fortunately for American educationists, there is never any dearth of trashy and popular fads, the raw material

of curricular novelty. The halflife of most bold innovative thrusts is less than that of the pet rock or the nude

encounter group, and pedagogical gimmicks have to be cooked up more often than situation comedies. But,

thanks to the fertile inventiveness always inspired by exuberant greed, the master schlockmongers will

always provide the educationists with full measures of readily adaptable inanities.

Of course, there is a difference between the peddlers of pop and the educationists. The peddlers of pop are

skillful. When promoters have deposited the take from Woodstocks and Earth Days, the educationists come

limping behind with minicourses in the ''poetry`` of rock and roll, and environmental awareness. In a frantic

scramble after what crumbs may fall from the merchants' tables, they rush to ''teach`` soapoperawatching,

the casting of horoscopes, and the throwing of the Frisbee. Coming soon: Elvis, the copper bracelet, and the

Future historians of education (how's that for a dreary calling?) will understand better than we that the most

powerful influence on education in our time was not new knowledge of the psychology of learning, not the

rise and dominance of the electronic media, not the fervor for democratization that followed the civil rights

movements, not even the newly awakened public recognition of the tensions between the demands of an

increasingly automated society and a reinvigorated and often antimaterialistic individualism, but, purely and

simply, the Big Mac. Our schools are, in almost every respect, analogues of the fastfood industry, although

there probably is some nourishment in the Big Mac. Even the slogans are the same: Have it your way; We do

It's not surprising, therefore, that educationists respond to public discontent not by trying to improve what

they do, but by trying to ''educate`` the public into some other ''perception`` of what they do. In education, as

in the fastfood business, it's called ''image enhancement,`` and, like all flackery, it's done with slogans and

buzz words. When the public finally noticed, for instance, that fewer and fewer children were learning to

read, the educationists quickly discovered that ''learning disabilities`` were far more common than anyone

had ever suspected. Therefore, we ought in fact to praise the schools for doing such a great job with swarms

of undernourished, disaffected imbeciles, many of whom were also myopic, hard of hearing, hyperactive (if

Now, pestered by complaints about student writing, the educationists have drawn from the bottomless pit of

mindless pop a bucket of inspiration, the Whatever Turns You On Plan for the Enhancement of Public

Perceptions Concerning Student Writing. They call it ''holistic`` grading. It will improve grades dramatically

without requiring any improvement in the teaching of writing. It will work even in schools where there is

Most of what we've heard about holistic grading has come from the horse's mouth, the National Council of

Teachers of English. We now have a report from another part of the horse, the Educational Testing Service,

With this method, the essay is read for a total impression of its quality rather than for such

separate aspects of writing skill as organization, punctuation, diction, or spelling. The

method takes a positive approach to the rating of compositions by asking the reader to

concentrate on what the student has accomplished rather than on what the student has failed

to do or has done badly. Holistic scoring is both efficient and accurate. The standards by

which compositions are judged are those that the readers have developed from their training

We have to presume that the written parts of tests given by ETS will be ''rated`` in this ''efficient and

accurate`` fashion from now on. In a few years, we'll hear that the writing crisis, if indeed there ever was one,

This, you see, is a ''positive approach.`` To fuss about organization, punctuation, diction, and spelling is the

To judge writing by this ''holistic`` method is like judging a musical performance without reference to

rhythm, tempo, or dynamics, and taking no heed of false notes or of ''organization.`` What could we say of a

performance in which all of those things were wrong? We could certainly not judge it as a musical

performance if we choose to give no weight to the attributes of musical performance. If we could consider

things without regarding their attributes, which we can't, we wouldn't even know what the hell they were. It is

only by their attributes that we can distinguish a musical performance from a billiard ball. It is by just such

attributes as organization and diction, dismissed above as presumably optional ''aspects,`` that we can

distinguish between written composition and the egg stains on an educationist's face.

And that is a distinction that we had better learn to make. There will never be good, universal, public

education in America until we learn, from their own words, that the people in charge of it are badly in need of

an education. Educated people will not be deceived by such nonsense. Some knowledge of the history of

thought and some skill in logical language can be expected of the educated, but they are not required for a

Educated people are likely to know what ''holistic`` means. They know, simply because they have the power

of language and thought, that if something is more than the sum of its parts, it cannot be less than the sum of

its parts. They even know what ''aspects`` are, and that to call punctuation, spelling, diction, and even

organization, ''separate aspects`` of writing suggests either ignorance or mendacity. They know, too, that this

slick hustle, designed not only to deceive the taxpayers about the state of student writing but also to make the

grading of compositions one hell of a lot easier, may appropriately be called many things, but ''holistic`` isn't

''Contemptuous,`` however, is one of them. It is not out of kindness but out of contempt (and sloth) that

educationists design ways to excuse students from the demands of good work. To tell a student that ''what he

has accomplished,`` however little that may be, is an adequate substitute for ''what he has failed to do or has

done badly,`` however much that may be, is not ''humanistic`` (they don't know the meaning of that word,

It is also unmistakably to imply that the mastery of good writing is not important. Do you suppose that those

educationists would want their dentists or even their electricians ''rated`` by their ''holistic`` method? When

pilots and flight engineers are licensed by ''positive approaches`` without regard for all those trivial ''separate

aspects`` of their crafts, will the loyal members of the National Council of Teachers of English fly to the

annual convention anyway, just to demonstrate their faith in a ''total impression of quality``? Will they

consult physicians whose diplomas have been granted in spite of ''what the student has failed to do or has

One thing must be said in fairness to the educationists who have packaged and touted the Holistic Hot 'n'

Juicy: The standards by which they propose to measure students' work are no more rigorous than those by

which they judge their own work. After all, the ability to write good English isn't required for a doctorate in

education, so why bother high school kids about it? Of course, there may be some kids who aim higher and

would like to do useful and respectable work that calls for the habits of accuracy and clear thought that come

from the mastery of written composition, but the fastfood business doesn't work that way. When ETS serves

In a school where ''holistic rating`` is accepted orthodoxy, will a student's understanding of the mere facts of

human sexuality be measured, and applauded, out of a total impression of its quality? Will the mindless

appreciation of expressed feelings in grammarless (and successful) advertisements have some consequence in

the classroom next door where children are learning to be canny consumers? Having completed their courses

in sex and consumer education, will students be every bit as knowledgeable and thoughtful in their sex lives

and their ketchup selection as they are in the separate aspects of writing skills? Will it come to pass with them

in the world according to whatever little they may have ''accomplished`` rather than according to what they

In the absence of literacy and the habits of mind that it both induces and permits, no one can understand

anything, for understanding is not the same as knowing. What we know can be expressed in statements about

the world. What we understand has to be expressed in statements about statements about the world.

Understanding calls for classification and organization, fine distinctions, and logical testing, all related to

knowledge. All of those things can be taught in schools to very young children, but they can not be taught

where an ''impression`` of overall quality supersedes the measurement of ''separate aspects of writing skills,``

which are precisely the devices of classification and organization, fine distinctions, and logical testing. There

is thus an absolute limit imposed on what the schools can do in the zany ''educations.`` Even should the

schools be able to provide some knowledge about human sexuality, for instanceand that itself is not to be

counted on in an atmosphere hostile to mere information and rote learningthey will never be able to

That absolute limit can also be understood in social and political terms, terms of the educationists' own

devising. We have seen that even the technically skillful and ingenious, to say nothing of the educated (not

always the same thing), are beheld by the educationists with wary suspicion. They may well be the products

of that ''excellence narrowly defined`` that has fouled the air and water, and they are certainly the incipient

elitists who constitute that ''dilemma`` in the form of a ''longstanding enigma.`` Is there perhaps some

danger in a program of sex education that gets too close to ''excellence narrowly defined¿` Will some lurking

''superior minds`` seize the opportunity to become more knowledgeable and thoughtful than most of their

classmates and become as skillful and effective in matters sexual as they are in designing those demonic

transistors? Will they become a sexual elite, leading prudent and orderly lives in stable families, from which

privilege the great mass of Americans is unjustly excluded? And from such a privileged elite, which uses its

thoughtfulness and knowledge exclusively in its own private interests, how can we obtain any useful output?

Since our educational system thrives on the disorders it causes, such questions are not as farfetched as they

may sound. A case in point is the new and muchtalkedof ''awareness`` among educationists of a looming

and promising problem that will bring hosts of new programs, research grants, administrators, counselors,

facilitators, and specialists: the fact that children who live with only one parent don't, as a group, do as well in

school as children from what is coming more and more to be thought of as a special case, an ''intact family.``

That is, at least in part, a problem of sexual values, attitudes, and habits. While the children who live with

only one parent may be in some personal distress, their growing numbers are good for business. The

workshops alone will provide employment for thousands. On the other hand, any significant diminution in

their numbers would be bad for business. It is not realistic to suppose that a massive governmental institution

There is, in fact, no ''problemsolving in the content area,`` although there are certainly problems ''in the

content area.`` But in a government institution, there is only one area in which problems are taken seriously,

and that is the political. Many of the strange things done in American educationism suddenly become

perfectly understandable when we see them not as educational methods but as political maneuvers. We must

understand illiteracy, therefore, the root of ignorance and thoughtlessness, as not some inadvertent failure to

accomplish what was intended but simply a political arrangement of great value to somebody.

Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous

combination of ignorance and pretentiousness. It's always amusing to watch them reinventing the wheel

every few years and announcing, for instance, as some of them recently have, that children who know the

sounds of letters can actually read words they've never seen before, by golly. It's fun to consider the systems

of Lilliputian leaping and creeping by which they better their lots and advance from humble teaching to

exalted posts as curriculum facilitators, and the superintendent's speech at the athletic awards banquet usually

has that rarest of literary qualities, absolute immunity to parody. Indeed, the first thing you see when you

consider thoughtfully and in some detail the ways of American educationism is that it is funny. It's usually

the last thing you see, too, and since education is not one of the truly serious enterprises of American

civilization, like petrochemicals or banking, it doesn't seem to matter much. True, clowns and kooks seem

common in the education business, especially at the higher managerial levels, but so what? The whole

business is about nothing more than children, who don't count yet, and who can't be expected to do any

important work. We are quite ready to tolerate in curriculum and governance the same clumsy amateurism

that we find so engaging in the school play and the marching band. After all, weren't we all taught in our own

time in the schools that what really counts is the effort? And it is only when we go to the home games that

We tolerate the educational establishment the same way that we tolerate the children themselves, and we

therefore extend to the guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators the same immunities that we extend to

the children, the harmless children. They are all togetherover there aside from the mainstream of real life.

But anyone who will look long and carefully at what happens ''over there`` will sooner or later notice

something that doesn't seem funny. He may begin to suspect that perhaps there are some consequences to

child's play, and that maybe the children aren't so harmless after all, to say nothing of the counselors and

facilitators. It may begin to dawn on such an observer that the children in school actually are people and not

merely yettobeformed raw materials who will start to be people after the last blackboard has been

washed. Where once he tolerated the silliness of the schools as a temporary and sectarian custom in a small

fragment of real life, he now sees that the habits and attitudes so earnestly inculcated in children by silly

people will almost certainly not evaporate on commencement day. And why should they? Habits and

attitudes never evaporate. We may sometimes change them consciously, but only after skillful observation

and controlled thoughtfulness, which are generally not among the habits and attitudes that children acquire in

school. Those are the habits of literacy. The attentive and patient observer, therefore, must come to see at last

that school is not ''something else over there.`` School is America. If you want to predict the future of our

Schools do not fail. They succeed. Children always learn in school. Always and every day. When their rare

and tiny compositions are ''rated holistically`` without regard for separate ''aspects`` like spelling,

punctuation, capitalization, or even organization, they learn. They learn that mistakes bring no consequences.

They learn that their teachers were only pretending in all those lessons on spelling and punctuation. They

learn that there are no rewards for good work, and that they who run the race all win. They learn that

what they win is a rubberstamped smiling face, exactly as valuable as what they might lose, which is

nothing, nothing at all. They learn that the demands of life are easily satisfied with little labor, if any, and that

a show of effort is what really counts. They learn to pay attention to themselves, their wishes and fears, their

likes and dislikes, their idle whims and temperamental tendencies, all of which, idolized as ''values`` and

personological variables, are far more important than ''mere achievement`` in subject matter. The ''whole

child`` comes first, and no one learns that lesson better than the children. Just as you can predict the future by

going to school, you can decipher the past by lookingaround. All those thoughtless, unskilled, unproductive,

selfindulgent, and eminently dupable Americanswhere have they been and what did they learn there?

What is done to children in schools is not inconsequential. It is not even the ''fun and games`` that might be

deplored for its own sake. It is permanent and deadly serious. Sometimes, it is simply deadly:

When you talked us in your paper you called us barbarians. It is even more rude than when

you call us delinquents. You cant compare us to 50 years ago because we dont wear knickers'

and deliver newspapers. All you Old Farts are the same. At Cominsky Park we were just

expressing our feelings about disco, because disco sucks. If you write another column like

I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] that made it impossible to

trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds

were monstrous, but the doer...was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor

monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil

motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in

his behavior during the trial and throughout the pretrial police examination was something

entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness... Is wickedness, however we may

define it, this being ''determined to prove a villain,`` not a necessary condition for

evildoing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be

Mike Royko is a columnist at the SunTimes of Chicago. His essays appear in many newspapers throughout

the country, thank goodness, for he has the habit of clear language and thought. Mike Royko wrote a column

about those eleven people who were trampled to death at a rock concert in Cincinnati. He suggested, by no

means injudiciously, that ''those who would climb over broken bodies to reach a seat in an auditorium could

be called 'the new barbarians.' `` That suggestion must have seemed less than humanistic and perhaps even

somewhat unselfesteemenhancing to a certain Robert Maszak, a teacher of English at Bloom Township

in Chicago Heights. Maszak, probably remembering his training in the teacher academy, seized for his

students this marvelous opportunity for a relevant and experiential exercise in the integration of

selfawareness aspects and the clarification of values. He had them all write letters telling Royko where to

head in, and proving, since they could write, that some teenagers were not barbarians. In fact, they couldn't,

Royko, to be sure, had said nothing about teenagersor about the worth of rock music, which was stridently

championed in many of the letters. Maszak, however, may well be a member of the National Council of

Teachers of English, and thus both a proponent and a practitioner of ''holistic`` reading, in which the reader

must scrupulously refuse to consider what the writer actually says, a mere ''aspect`` of writing.

Maszak may also be a holistic grader, for he was not reluctant to display the fruits of his teaching, which look

Dear Tenage hater I was disapointed by what you writen on the Who concert. From what you

said I can see you have know so called barbarism. You used some strong words in there with

very little fact, you say everyone was numbed in the brain. I will say from concert experience

maybe half or three forties were high on something or nether but I allso know that theres not

one forth to half that weren't. You say everyone was pushing and throwing elbows, did you

ever think that some of the thrown elbows were from people who didn't like getting pushed.

Yes. The times indeed have change. Well, let's try to be holistic. Let's ignore failures of technique and, as we

were instructed in last month's quotation from ETS, concentrate on ''what the student has accomplished rather

than on what the student has failed to do or has done badly.`` Let's remember as well the aggrieved whimpers

of the educationists who beseech us to believe that skill in writing is obviously, while useful, much less

important than humanistic things like the encouragement of selfexpression, the enhancement of selfesteem,

Now we can understand why Maszak was untroubled by such a piece of work. It is, in fact, a testimony to the

triumph of educationism over education. That poor student, not a villain but a victim, has indeed expressed

nothing more than himself. His esteem for that forlorn and meager self is firm and truculent. And his values

Perfectly clear, too, are the values of the few students who actually mentioned Royko's topic, the death of

eleven people. One saw it as a perfectly expectable concomitant of everybody's inalienable right to have what

If there were someone yer looked up to and yer went to see them in person and thier were

thousands of peopl just like you and wanted to see him up close would you fight yer way in?

Another shows an even keener sense of values; he gives us the very numbers by which we can reconcile

ourselves to death in Cincinnati: ''People die every three second. What would you do if you paid $15 for a

Eichmann must have said as much in the still watches of the night, if he ever did say anything to himself.

Jews die anyway, don't they? And Eichmann had even more than fifteen dollars at stake.

You can be sure that the humanisticists in our schools will make a profit from that last letter. They will

transform it into a ''values clarification module``: You have paid for a ticket to hear a concert by the Walking

Dead, whom yer look up to. How cheap does it have to be for you to decide that getting to your seat just isn't

worth the hassle of trampling a few people to death, people who may in any case die every three second? The

ensuing rap session will be quite long enough to provide yet another day's respite from the tedious and

The children who wrote the Royko papers are juniors and seniors in high school. They are probably from

sixteen to nineteen years old. They have spent eleven, twelve, or more, years in our ''humanistic,``

''valuesoriented,`` schools. What their teachers have praised as ''creativity`` looks remarkably like anarchic

selfindulgence, which is what creativity must always be in the want of discipline and skill. Their

muchencouraged ''selfexpression`` cannot be distinguished from dissolute libertinism, a virulent form of

selfexpression where there is no selfknowledge. Their ''enhanced selfesteem`` has blossomed into an

arrogant narcissism, a perversion of selfesteem where there is no idea of what is estimable.

Can we hope that Maszak's few students are unique, or at least unusual? We cannot. We know that there are

millions, millions of children who have in effect been dehumanized by the ''humanistic`` education that

smugly dismisses the mastery of knowledge and skills and the discipline of the intellect as elitist adornments

accessible, if they will have them, only to the few, and eagerly peddles to the many the mindless claptrap of

environmental awareness and career orientation and ethnic sensitivity and doing your own thing and letting it

Human beings only, of all living creatures, can know what Hannah Arendt has described as ''the claim on our

thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.`` She said of Eichmann ''that he

clearly knew of no such claim,`` although she does not say of him, as we might have to of Maszak's students,

that even had he known of such a claim he would have proved incapable of paying it thinking attention.

Thinking attention can be paid only in skillful language. And, for those who want to be humanistic, there is

no more distinctly human attribute than the power of language and no more distinctly human accomplishment

Go and learn those things, you humanismmongers, before you presume to instruct our children in values.

And do it fast. There isn't much time. We have read the Royko papers, and we know what you have been

doing. We have seen the future that you have fashioned for us, and, in words that even your victims will

It is possible, of course, to make too much of what seems a smoldering savagery in the students of Robert

Maszak. But when we seek mitigation of that ominous threat to the future of an already disintegrating

civilization, we discover yet other threats. For instance, it is probably true that Maszak's teenagers are in part

striking poses designed to disturb grownups, pour épater, no doubt, le bourgeois. That is not only a child's

inalienable right, but an important part of the training of the mind. Rational thoughtfulness, after all, is not

and should not be the ordinary condition of daily human life; it is a stance that we assume, if we can, when

appropriate. Even if we are able to do the work of logical thinking, we do not, unless we are John Stuart Mill,

perhaps, do it except in response to a summons, exactly the summons that Hannah Arendt has in mind when

she speaks of ''the claim...that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.`` Attentive

thoughtfulness is an aberration, an act not only rare in human experience but also an act requiring cultivation.

Thinking is not unlike playing the violin; it isn't simply natural. Even if we can do it, we don't often do it.

Very well, then. We admit that those teenagers are, in part at least, striking stances. But why these and only

these stances? What stance, we wonder, has their teacher himself chosen, so that they can so obviously expect

his approval? Their chosen stance is (just like their teacher's?) tiresomely ordinary and predictable; even its

virulent truculence is exactly what ''tough`` teenagers suppose ''stylish.`` It pretends to express an

independence, especially an independence of the outworn values of grownups who wore knickers and

delivered newspapers, but it in fact expresses the opposite, for it is nothing but a recitation of attitudes and

emotions as generally received and accepted in that milieu. ''That milieu`` includes the classroom, obviously,

and the school. It includes principally, however, the world out there, the popular, the ideology of the streets

and the movies and the music. In that sense, Maszak's classroom is the world, only less so, for it repeats what

is uttered first in the world. The agents of American educationism do not lead their students anywhere, they

follow them, and always downstream, always in the way they would go even if there were no schools.

An education, which requires the training of the mind in rational thoughtfulness, goes against the grain. It

isn't easy. It isn't even ''natural,`` as we usually mean that word. To live, even to live an ordinary and

comfortable life, requires the practice of rational thoughtfulness no more than it requires practice on the

violin. You can come and go, get and spend, work and play, choose and reject, rise and fall, live and die,

entirely in response to the suggestions without and the appetites within. You need never feel, never mind

answer, that claim that facts and events make on the thinking attention. For any value you share, any

''worthy`` emotional response to which you are led, any received opinion that you think to call ''yours,`` there

Furthermore, a whole culture composed of people just like you would be a very stable and peaceful one.

While the socialadjustment educationists may seem silly and ignorant, at the heart of all they do there is an

important and correctly understood truth: thoughtfulness is disruptive, and the work of an individual mind is

seldom likely to contribute to the consistent harmony of a collective social system. Therefore, while you, as

an individual mind, may judge that the children who wrote to Royko suggest some failure in schooling, and

while such might even be the judgment of individual minds who actually do the schooling, those same

children represent a mighty success in principle. Whatever else they might be, they are not individual minds

that will fall into the anticollective habit of thoughtful attention. They may indeed make a ruckus at a rock

concert, which is ironically only a part of the ''consistent harmony of a collective social system,`` but they

will not examine and reexamine the ideas and values that have been delivered unto them.

Those students represent another kind of success. Their schools have undertaken, at the expense of skills and

knowledge, to instill in them values. And they have values. They know what a fifteendollar ticket is worth

and that disco sucks. Those are values. They are not determinations from evidence, not descriptions of

phenomena, not conclusions from argument. They are assertions of worth. Values. They are neither unusual

nor eccentric, however repellent some may find them. But even the most intemperate critic of American

educationism cannot accuse the schools of intending to teach such values, and the people in the schools will

themselves protest that such reprehensible values are picked up not in the schools, which struggle bravely

and perhaps hopelessly against them, but from ''the society.`` They are right, and they are wrong. Certainly

the resort to violence, hedonistic selfindulgence, and the supposed worth of whatever is popular are

celebrated in ''the society.`` But why is that so? It must be because we are in the habit of accepting values out

of suggestion and example rather than of formulating them out of knowledge and thoughtfulness. And

that must be so because we have been schooled into that habit, for whose sake we have been unschooled in

the habit of thoughtful judgment, which would preclude the habit of accepting values out of suggestion and

example and make impossible the social adjustment that is the principal aim of the schools. Thoughtful

judgment is a specific antibody against uncritical susceptibility to suggestion, so it must be repressed if

schooling is to succeed. And when it is repressed successfully, through willful neglect of intellectual

discipline and mere information, schoolchildren will form their ''values`` not from the transparent

preachments of teachers who are obviously trying to con them into putting on knickers and delivering

newspapers, but from the dramatic and stylish examples of the world of the demotic.

Many pernicious consequences flow from the fact that the schools have appointed themselves inculcators of

values and that the American public, itself ''adjusted`` by the schools, has come to believe that the inculcation

of values is a legitimate aim of education. One of the worst of those consequences is now made manifest in

the current wave of sectarian demands that the schools, since they are in the values business anyway, ought

to teach not just the nonsense they have been teaching but whatever other nonsense any sufficiently noisy

group of citizens may prefer. After all, if the schools can ''teach`` doing your own thing or going with the

flow ( both of which, curiously enough, can justify any particular belief or deed), why can't they ''teach`` that

the universe is just as well described in Genesis as in geology, astronomy, paleontology, physics, biology,

and chemistry? While they preach, from one side of the mouth, a humanistic contempt for that ''excellence

narrowly defined`` that brought us all those ugly antennas, why can't they prate, from the other, about the

glories of the profit system? There is no good answer to such questions. If a taxsupported government

school system devotes itself to any values at all, it can always be made to do exactly that for any

One of the inevitable consequences of sixty years of antiintellectualism in the government schools is the

automatic assumption of most Americans that things like spelling and punctuation are political and

ideological badges. Those who are fussy about spelling and punctuation, and other such devices, are assumed

to be oldfashioned, conservative, and elitist, while those who care little for such traditional trivia must be

with it, liberal, and democratic. (This accords ill with another article of American folklore, according to

which it is the ''educated`` who become liberals and abandon the oldtime religion of this or that, but the

American public has been trained not to see such contradictions.) Because The Underground

Grammarian often ridicules academicians who cannot spell or punctuate or even make sense, readers

occasionally assume that it must also be against gun control and in favor of prayer in schools and a return to

McGuffey's Readers. I often had letters from strange people asking aid and comfort in such causes, all of

them unwitting testimony to the distress and confusion of mind that automatically equates schooling with

education and indoctrination with learning. Eventually it seemed good to write a general answer to all such

We have been hearing both from and about groups of citizens who have organized themselves as guardians of

education and monitors of texts and techniques. Those who have written to us have praised our efforts,

claiming a common cause and expecting that we will praise, and promote, their efforts. We will not. They are

decent and wellmeaning people disturbed about the obvious disorders of education, no doubt, but their

understanding of ''education`` is as thoughtless and selfserving as that of the selfstyled professionals of

These guardians of education, while they differ in some ways, all seem proponents of the backtobasics

frenzy, in which we find no merit. We champion mastery, and we mean mastery, not minimum competence,

in language and number not because it is the goal of education but because it is absurd to imagine an

educated person who lacks it. Having that mastery, we can make of knowledge the raw material of

thoughtfulness and judgment. Lacking it, we can make of knowledge nothing more than the substance of

The backtobasics enthusiasts, who never fail to note the paramount importance of being able to read

wantads and to write letters of application, treat the skills of number and language as subdivisions of

vocational training to be imparted and done with, as though reading a micrometer and reading a paragraph

were acts of the same nature. In one sense, literacy is a trivial skill, easily acquired and neither more nor less

valuable than those darlings of the schools, the ''life skills,`` things like shoetying and crossing at the corner.

In another sense, it is an endless and demanding enterprise that is also the ground of our knowledge and

understanding, but an enterprise little likely to entice the minds of those taught literacy as a life skill.

All unwittingly, therefore, the guardians preach the same degradation of literacy that the educationists have

so long practiced, and, strange as it might seem at first, for the same reason. The greatest mischief done in the

schools is the attempt to inculcate certain presumed ''values,`` but the guardians understand that less than

perfectly. They fancy that the mischief lies not in the inculcation of values but in the inculcation of the

educationists' values rather than the guardians' values. All would be well, they imagine, if only the school

would foster the ''right`` values. And that is why they must make of literacy a ''basic`` life skill rather than a

way of life. If you want to foster in children certain values and preclude others, you must take care that they

do not develop an appetite for knowledge and the skill to make of it the raw material of thoughtfulness and

judgment. Jefferson's words are an assertion of faith, not fact; fact may be ''selfevident,`` but ''truth`` is not.

There is a momentous difference between coming to believe what we have often been told and deciding, as

Jefferson did, out of knowledge and thoughtful judgment, to ''hold`` something true. The former is a kind of

slavery and easy to achieve; the latter is difficult, for it requires knowledge and governed intellect, in other

Freedom is, to be sure, frightening. There is no telling what values free people will choose to hold. Decent

and wellmeaning guardians of values were horrified by the monstrous principles of the Declaration of

Independence. It is, of course, out of fear that the guardians preach the inculcation of values, fear of

Most of the guardians urge things like the study of history and economics ''emphasizing the benefits of the

free enterprise system.`` We wholeheartedly share the guardians' devotion to the free enterprise system, but

they obviously don't share our equal devotion to the study of history and economics, which will inevitably

bring the knowledge of some facts, events, and ideas that are not at all conducive to our wholehearted

devotion to the free enterprise system. When we study history from a certain point of view, we do not study

history. If our students someday discover, as in fact they will, that we were sometimes mistaken in our

knowledge of history, they will probably forgive us. But if they discover, as in fact they do, that we have

misrepresented or omitted knowledge in the service of some values, they will learn to distrust both us and

If our values are grounded, as we usually imagine they are, in evidence and reason, then those who can see

the evidence and who know the ways of reason are likely to adopt them. However, if we find ourselves

tampering with the evidence and tempering the power of language, the medium of reason, then perhaps we

ought to reevaluate our values. Should that prove unacceptable, we should at least be able to see that our

interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to

promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice,

The guardians do differ in one important way from the educationists. The guardians have lost their nerve,

while the educationists still have plenty. The guardians, although they often wave the flag, do not truly hold

the most basic value of a free society: the belief that, given the choice, knowing and thoughtful people will

choose to continue in a free society. Those who do hold that value must guard against the guardians. But not

We misunderstand the dangers of schooling. We fancy that what is at stake is some obviously needed

widespread level of competence and ability, a large population of people able to cope with the demands of a

complicated and technical system. And there is, to be sure, some danger that we will have fewer effective

people than we need. But we have at stake in the schools something far more important than that, for what is

effectively precluded by the essential and pervasive ideology of the government school system is nothing less

We could probably say many things about the unhappy schoolboy who knows the value of a ticket and even

that ''people die every three second,`` but of them all the most important is that he is not free. His beliefs and

values are not his; he is theirs. He is possessed, as anyone must be possessed who knows nothing of the claim

that all things make on our thinking attention and who lacks in any case the perfectly learnable powers and

skills of thinking attention. Which is to say that that schoolboy, in company with countless millions of other

Americans, is held captive by illiteracy, and that we have in effect voted in favor of Proposition 3, which

requires that the ignorant must be unfree if civilization is to endure. But Jefferson warned us that that might

happen. What he did not foresee, unfortunately, was that we would find a way to make it happen.

Literacy is not a skill or a collection of skills, although it surely does provide many evergrowing skills; it is

rather a way of the mind, the individual mind, for there is no other, the habit of thinking attention paid in

language in the search for understanding. It is the only guarantee of freedom and the essential attribute of

knowing and thoughtful people who can choose. For free people, basic minimum competency won't do, and

that our schools now propose that shabby substitute for literacy is clear evidence that their collectivist

A government institution serves the aims of government. The aims of even the best government, as Jefferson

warned us, are not the same as the aims of free individuals nor can they be. Free individuals, capable of

thoughtful discretion, are the necessary check to the natural propensities of what Jefferson so aptly named the

''functionaries`` of government. It must follow, therefore, that if education provides us with free individuals,

it is not in the interest of government functionaries to provide education. They must provide something else,

but they must call it ''education.`` In this respect, no government is different from any other, and in the

Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply.

There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class,

Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved

are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt

and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the

power of thought is occluded and the power of deed brought low. That's why Lenin's bolshevism and

''Give me four years to teach the children,`` said Lenin, ''and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.``

He wasn't talking about reading, writing, and arithmetic. He wanted only enough of such skills so that the

workers could puzzle out their quotas and so that a housebroken bureaucracy could get on with the business

of rural electrification. Our educationists call it Basic Minimum Competency, and they hope that we'll settle

for it as soon as they can cook up some way of convincing us that they can provide it. For Lenin, as for our

educationists, to ''teach the children`` is to ''adjust`` them into some ideology.

Lenin understood the power of that ready refuge from logical thought that is called in our schools the

''affective domain,`` the amiable Nevernever Land of the halfbaked, to whom anything they name

''humanistic`` is permitted, and of whom skillful scholarship and large knowledge are not required. Lenin

approved the ''teaching`` of values and the display, with appropriate captions, of socially acceptable ''role

models.`` He knew all too well the worth of behavior modification. He knew that indoctrination in

''citizenship`` is safer than the study of history, and that a familiarity with literature is not conducive to the

On the other hand, Lenin knew that there was little risk that coherent thought would erupt in minds besieged

by endless prattle about the clarification of values. He knew that reiterated slogans can dull even a good mind

into a stupor out of which it will never arise to overthrow the sloganmakers. In this, our educationists have

followed him assiduously, justifying every new crime against freedom of language and thought by mouthing

''Most of the people,`` Lenin wrote, not in public, of course, but in a letter, ''just aren't capable of thinking.

The best they can do is learn the words.`` If that reminds you of those bleating sheep in Animal Farm, try to

forget them, and think instead of the lowing herds of pitiable teachertrainees, many of whom began with

good intentions and even with brains, singing for their certificates dull dirges of interpersonal interaction

outcomes enhancement and of change agent skills developed in timeaction line. Lenin's contempt was

reserved for the masses. These educationists, pretenders to egalitarianism, hold even their own students in

If you think it too rash to charge our educationists even as unwitting agents of tyranny and thought control,

consider these lines from a recent proclamation of the Association of California School Administrators:

''Parent choice`` proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide

individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the

true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute

and by which they are sustained. ''Family choice`` is, therefore, basically selfish and

antisocial in that it focuses on the ''wants`` of a single family rather than the ''needs`` of

And if you'd like to object, you'll see that these people also know how to answer Kautski. They'll just

Thoughtful people will discover some reservations about the voucher system, against which the California

administrators direct their strange homily. It does assume, contrary to evidence, that the ordinary American

parent knows what an education is and prizes it, and it will provide lucrative opportunities for even more

fools and charlatans than the schools now harbor. In fact, the best thing that can be said for the voucher

system is that it clearly terrifies the educationists and drives them to admit, out of a mindless frenzy,

apparently, for the admission is most damning, that ''educating the individual is but a means to the true end

of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are

sustained.`` They almost certainly say exactly the same thing in the schools of Albania.

It was the American promise that free individuals would be more important than any ''social order,`` and that

it was for them to choose how best it might be formed and sustained. Nor is it suggested in the Declaration of

Independence that the individual's pursuit of his ''wants`` is ''basically selfish and antisocial`` and

antithetical to the ''needs`` of the society. But then the chances are very good that no member of the

Association of California School Administrators has pondered the meanings of the Declaration of

Independence. Indeed, as inheritors of the ideology of Cardinal Principles, the California principals have

probably never so much as read it, since ''civics should concern itself less with constitutional questions and

remote governmental functions, and should direct attention to social agencies close at hand and to the

The common good. How splendid that sounds. But when William Blake once gave his thinking attention to

the perennial cry of those who justified their deeds in the name of the common good, he had to conclude:

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea

of the scoundrel, hypocrite, flatterer; for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely

The deepest, most pervasive theme of American educationism is the rejection of minutely organized

particulars for the sake of vaguely appreciated generalities. If the former are the substance of Art and Science,

I can't think of any pat answer to that question, but I cannot help believing that those whose minds wander in

the work of vaguely appreciated generalities and who cannot give themselves to the organization of minute

particulars cannot in any sense be free, and may not, in some special sense, be fully human. If the direction of

thinking attention to the claim of events and facts is the essentially human act, performed in the essentially

human medium of language, what can we say of those who are unable to perform that act, but that they are

Rousseau had it backward. We are not born free. We are born in the chains of the random and reflexive, and

are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect

the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is

impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars. It was a

premise of the founders of American educationism that what they called ''ethical character`` could be

instilled, indeed, might better be instilled, without attention to intellectual discipline. Out of that premise

they devised their ''affective domain`` and set it over against the merely ''cognitive domain`` as a somewhat

more than equal and independent principality, where they might wander comfortably among the

unmeasurables, the feelings and sentiments and values and ''worthy emotional responses.`` Of that affective

domain I must now say four things, which, although I have to put them in some order, are equally important:

It is out of resort to the affective domain that educationists can palm off as ''education`` everything

from folk dancing to bulletin board decoration and visits to nursing homes, and, at the same time, so

neglect the merely cognitive disciplines that they can spend twelve whole years in the teaching of

The affective domain is a logical absurdity. Feelings, sentiments, values, and responses have causes,

attributes, and consequences. We can know nothing of them, we can neither understand nor judge

them, without the work of the intellect in the organization of minute particulars. You may call

''affective`` whatever you please, but you cannot deal with it unless you are cognitive.

The feelings, sentiments, values, and responses of our children, or of any citizens, are none of the

government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the

emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous. That it should, out of that intrusive

manipulation, provide us with who can say how many young citizens who cannot think coherently

but who do ''appreciate`` the value of a fifteendollar ticket to a rock concert is an unspeakable

It is the supposed existence and paramountcy of the affective domain that have made the teachers'

colleges what they are, nurseries of selfindulgence, unskilled ''creativity,`` and halfbaked

pseudometaphysical incantation. Silly as it may seem, training in the efficient storage of chalk and

erasers would actually be of more value to the incipient schoolteacher than a whole experiential

continuum of intercultural awarenessenhancement, but if teachertraining were devoted only to the

cognitive it could be very quickly accomplished by very few people. The professionals of education

can justify their continued employment in great numbers only if they can convince us that they alone

can initiate supplicants into the mysteries. It is only in the cognitive domain, which they scorn, that

Nevertheless, and although the colonists could hardly have been more oppressed by the king than we are by

the schools, there seems to be no hope of a Declaration of Independence, to say nothing of a revolution. This

time, the people, already massively indoctrinated by the values teaching of the schools, are willing parties to

their own oppression. We want the schools to teach values, and we believe what they have told us, that

concrete knowledge and strict intellectual discipline are not only separate from ''ethical character`` but

The makers of Cardinal Principles were true prophets when they said that, where the formation of ''ethical

character`` was intended, the school was ''the one agency that [could] be controlled definitely and

consciously.`` And they did it. The national ''ethical character,`` whatever it may be, didn't just happen; it is

the result of definite and conscious control. Nor can we free ourselves from that control, not only accepted

but even approved by most Americans, without an enormous change in many millions of individual minds.

Such a change could be wrought only through universal public education, which is exactly what we do not

have. We have universal public schooling, which is not even close to education. The confusion between

schooling and education, which suffuses every one of the Seven Deadly Principles, and out of which the

principlemakers did their work, is what the schools have by now taught us all. It is their only triumph, the

only lesson they have taught universally and with complete effectiveness; but it is enough. It took them a bit

more than four years, to be sure, but they do seem to have planted a seed that can never be uprooted. Lenin

As I was approaching what I hoped would be the end of this book, I received a fat manila envelope from a

highranking staff officer in the educationistic bureaucracy of the State of New York. His letter, clipped to a

great wad of that slick and grimylooking paper that comes out of copying machines covered with that

Your advice and example are among the influences on the attached grant proposal to the

National Endowment for the Humanities for ''A Program of Renew Education in Basic

Humanities Disciplines.`` Because of your influence, I thought you ought to get a copy of the

proposal while we are still awaiting the results of NEH's peer review, which we should have

in March and April. I would like to hear your reaction to the proposal (which, you will note,

includes a fieldtest in New Jersey), and I hope that we will be able to call on you for advice

on the project if it is funded. Please don't hesitate to write or call me with questions or

Although the writer was not unknown to me, and although I had actually once spent a day pattering about this

and that at the headquarters of his vast bureaucracy, I could think of no way to justify calling that ''advice and

example,`` to say nothing of ''influence.`` Furthermore, I felt vaguely discomfited to be even a putative party

to that process in which one educationistic bureaucracy solicits a slice of our money from another

educationistic bureaucracy in order to remedy some newly visible deficiency caused by a third educationistic

bureaucracy. If the teachertraining academies of America had not devoted themselves for more than half a

century to militant antiintellectualism, there would now be no need for the National Endowment for the

Humanities to take some of our money and give it to the New York State Department of Education, which

will thereupon set about beginning to start to prepare to do what it damn well ought to have been doing all

along. Accordingly, in spite of my correspondent's advice not to hesitate with questions or advice, I hesitated.

As I hesitated, it dawned on me. Of course. I was looking at the latest Great Lurch Forward. The whole

history of American educationism can be told in Great Lurches Forward. When we recently noticed that even

the taxpayers had noticed that astonishingly few high school graduates could read or write, we made the

Great Lurch Forward into Basic Minimum Competency. Well, all right, said our educationists, now we know

what to do. That was what they had said when we were all so dispirited by the dread Sputnik, which Clifton

Fadiman reminded us, although in vain, was simply a flying dog in a metal box, but which frightened most of

us enough to make us turn for succor to the educationists, probably the only people around who couldn't

provide any. Aha! they said; now we know what to do. And they lurched forward. Since the day of the Great

Primal Lurch, the life adjustmentism of Cardinal Principles, they have lurched from one bold innovative

thrust to another. They have lurched out of ''selfcontained`` classrooms right back into them, lurching in the

meanwhile in and out of pods and modules. They have lurched from the old math to the new math to the

balancing of checkbooks instead of math. And now they are going to lurch into The Humanities.

The lurchers, notably imperceptive of irony in any case, see no irony at all in proposing that those who

couldn't even make us a minimally literate nation will now make us the possessors of the ''thoughtful

discretion`` of which Jefferson dreamed. Since I do know something about these lurchers in Albany who

claim my influence, I can testify that they are not cynical opportunists booking themselves cushy berths on

the next great lurch, but that is no consolation. In fact, I could wish they were cynical opportunists, for it may

well be that the false and mercenary preacher will convert, out of wellpretended zeal, more souls than will

ever be moved by decent, ineffectual honesty. And the Albany lurchers, surely decent and honest, will just as

Like all those who imagine that it is possible to change or reform the government education system, they

seem to have a mistaken metaphor in their heads. I think they see ''the schools`` as an apparatus of some sort,

even, as many educationists unhappily call it, a ''delivery system,`` something like UPS. There are the trucks.

They exist. They even run. You can put in them and then deliver anything you choose. All we have to do is

choose. If we choose some nice humanities, we'll deliver them. But government education is not a neutral

vessel into which and out of which diverse fluids can be poured. It is not even an apparatus that can be set or

programmed to do whatever we want of it. It is more like an elaborate and complicated organism that has

inevitably evolved into exactly and only the creature that can do exactly and only what it must do to survive.

It is even more like an extensive, interlocking ecosystem, something like the Great Dismal Swamp, in which

every plant and creature, and even the air and earth and water, are what they are and do what they do because

that's the way it must be. You can shoot the tiger, or you can stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce

Here is just one of the objectives of the ''Language Arts/English Syllabi`` as put forth in the proposal from the

New York State Education Department, already tainted, you probably noticed, by that slash, which reveals

that no one has paid any thoughtful attention to the conjunction, and thus to the exact nature of the

relationship, between those hokey Language Arts, already infamous, and mere English:

Instruction in critical thinking will be integrated into the classroom activities of reading,

discussion, and writing about literature and other writing of recognized high quality. The

complexity and difficulty of the reading, writing, and discussion will increase progressively

That certainly sounds great. But, for anyone who knows something of what is done in our schools and teacher

academies, who has seen how the work of the mind is done by the theoreticians who design programs, who

has an inkling of how education is governed and directed, some questions arise. Who will provide all that

instruction in critical thinking? Will they be the teachers who have themselves been exhaustively trained in

values clarification and in relating? Will those who carried signs promoting ''Quality Educacion`` and

''Descent Wages for Teachers`` cast light on ''literature and other writing of recognized high quality``? Will

the assistant superintendent for instruction, the exshop teacher with a small real estate business on the side,

devise the parameters of the plan to integrate the instruction in critical thinking into the various classroom

activities? Will that instruction be also integrated into the making of collages for the bulletin board and the

appreciation of other cultures at the Christmas party featuring the cookies of many lands? Who will decide,

and how, exactly what ''complexity`` is suitable for the fourth grade and what for the sixth? An exguidance

counselor turned principal? An exprincipal turned coordinator in Albany? Will the publishers and legislators

and professors of education disband their Triple Entente and leave the choice of ''literature and other writing

of recognized high quality`` to the critically thinking teachers? Will the parents, themselves unthinking

products of long years of values indoctrination and helpless against the random suggestions of any and all

indoctrinators, be tickled pink when their children bring all that critical thinking home? And you can

probably devise for yourself dozens of other depressing questions about what is in fact one tiny entry in thirty

Furthermore, we can see that in the schools history becomes social studies, writing becomes a communication

skill, literature becomes propaganda, and even science becomes brushing after meals. What will

''humanities`` become? I am sad to say that I have a clue, for in my own school I have seen recently a

supposed attempt to cash in on the next Great Lurch Forward, which, fortunately, failed. I say ''fortunately``

because had it succeeded we would in fact have been further than ever from the education of ''informed

To see why that failure was fortunate, you must first know some generally hidden things about a public

college. By ''humanities,`` for instance, we mean those studies that do not lead to clearly identifiable paying

jobs, and in fact we hardly ever use the word except when we have to distinguish those few and antique

disciplines from such things as teachertraining or business education, which are the routine enterprises of

the college. Furthermore, we never speak of ''the liberal arts``; we are prevented by a superstitious dread of

the kind that would prevent the surviving peasants from uttering aloud the name of Count Dracula. When we

do have to admit that all our students ought to share some body of knowledge, and can thus be passed off as

members in good standing of Western Culture, we call that what almost every other school in America calls it

''general education.`` General education, of course, is to education exactly what general science is to

science, a smattering of this and that. Nor is ''general education`` a euphemism for the liberal arts, and

certainly not for the humanities. It is, in fact, not an intellectual entity but a political device, the result of a

reluctant compromise among the teachers of everything from puppetmaking to selfawareness through

massage. It has neither center nor theme, and everyone, although for purely sectarian reasons, agrees that it is

One of our subcommittees undertook to reform general education. After many months of arduous labor, the

subcommittee brought forth well, certainly not a mouse, but something more like a hydra as big as the

Ritz a hydra as it might be designed by a subcommittee, however. Its details were only mildly interesting,

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

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 Ça 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 teachertrainee enrollments

decline, impart in a reallife 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

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 is not 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

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

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 customestablished 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

But the most unsettling revelation of that passage is of the automatic assumption that underlies the

characterization of the ''claims of disciplines`` as ''customestablished`` and ''provinces of instruction`` as

''coveted.`` What else must be true of one who automatically assumes that it is out of custom 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 preservice handson 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

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

The state of American government education is simply not a ''problem`` that can be solved. It is rather an

enormous fact of life, a selfperpetuating 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 fastfood

merchandizing, militant homosexualism, disco dancing, supplyside 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

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

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

Consider, for instance, the case of a certain tenthgrade 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 thoughtprovoking 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

I don't know whether [he] is right or wrong about the books. But in a public school system,

superintendent has to uphold them...What if a teacher decided to use Playboy or Hustler? I

think the school system has an obligation to set standards and to set curriculum.

Forgive me, reader, if I fear that you may have missed the main point of this little story. If you are

exasperated at yet another suggestion that we have put the yahoos in charge of the schools, then you

have missed the main point. That superintendent, yahoo or not and it doesn't really matter is absolutely

right. He recites with perfect accuracy the principles of an ideological collectivism. Now you might say,

speaking as an individual mind that can know, understand, and judge, that the difference between

Playboy and the Poetics is obvious. It is, quite simply, a matter of worth. But a superintendent is not an

individual mind but rather a functionary of a collective ideology. It is not his function to know, understand,

and judge, but only to function appropriately according to his place in the apparatus. (That sort of ''worker``

seems superbly characterized by the word ''apparatchik,`` the best possible job description for most of the

people who ''educate`` our children.) The apparatus is not intended to distinguish what is worthy from what is

not, but what is approved from what is not. That distinction requires only knowledge of the list, and it

absolutely precludes understanding and judgment. Therefore, from the point of view of the apparatus of

which the superintendent is simply a component, there is no difference between Playboy and the Poetics. We

have thus an educational system that, exactly because it is ''values oriented,`` can by its intrinsic nature have

Now, if you still dream that education can be changed by the people who work in it, imagine yourself trying

to discuss that little matter with that superintendent, the man in charge of the life and work of the intellect in a

whole school system, and who says, ''I don't know whether he is right or wrong about the books.``

Remember, he speaks the truth. He doesn't know. In that imagined conference you will see a miniature but

It is instructive to notice that when dissidents are unmasked in the schools, it is usually because of a book. I

mean, of course, a book, not a textbook. A book is the permanent record of the work of a solitary human

mind, to be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by another solitary human mind. A committee can

no more make a book than it can play the violin, but almost every ''book`` used in schools and in

teachertraining academies is written collectively and for collective purposes. The makers of schoolbooks

are ''writers`` only in the sense that the sign painter who labels bathroom doors is a ''writer,`` or the pilot who

draws in the sky slogans in smoke. Such messages enormously dignified in schools as ''communications``

can never, however long and seemingly complex they become, provide the substance of anything more

than collective training. Education comes from books. And it goes into books. Education arises when one

mind ponders the work of another. Thus, since the elements and circumstances of an education are beyond

number, since all minds are different not only from one another but even from their earlier selves, there is no

end to understanding, no final judgment. And that is why books are so scarce in schools and why a teacher

can find himself a pariah in the ''academic`` enterprise because of an essay by Aristotle. The schools are

devoted to collective conclusions, what that superintendent calls ''standards,`` and not to the interminable

(and to educationists ''selfish and antisocial") ruminations of understanding and judgment.

A magnificent education, as countless examples attest, can come from nothing more than reading and writing.

In the one we behold the work of the solitary mind, in the other we do it, but we do it in such a way that we

can behold again, and understand, and judge, the work of a solitary mindour own. In the cause of education,

there are no substitutes for reading and writing, nor do they require any supplements. Filmstrips and

flipcharts and all the countless gimmicks and gadgets that clutter our classrooms which are, by the way,

every bit as profitable as the antennas and jet exhaust fumes so righteously deplored by our humanisticist

educationists are the trash and pollution of education and reveal the schools' corporate belief that children

are mentally crippled and must be cajoled into learning anything at all. But the gimmickry of the schools is

more than simple cajolery, which most students see quite clearly as something between condescension and

contempt; it is an integral and large portion of a general program designed to prevent solitude. And while the

children themselves are pestered with values clarification modules and relating sessions and group activities

lest they fall into solitude, they are also protected from dangerous exposure to the fruits of solitary thinking in

others. Committees and commissions and teaching teams and curriculum standard setters make the

filmstrips and movies and tapes and slideshows and packets of learning materials. Their very teachers,

raised in the same tradition and then doubly indoctrinated in the teacher training academies, are not solitary

minds but collective spokesmen, not minds that pursue understanding but only mouths that transmit

communications. The system will find no fault in any teacher, no matter how scant his knowledge, who is

ever mindful of awareness enhancement and the parameters of remediational strategies in meeting the felt

needs of the whole child, but it will suspend without pay a teacher who brings into class a nonstandard work

Still, some dissidents do survive. And, because they are themselves solitary minds, some few lucky students

will find, even in the worst school, the beginnings of an education. The dissidents are those teachers we all

remember, the Miss Morrisons and the Mr. Martins who made we don't know just how some important

difference. And they will always make that important difference, although our schools of education make it

harder and harder for a solitary mind to emerge intact and independent. But they will save only a few other

solitary minds here and there. They cannot save, or reform, or even change the system. Two facts prevent

them: They are almost always teachers, privates in the ranks, the least powerful and influential people in the

schools; and, for all the good that they do now and then, their selfinterest is best served by the same

establishment that harbors and rewards the guidance counselors and curriculum facilitators and the

supervisors and superintendents and all the whole host of fools and frauds who could probably not make a

living in anything other than a government agency. They are the dissidents also government agents.

We have reached a point at which even Mencken's sound advice would be no help. Sure, we could probably

burn down all the colleges and hang all the professors, but that would still leave us with fifty state

departments of education, and a federal one, hundreds of educationistic research institutes and curriculum

development outfits, a like number of publishers and learning materials designers and manufacturers, who

knows how many awarenessorientated teachers' centers, and who can count what else, including the

National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Unfortunately, burning the

colleges and hanging the professors just won't do it. Our schools, a parody of education, are impervious to

anything less than revolutionobliteration and reconstitution. But that is impossible.

In the first place, nobody cares that much. It just isn't worth the trouble. The only ones who care, although not

that much, might be the dissidents, but they can never make a revolution. In America we have rules for

revolution, and obviously good rules at that. Who would make a revolution among us is expected to pledge

thereto life, fortune, and sacred honor. Some of us dissidents (I think I can speak for them) would like no

doubt to imagine pledging our lives in some great cause, but when you get right down to it there is nothing

more at stake here than the freedom of somebody else's children. Besides, we have contracts. Whether we can

pledge our lives or not they do not specify, but they do make it clear that there is to be no tampering with the

terms and conditions of our employment. As to our fortunes, well, you know very well that we have none.

Most unaccountably, the wise and happy society of ethical characters and worthy citizens that we have

fostered for so long in our schools now seems to value us less than it values bus drivers and trash collectors.

So we can pledge no fortunes, not even our guaranteed annual increments. And as to that sacred honor, which

sounds suspiciously antiquated and elitist, you do have to admit that it is a value notoriously difficult to

clarify in group discussions. On that we must pass. The closest we might come is to pledge our tenure, but we

can't. It sounds noble, of course, but it would simply erode the standards of the profession.