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THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number One…………February 1985

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Two…………March 1985

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

____________

* From Science and Absolute Values, Vol. II of 3rd International Conference on Unity of Sciences, London, UK/International Cultural Foundation, 1974. Our reader, who is scholarly as well as discriminating, had seen only the page he sent, but he did the bibliographical homework so that we could look up the whole thing. But we’d really rather not.

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Three…………April 1985

The Roll Model of Oregon

Thanks to Jonathan Nicholas, and others like him, if there are some others like him, we will soon be able to stick one in the eye of Godless Communism. Sure, they sent up the first Dog in Outer Space, but could it spell? Nosiree! But the first Teacher in Outer Space will be able to spell quite a few words.

Nicholas writes a regular column for The Oregonian, and he was one of the judges asked to select the best of the essays submitted by the teachers who wanted, for unaccountable reasons, to be Teacher in Outer Space. Like most journalists, he seems competent and decent–and a bit naive. He was actually surprised to discover that few teachers can consistently make their verbs agree with their subjects, and that a good percentage of them seemed to think spelling an instrument of oppression devised by the Dominant Class.

Poor Nicholas wrote a column citing some cases of teacherly spelling: “villans,” “canvessing,” “heresay,” “liazon,” “delt,” “cherrish,” and so forth. He cited also the teacher who said that he was active in “contract negations,” and the one who commended his philosophy of teaching as “very simplistic,” and the lady who pronounced herself a “strong roll model,” and even the deep thinker who wrote of the feelings “that all humans are err to.” To us, just the usual stuff, but to Nicholas, a surprise.

His column brought him–was this also a surprise?–a “storm of protest.” He was accused of “casting a slur on the profession,” of “taking advantage of [his] situation as an examiner…to expose candidates’ deficiencies to the general public,” and even of “trading in errors of fact.”

The charges are more interesting and revealing than the transgressions they seek to excuse. A man asked to make judgments is accused of “taking advantage of his situation,” his obligation to judge, because he does judge, and in public, the level of learning in those who are paid by the public for the level of their learning. To those who know little of educationism, that seems an astonishing insolence, but among the educationists it is just “our thing,” a bureaucratic version of omertá.

Consider another such case: In New York City, schoolteachers are just now being asked to grade their administrators–by checking blocks on forms, of course. (Educationists know better than to ask of each other thoughtful deliberation in writing; they are so busy with quality education that they don’t have time to look up all those words.) The administrators don’t like it, of course, but they have been assured that the results will be kept in the club, lest a slur be cast on the profession. Where some change seems called for, private and quiet discussions will take place. In public, where the money comes from, it’s Three Wise Monkeys City.

The school people, all having been ground exceeding small in their values modification mills of the teacher-training academies, can see nothing wrong in that arrangement. They have been persuaded of that doctrine into which they assiduously persuade the children whose minds they are given to modify, the belief that one person doesn’t count for much, that moral force, if there be any such thing, is an effluvium of feelings emitted by a “peer group.” Thus it is that they believe also, all unaware, in the doctrine of Affront by Association, by force of which they can imagine what no competent electrician or plumber would ever imagine, to wit, that if some electricians and plumbers are known to be no damn good, a slur is cast on the profession.

The doctrine of Affront by Association has immense consequence. By its power, for instance, girls are not supposed to be offended that it is Jack, not Jill, who can jump over a candlestick. Since girls seem not to know that by nature, it must be nurtured in them, and who better to do that than school people, who are affronted, not by their colleagues who can not spell, but by him who points them out?

Affront by Association engenders yet another superstition of collectivism, the doctrine of Innocence by Dilution. Well, if there are a few teachers who can’t spell, or make their verbs agree with their subjects, it doesn’t really matter. We should not judge the profession by a handful of examples. Which is to say, in a monstrous absurdity that doesn’t bother the educationists at all, Well, the important thing is that the profession can spell and make its verbs agree with its subjects. If this or that (merely) individual teacher is perhaps not the best “roll model,” that’s OK; the profession will serve.

But the profession can not teach a child to spell, any more than a profession can heal the sick or fly a plane. It takes a person to do such things. Every child in every school ends up learning, or not learning, from a person. So we are sorry to report that Jonathan Nicholas backed off in his next column by saying that “someone who writes an awfully poor essay may indeed be an inspirational educator.”

That’s the way they talk, in vague conditionals whose “truth” is not subject to any possible test, and whose negative form would be just as “true.”

When Nicholas writes a column specifying exactly which of those poor writers are the “inspirational teachers,” and, therefore, which not, he’ll find out what a real “storm of protest” is like.

G. K. Chesterton on Lost Lucidity

[As we ponder how to make some point, it often happens, by strange providence, that some reader, just for the good of it, sends in exactly the right quotation. Here is one of the most recent of those treasures.]

That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost. You will find it in the most spontaneous explosions of Dr. Johnson. Since then some muddled notion has arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because the man knows what he means and means to say it. I know not from what nonsense world the notion once came; that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate. But it seems to be a notion that a man must mean what he says, because he breaks down even in trying to say it; or that he must be a marvel of power and decision, because he discovers in the middle of a sentence that he does not know what he was going to say.

With Friends Like These

 

Together we can persuade our friends and colleagues of the wisdom of Lord Keynes, that practical men of affairs are often the slaves of philosophers long dead. We can break out of that bondage if we learn how to judge the live principles which do in fact filter our understanding of the present and the future. We can thereby become quite successful in our careers.

THOSE are the words of one who has himself been successful in his career, if being the director of something called a Council of Liberal Learning can indeed by thought of as a career. Anyway, that’s what he is, and his name is Irving J. Spitzberg, Jr.

We found his words in a little piece sent around by the Scripps-Howard service. To what end he cites Keynes, we can not tell, for that point seems lost in what follows, but we can tell that he is trying to increase enrollment in “liberal arts” courses by reciting the latest pitch of the liberal arts hucksters, who do need more students if they are to escape the dismal futures as fill-in teachers of Remedial Writing 101.

Spitzberg’s little essay is obviously a part of a larger PR Thrust, for it came out at just about the same time as the CLL’s snazzy Liberal Arts Awareness Enhancement Poster. If the poster was in fact dreamed up by liberal artists (so what would you call them?), it makes a good case for studying advertising.

In big-headed (symbol?) cartoon-style caricatures, it displays six supposed examples of the benefits of liberal study, presumably. But their power as endorsers of the liberal arts is strangely mitigated by the fact that they are extolled not for what they were, but what they could have been had they been students in today’s schools.

One of the examples, for instance, is of Marco Polo! He is put forth as a man who “would have made his quota in international sales,” and who might have been a geography major, with a minor in anthropology, which course of study would have provided his knowledge of other cultures and a global perspective.

Then there’s Benjamin Franklin, who “had the key skills to be an advertising executive.” Lousy luck. Born too soon. Just think what he could have been had he gone to one of our colleges.

Elizabeth I is presented as one who “would have been dynamite on the six o’clock news,” which puts her right up there with Michael Jackson as an example of what the liberal arts can do for your career. She, of course, might have majored in foreign languages, and thus found a multi-cultural perspective.

If it has never occurred to you that Bach “had the chops to create computer software,” or that Shakespeare “would have made a great corporate manager,” it is entirely due to the fact that you are not an imbecile. And if it now occurs to you that Tolstoy would have been socko at getting out the newsletter, and that Alexander of Macedon would have done a bang-up job of organizing the annual picnic, you should have a great start on a poster of your own.

Strangely enough, the poster makes no mention of facts that students want to know. Exactly what courses did the Queen take? What was Marco Polo’s grade-point average? Did Shakespeare develop his communications skills in a freshman composition course or in a creative writing course? And how about that Socrates? Did he really get his degree in philosophy?

Yes, and of course, Socrates is on the poster too. He is shown holding a mug of steaming coffee. He is praised for one “who had the wisdom for a career in human resource management.” Human resource management.

What trade he hath, who manages human resources, we do not know. He may be a prison guard, or a gatherer of migrant laborers into buses. Perhaps Eichmann, in the still watches of the night, dignified himself as a manager of human resources. (So why isn’t he on that poster, especially since, utterly unlike any of the celebrated six, he did go to college?) But this we know: that Socrates held it an act of unreason and aggression to manage any human resources but his own, and that to treat a person as an object to be used or as an agent to be turned was not the act of a reasonable man, but a form of impiety, the injury of a soul. When he told the jury that he would rather lose his life after defending himself rationally than save it through manipulation and persuasion, he said, Gentlemen, it is not my place to “manage” your human resources, your minds and feelings and beliefs, but only to see to my own.

Business prospers not simply because people need things; if we bought only what we needed, business would be a modest and seemly institution. If business is great, a mighty empire in whose service millions yearn to enlist, it is because people want things. Thus it is that business depends ultimately on the fact that wanting can be aroused, while the ability to make judgments about wanting has to be cultivated and practiced. Nobody has to learn to want, but everyone has to learn how to decide whether he should want what he wants.

The main business of business has to be, therefore, the arousal of desire, not an especially difficult task. It can easily be accomplished by flattery, cajolery, persuasion, intimidation, or any sort of appeal to the emotions, especially to envy, cupidity, vanity, ambition, and fear. Surely there must be, even in the world of business, serious and thoughtful persons who are troubled, realizing that their enterprise, like any other, has its roots in the soil of our frailties, and thrives, however good its intentions, in measure with folly and vice. Those are the people who should appear on that poster, for they are truly examples of the worth of education, in the world of business, or any other.

What would we say of a man who is not the least bit troubled about the way he makes his living, into whose mind has never crept the faintest suspicion that he lives by the weakness of others, and that he does them harm by encouraging and perpetuating their weakness? Should he, tomorrow, suspect for the first time in his life, that a “successful career” and a good life might not be exactly the same thing, would he have become better or worse? Among whom would you rather fall, those who have no doubts that what they are up to is right, or those who have doubts?

As the world is, we have all fallen among each other. It behooves us, each and every one, therefore, not to encourage each other in certitude, but rather to commend to each other a life of decent doubt and questioning. And therein lies the true worth of the study of all those so-called “liberal arts,” which might better be called, simply, education.

Here is a great, perhaps the greatest, difference between education and training. It is the right goal of training to provide, where certitude is possible, the means of discovering it, and it is the right goal of education to lead the mind into the strangely beautiful, disquieting realms of wonder and doubt, where no one can see either the big picture or the bottom line.

And what shall we say of a man, take Irving J. Spitzberg, for example, who demotes education to the rank of speed-reading or snappy dressing and urges it as a practical accessory for those who want to get ahead in business and have “successful careers”? What would we say of one who had the wisdom of Socrates, which Socrates said was nothing but the knowledge of his own ignorance and incertitude, and then decided to become a human resources manager?

If there is any coherent message in that silly poster, it is the curious advice to take up certain studies so that you can end up being far less than you might otherwise have been. The important understanding of “education” that we might take from the example of Socrates is not that he might have been a manager of human resources, but that he would certainly have turned down the job, no matter what the pay, as not conducive to the sort of life that he knew he wanted to live, and that he knew he should want to live.

In that fact, there is an intriguing irony, for our students would surely say, as most do, that, unlike Socrates, they do have to make a living, and do not have the “luxury” of living some life that they know to be good unless it happens to be sufficiently lucrative. He is an interesting pickle, who does not have the luxury of abandoning the pursuit of luxury, and who can not live well in one sense because of a desire to live well in another.

But that is the pickle in which we all find ourselves, whether we may be auditors of banks, or writers, or makers of pots. The need of getting and spending, all the nuts and bolts of life that the Greeks called Necessity, but mere Necessity, are natural enemies to our abilities, and our inclinations, to distinguish, and to choose between the better and the worse.

While it is bad enough that we must live in the No-man’s Land between the Necessary and the Good, it does at least serve us to keep alert and thoughtful. But there is a much worse condition not only possible to us but perfectly natural to us. Ignorance, the condition of those who don’t know that they live in No-man’s Land. They work hard, and get and spend, and scurry to produce, and dream of a future that will bring them happiness by securing and multiplying the very things that, all unaccountably, did not bring them happiness in the past.

Although, in these strange days, there are some who hold otherwise, we have no reluctance to assert that knowledge is better than ignorance. It is a conviction, no, a conclusion, to be discovered in exactly those studies now being put forth as handy and practical for those whose goal in life is to collect more of those things that will always prove, however large or numerous, not quite enough.

At first, the wealthy Vandals aped the Romans, and the poor Romans aped the Vandals. Later on, as the Vandals grew richer and the Romans poorer, all the Romans learned to ape the Vandals. There was profit in it. Long ago, the professors of the humanities discovered that there was profit in aping the educationists, but the star of educationism is falling. The profit now lies in hitching the wagons to businessism, especially since we still haven’t caught up with the Japanese. If the businessists are as canny as they say they are, they will surely refuse the alliance. Who needs the feeble assistance of people who can think of Socrates as a human resources manager, or who can suppose, or pretend to suppose, that the career of Marco Polo is a triumphant demonstration of the power of humane studies? There is, in fact, no shortage in the business world of people who are a lot better educated than that.

They have better taste, too. You never hear them claiming that Lee Iacocca, if he had chosen, could have spent his life leading humanity in the path of reason.

__________

Brief Notes

WE DO BELIEVE that this was the last regularly published and internationally circulated journal in the world to be set in type by hand, and the first to be set on Apple Computer’s do-it-yourself-at-home (or almost) combination of the Macintosh computer and the LaserWriter. It is not a bad system, and we intend to become experts at it. After a while.

The last issue, the first product of the new technique, did not delight us entirely, but it did teach us some things not to do, and a few things to do. It seemed a good idea to do the first such issue, for instance, entirely in the computer. That was not a good idea. From now on we will use the computer mostly for the setting of text; for titles, rules, and illustrations, we will go back to our own library of types and cuts. Many readers claim to like those old illustrations, however irrelevant they may be to the text. We are glad to report that we will be able to use more of them in the future.

IN OUR never-ending search for data for the formulation of a prologomenon to a definition of “education” as implied in the practices of the public schools, we have now unearthed datum number four hundred and seventy-two, which will remind some readers of an old favorite, datum ninety-six, the fact that in many kolleges nowadays it is possible to earn kredits for having taken care of houseplants and gerbils.

If school officials in Haslett, Michigan have their way–and why wouldn’t they?–high school students in that enlightened town will earn, if that’s the word, kredits toward their diplomas by “seeking treatment” for whatever nasty drug and drinking habits they may have been forced into by the influence of society as a whole. Those who actually take up residence for a while in a state institution other than their high school will get two kredits, and the ones who can come up with a little “treatment of emotional disturbances on an out-patient basis at an approved institution” will get at least one kredit.

“When the kids are going through treatment,” says Richard Beal, a school official and educator of Haslett, “they are in a learning process.”

How true. But what about the handicapped, all those aberrant loners who don’t have enough group spirit to take up drugs and alcohol? It seems only fair to provide them with an equivalent, one kredit for a bubble gum cure, say, and two for the indubitable “learning process” in a long afternoon of root canal.

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Four…………May 1985

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Five…………September 1985

Straws in an Ill Wind

THIS issue is devoted entirely to one theme, but then, come to think of it, so is every issue. It is Literacy, by which we mean some thing very different from what is meant in the streets and in the schools, which are nothing more than training grounds for the streets.

The climate of the mind in which we all must live is not dictated by a hard reality to which we must bend, as flight through the air is dictated by the laws of Nature. Literacy is not, like gravity, just what it is. It is what we decide that it should be. If we decide that literacy is something trivial and shabby, then the mind’s work in us will rise, at best, to the trivial and shabby.

But that is at best. We have done the worst. We have decided that literacy is one end of an elementary mental event that we call communication, something to do with filling out forms and figuring out the instructions for the filling out of forms, and to that level of shabbiness and triviality, somehow or other, we have not been able to rise.

Is there some hope that if we make of literacy something far higher and finer, we will at least rise to the reading of instructions and the filling out of forms? If we understand literacy not only as the ability to recognize the sentence that is preposterous, but the power by which the mind is kept in tune and the reason in frame, will eleven percent of Americans someday be able to notice circular argument and non sequitur, and thus destroy politics as we know it? If we understand literacy as the grasp of metaphor and analogy, an alertness to what is implicit in the explicit, will it bring an end to the Great Fundamentalisms of Educationism and Religiosity?

Yes. But that won’t happen so long as we believe that schoolers know what literacy should be. To dispel that belief, we’ll just tell you what they say.

A Sharing Time on the Rug

“Common sense suggests some connecting links between reading and writing,” says Charles Chew, chief of the Bureau of English and Reading Education in the New York State Department of Education. “Yet, for at least the last thirty years, reading and writing have not been connected.”

SELF-ESTEEM, as any educationist will tell you, is the highest goal of schooling. And that explains educationism’s loyal devotion to what is surely the greatest support of self-esteem. Sheer ignorance. There is no stronger armor for fools.

The quotation is from a report in the New York Times on one more of educationism’s already uncountable inventions of the wheel. Now, from the people who told us that children who spend more time in study will actually learn more, and that those who memorize will remember more, we have the stunning announcement that reading and writing have “connecting links.”

The article is by Fred Hechinger, in whom we do occasionally suspect a bit of irony. He has a way of quoting, with a perfectly straight face, the silly words of people with silly titles, as would serve them bloody right. But we wish that he would ask some questions.

Well, Mr. Chew, if all that is nothing but “common sense,” who, exactly, are the people to whom you must be referring in that oblique passive, when you say that “reading and writing have not been connected”? That can only mean that somebody refrained from connecting them, in spite of what must have been common sense for the last thirty years, too. Oh, by the way, just how long have you been the “chief” of this Bureau of English and Reading Education? And were you, for a while, before your enchiefment, one of the Indians in this tribe?

But the New York Times just doesn’t work that way. It may have something to do with what isn’t fit to print.

Whether fortunately or not, we have never been able to decide, but it is true that every time the educationists invent the wheel, they proceed at once to invent the broken axle. Now, having noticed that reading and writing have some “connecting links,” they have also discovered–oh joy!–that such details as grammar and spelling do not require all that painstaking attention that teachers have been giving them.

One teacher in Maine, breaking ground with the new educationist manual on the startling connection between reading and writing, which is called, of course, Breaking Ground, has made of her classroom “a combination of literary analysis and gossip.” Another, teaching second-graders in Calgary, Alberta, lets the kiddies “get their ideas across in ‘invented’ spelling.” “Had I stressed spelling and mechanics,” she says, as one of the contributors to Breaking Ground, “I wouldn’t have observed the same high quality of ideas.”

Well, who are we to say? It may in fact be true that, from where the educationist sits, the ideas of second-graders are worth a thousand “kats.”

A first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania describes her ground-breaking thus:

When the children began writing, I moved among them, listening to their pieces, and responded with encouraging comments. We concluded each day’s writing with a sharing time on the rug, in which two or three children presented their work to the entire group and received responses.

How sweet. And how expectable. No matter what wheel they rediscover, the schoolers will never let it roll, but only spin. Whenever they sniff the least hint that the mind’s life is inner and private, it’s right back to the old rug. Whenever they are reminded, however faintly, that thoughtful understanding is and can be only the work of a person, they arrange the desks in a circle and launch a rap-session, lest anyone suppose that he can work his own mind by himself, and discover, without the consent of “society,” what he thinks.

We are not deceived into the belief that little children have incisive and illuminating ideas. But we are no more deceived into the belief that children who have been trained to assume that the understanding of ideas requires no more than the corporate deliberation of the utterly uninformed will grow up to think for themselves.

There is, not only in the schools, but in the teacher academies as well, an unremitting, if all unwitting, conspiracy against solitude. In solitude only can the worth of reading and writing be discovered. So it is that reading and writing, to say nothing of their recently discovered connections, have been not simply neglected, but, to be more precise, distorted by schoolers.

In reading and writing, in literacy, which is more than reading and writing added up together, they care only for what comes out of the reader or the writer, which is subject to collective assessment and adjustment, and not at all for what takes place in the reader or writer, which is the important goal of either enterprise, and can be, and often should be, hidden from the world.

Writers do not write for the sake of passing on information, although they may well do that, but for the sake of discovering some truth. Readers do not read for the sake of receiving some information, although they may, but for the sake of discovering some truth.

In this respect, the world of school is no different from the worlds of hotel management or waste disposal. All they want is some information; they neither write nor read. They just communicate. That sort of thing can be done on a rug.

Leaflets for the Masses

Sure I stole. Why not? Where I grew up you had to steal to eat. Then you had to steal to tip. Lots of guys stole fifteen percent, but I always stole twenty, which made me a big favorite among the waiters. On the way home from a heist, I’d steal some pajamas to sleep in. Or if it was a hot night, I’d steal underwear. It was a way of life. I had a bad upbringing, you might say. My dad was always on the run from the cops, and I never saw him out of disguise ‘til I was twenty-two. For years, I thought he was a short, bearded man with dark glasses and a limp; actually, he was tall and blond and resembled Lindbergh. He was a professional bank robber, but sixty-five was the mandatory retirement age, so he had to get out. Spent his last few years in mail fraud, but the postal rates went up and he lost everything.

HALF a century ago, in what we suppose education’s palmy times, and among students at Cambridge University, whom we suppose a vanished elite, I. A. Richards performed a simple test with devastating results. He asked the students to write brief commentaries on little readings, and discovered the principle upon which our understanding of literacy ought to be built: If reading is understood as a skill that goes beyond the ability to receive communication, then there is al most no one who can read. Richards’ evidence and conclusions can be found in his Practical Criticism, a good read.

More recently, Alan Powers, who teaches English at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, repeated that experiment, to show, as we suspect that he suspected, that nothing had changed. The only important difference was that Powers’ students brought to their “understandings” of the test passage (cited, in part, above) their own supply of preconceptions and social beliefs, through which they, just like undergraduates at Cambridge, could not see the text.

In schools, there is an easy way to test whether students can comprehend that passage. We can see it now:

1. Which did the narrator steal?a) socksb) underwearc) dark glassesd) waiters’ tipse) none of the above

After six or seven of those, there would be the “thought” questions: How would you feel if your father were forced into retirement even though perfectly able to successfully maximize his potential through his chosen profession?

The passage is, as many of you will have recognized, from “Confessions of a Burglar,” by Woody Allen. It is also, as every single one of you will have recognized–we know our readers–funny. But Powers’ students did not notice that. Far from it, they thought it sad, a sorrowful revelation of a society that forces innocent boys into crime. Here is a sampling of their understandings:

…a tough, somewhat smart person. I get the impression he was raised in New York. Back in the early fifties when people had to steal to get by.

I think the story is very sad. That a person would have to steal pajamas or underwear so they could have something to sleep in. I’m sure it’s like this for many people… brought into this world with bad misfortune.

It’s hard for me to believe that his father was a professional bank robber. I never knew that they had to retire at a certain age.

The person writing this seems to be a real weasel. What really convinces me that he’s a punk is that he always steals petty little things. I mean if you’re going to go down the crooked road at all either go all the way or not at all.

Enough. It would make a stone weep. Just think: Someone has said, and said with all the weight of officialdom and “professionalism,” that these unhappy children can read. They are not tykes. They are college students. And someone with a license has measured their “comprehension” and found it fine. But they can not read at all. Not at all. What they can do is exactly what they have been taught to do-the pseudo-reading of the schools. They can eyeball the text with the intention of recognizing vocabulary and getting the gist of it. Beyond that, they can wander not into the piece, but out of it, into the soupy social notions of the affective domain, buttressed, as they must be, by collective ignorance of the sort that understands the early fifties as a time when people had to steal in order to get by.

There is simply no important, rational definition of “reading” by which those poor children can be said to have “read” that passage. None. But there is, of course, a definition that serves somebody else’s purposes.

Which brings us to Jonathan Kozol.

We like his work, although we think him a bit too meek and gentle a critic. For instance, in Illiterate America, his latest book, he guesses that about forty percent of American adults are “incapable of reading.” (We quote from Neil Postman’s review in The Manchester Guardian.) Over-optimistic, but no matter. The important question is still, Of reading what are they incapable?

Kozol is concerned with far more important things than the filling Out of forms and the construing of instructions, although he does not overlook those little problems. Rather, while he does not put it exactly that way, he is more interested in the general inability to read and understand political platforms, in which context “understand” seems to be another word for “believe,” provided, of course, that it is the true political platform, and not the other one. When he says, therefore, that millions are disenfranchised by illiteracy, he obviously doesn’t mean that they can not vote, but only that they can not understand why to vote one way rather than the other. He does not dream our dream, which is that truly understanding people would refrain entirely from choosing between evils of supposedly different magnitude. Kozol does dream, however, of a “national” solution to the literacy problem, a government policy bigger and better than current government policy.

(Whatever else can be said of Kozol, he does make the one best possible suggestion as to what to do about illiteracy. Stop whining and teach someone to read. Do it now.)

Which brings us to the work of a lady who has recently, although she doesn’t know it, joined us as another unpaid staff member. All she does is send us copies of her own works, thoughtful and illuminating, too, in order to show us where we are wrong. Good stuff. We steal from it.

One of her recent pieces is a hilarious review of a school geography text, in which students are informed that “the oceans supply the earth with a steady source of water, which seems to be necessary to support life.” But her most telling observations are of the fact that this text, like so many used in schools, seems rather a pretext, a “teaching” of something other than geography. After a brief description of South and Central America, for instance, the book suggests that the “geography teacher” ask the students what they would do to stamp out poverty in those sad regions of Earth. Since no one, not even a textbook maker, can imagine that some child will come up with exactly the right answer, the only purpose of such a non-academic diversion must be recruitment for the Children’s Crusade against Cardinals and Colonels, and also banana companies.

Elsewhere in the text, the teacher, who is presumed as little interested in geography as the students, is told that “this would be a good time to discuss with the class how little of the world’s area our country occupies but how much of the world’s resources we consume.” As to whether there is also a good time to discuss how much of the world’s nutrition we grow in so little of the world’s area, the text is silent.

Why they do such things, we can not fathom. Educationists are forever weeping, as publicly as possible, over every evil but one on the face of Earth. It is as though they wanted us all to believe that they could, of course, have been movers and shakers, since they know best how to move and shake, but that they humbly chose to serve, only to discover that the movers and shakers consider them nothing but servants. They seem to suppose that children are somehow improved by being brought to weep along with them.

But we do know how they manage to do such things. They themselves provide the shabby non-literacy that makes it possible to get away with that sort of “teaching.” And from an induced sadness about poverty in South America, the path is short and straight to that sort of “reading” that looks not at meaning but at some imagined psychological or sociological force out of which a writer writes. To come away from Jane Austin with a raised consciousness as to the sorry plight of women is no less silly than to read Woody Allen as an unwitting witness to “bad misfortune.”

Every member of our staff liked Reds. Perhaps we only imagine it, but it does seem that radical reformism has, in the past, often been lively and thoughtful, and productive, if of little else, of some awakened minds. Postman’s review, for instance, refers to the fact that Common Sense, within a year of publication, had sold half a million copies, equivalent to twenty-four million in today’s population. And early in this century, Little Blue Books (who remembers?) proved that “the workers” both could and would seek understanding from Emerson and Marcus Aurelius as readily as from Engels and Spencer.

In our time and place, the largest and most visible reform movement is government schooling itself, which seeks the reform of every institution except itself. It does not take its chances in the marketplace of the mind, standing on street corners and handing out leaflets for the masses. It shows flashcards, and promotes the notion that understanding is the result of “exposure” to the right flashcards, rather than the result of the sustained and orderly thoughtfulness that comes of literacy. Educationists simply don’t need any readers.

Theirs is a reform movement that puts its hopes not in wider-spread and better understandings, not in seeking the consent of thinking adults, but in the inculcation, in children, of feelings, which seem to need no judging so long as they are “sincere,” and which are very easily aroused in children of any age. To such a reform movement, the remarkable general literacy on which Paine could depend would be quick death. And that is why the schools will not teach true reading.

Nor could they. By now, the educationists have made a mass of themselves, and a mass that has never read anything but its own leaflets, written at the right grade-level, and printed large.

_______

Brief Notes

Shame at Last

WE once did a little piece suggesting that schoolteachers, like anyone else, might be better at their work if, rather than esteeming themselves all the time and for everything, they would consider the possibility of being just a little bit ashamed of some of what they do. All the rest of us are, as is right. Caught a lot of flack. Nevertheless, one Mary Futrell, leader of the land’s biggest teacher’s union, has agreed at least to consider shame. Like this:

Many cannot read a classified ad or the warning on a bottle of medicine. In a great democracy, this educational underclass is nothing but a badge of shame.

Wow. A badge of shame. How true. But it’s a funny thing. We have been looking all over for the badge of shame, which ought to be a pretty big one in a great democracy like this, but we can’t seem to find anyone wearing it. Maybe it’s something like the E. F. Hutton thing–oodles of malefaction, but not a single malefactor to be found.

THE summer months have brought in a surprising number of new subscribers. We can’t figure it out. We more or less agree with Reynolds Price, who guesses that, leaving aside guides to real-estate investment, sex and diet how-to’s, and the memoirs of whores of all sorts, there are about three thousand people in the land who read books. We thought we already had a good share of them on our mailing list, and we’re surprised and delighted to find a few more.

Many of them, however, ask for lots of back issues. Some want a complete set. We don’t have a complete set. But we do send whatever issues we still have to anyone who asks. There is no charge, but we would be happy if you send some stamps.

We urge new readers who want to see old pieces to notice the existence of The Leaning Tower of Babel, which is a collection of articles from roughly the first seven years of this sheet. It is published by Little, Brown, and, no matter what they tell you in the bookstore, it remains in print.

We plan also a reprinting of a few more recent pieces. We’ll let you know.

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

 

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Six…………October 1985

Yet Another Losing Season

 

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.–Kafka

ONE of our most respected readers has sent in his annual letter of condolence. He says that we seem still to suppose that we can win, but that he knows we can’t. He also knows, however, and this is most important, that it doesn’t matter.

But we are not out to win. We can’t imagine what that would mean. What is there to be won? If there is an enemy, it is nothing but Folly, mindlessness, the allure of the unexamined life. Who overcomes Folly wins all that can be won, and on the only field where that adversary can be brought to battle–in the mind. Who can say to himself, Now, right here, in these very words, I can understand the difference between sense and nonsense, has all that can be had in the fight with Folly.

Many of our most faithful readers do lament from time to time that we have no solutions to offer. That is true. But solutions go with problems, and not merely in a manner of speaking, but in a fixed and logical relationship, and the vast ideological establishment that calls itself Education is not a “problem.” It is a fact. It is a human reality, like war or vice. If we can consider it under the name of “educationism,” it is only because that is our choice of one particular rather than another, but that particular is only one manifestation of a great universal, which is folly, or, as we often call it, Unreason. It is not a person, but an it that lives in persons, and can not change or be changed without a change in persons.

We are not reformers, who usually seem to us persons who suppose that all would be well if only they could change other persons. We have enough trouble keeping our own minds in order, without trying to change those who seem to have no interest in doing the same for themselves. If we see, in them, the clues by which to order our minds, have they not already served us, as though we had conquered and subjugated them? What further should we require of them?

We think the poet right: Fit work for fools is the betterment of fools. The only fool we can make better is the fool who lives in us, the fool who shoots off his mouth without thinking, who stubbornly recites precepts and slogans, and who supposes that Earth would be fair and all men wise and good, if only we could “do something” about all those fools.

We think Aquinas right, too. In his famous refutation of Siger of Brabant, he provided an indispensable rule of thought, pointing out that he had refuted his opponent not by citing “documents of faith,” not simply by asserting B instead of A, but by his opponent’s own reasoning and out of his opponent’s own premises. If the “reform” of his opponent was his intention, he had an advantage we will never have. The opponent was himself capable of Reason, and given to it, and inwardly able to know it, and honor it, when he saw it.

We can, and do, engage the educationists on their grounds, as Aquinas prescribed. With the words of their own mouths, with their own premises and propositions, we reason, discovering what is there to discover–Absurdity. We have done it again and again. They are not interested. It is not in their set of cultural attitudes, as they would call such imposed limitations of the mind, to work by such processes as validation and refutation. And thus we always find ourselves standing alone on their own grounds. They are not there, where, by the feigned expertise of their language, they pretend to be. They will not “put up,” as one officer of the National Education Association has put it, with demands for “docile rationality.” And in their absence, to tell the truth, we are not interested. They are not our work.

It is not in their habits of mind, and perhaps not even in their powers of mind, to know that a premise dictates consequences absolutely, and that propositions can indeed, and should, be tested by logical discourse rather than the demands of convenience or the cries of the heart’s desire. They are not troubled by contradiction, for Truth is to them just a matter of feeling, or utility, or even of the predilections of social class, and knowledge, which is permanent, they do not distinguish from information, which changes ever. To their grounds, which are simply the grounds of all human thought, the grounds of considered statement and discourse, and of “quietly asking and answering in turn,” as Theatatus put it, we can go, but to their dwelling place, the misty Affective Domain, we can not go. We should not go. We will not go. In that land, there are no rules of thought. It is a bad place.

Aquinas would have understood, for it was he who warned us that of all opponents the only one invincible is Ignorance. Argument and analysis will not prevail against our educationists, who have yet to arrive at Education.

Many of our readers do wish that they, if not we, could indeed do something about the crippling mental disorders brought on young children by schooling. They have good reason to wish that; they fear, quite naturally and appropriately, for their own children. Or, sadly deeming the first generation already lost, for their children’s children. We do not, because we have no hope for the change of a fact of life, counsel them to despair. We urge them rather to mind their grammar. There is no point in asking the question: What is to be done? That is a buck-passing passive, which implies the possibility of a deed without a doer. The correct question is: What can I do? So ask it.

Someone, Santayana perhaps, has said that the best any philosopher can hope for is to row his own boat, taking, maybe, a few friends along for the ride. That is also the best any teacher can do, the best any parent can do, the best any one of us can do for any other.

You say you are not a philosopher? Piffle. And fie, too. When you bow down to schooling, you present your hind end to education, for the two stand over against each other. It is schooling that pretends to know what a philosopher is, and education that makes one out of any person who pays thoughtful attention to the meaning of deeds and the worth of doing, quietly asking and answering in turn. It is schooling that invents and licenses “experts” in guessing, who find a little truth only when they happen to lift it from poets. It is schooling that devises “disciplines” for the interminable searching out of the obvious, and makes “subjects” out of sentiments.

There is a persistent contagion in the orderly discourse that arises from the practice of thoughtful attention. A single case of it can, in time, infect the world. How better can we then endow, or compliment, each other, than by talking sense together? If some child of yours is taken in by the schoolers, it is perhaps because he hears no other voice. So watch your mind and your mouth, and wash them of precepts and slogans, and study good sense in his company.

Trivial Pursuits

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an important new theory which explains that millions of American students and adults are illiterate not so much because they can’t sound out or recognize words (although some can’t) but because they don’t have the background information they need to understand what they’re reading.

ALTHOUGH modern educationism imagines itself the result of “research” and what “the studies have shown,” it can itself be shown as the result of what Plato understood as the least and lowest form of all the mind’s attempts at understanding the world–Guessing, the only sort of “science” possible to dreamers, children, and madmen.

What you see above is a comment from one Albert Shanker, a teachers’ union leader, in which yet another half-baked educationistic guess is dignified as “theory,” a distinction that is itself the result of guessing that there is no need to distinguish between a theory and a guess.

Educationists do, however, find it useful to distinguish between guesses that they like and guesses that they don’t like. Nowadays, they like especially any guess that will permit them to cook up something easy and call it the Secret of Literacy. The “theory” in question has been put forth by a certain E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a Porseffor of Eglinsh at the University of Virginia, where Jefferson no longer has any influence. Hirsch’s convenient notion of literacy permits Shanker to lament the sad but hypothetical case of “a perfectly literate Englishman [who] may not be able to understand . . . the sports page in an American newspaper . . . because he doesn’t know enough about baseball, football or basketball.”

Hirsch recommends what he calls “Cultural Literacy,” which will easily be achieved by telling children the names of various things and people. He provides sample menus–“Water and Mountains,” “Patriotic Songs,” and, most entertaining, a tiny alphabetical list (up to H) of “Pre-1965 People.” For perfectly literate Englishmen, of course, “Baseball, Football, and Basketball” can be added. Even porseffors of Eglinsh might be brought into some modest version of literacy by conning long lists of the terms used in waste disposal and poultry management.

We would admit that a perfectly literate Englishman might well be left utterly uninformed not only by an American sports page but even by a Hittite inscription or an operator’s manual for a cyclotron. We would not say, since careful thought demands careful talk, that he does not “understand” those things. That is true, of course, as it is true that an Englishman who is not moving is also not running; but those who would teach runners, unless they have degrees in Phys. Ed., of course, do not spend much time in trying to convince us of their “theory” that running requires movement.

To one who can not receive what is plainly on the surface, literacy is still many steps away, and so too is understanding. To one who can receive what is on the surface, literacy is one step closer, but only one step.

One of the “findings” of Hirsch is, however, absolutely correct, since it is also absolutely obvious. He seems to have noticed that the land is swarming with children who seem never to have heard of anything, although he makes no mention, as far as we know, of the equally obvious fact that some of those children are remarkably long in the tooth. (That’s for the Englishman, lest he fail to understand.) Our countless children of all ages know the mighty deeds of neither Alexander Haig nor Alexander the Great. As to David and Goliath, the Princess and the Pea, the name of that ocean over there, and even the first stanza of America the Beautiful, they are uninformed. Everybody knows all that.

And there are many reasons for all that. It is not an unrelated fact, for instance, that every day of the year forty American teen-aged girls who have never heard of anything can nevertheless manage to give birth to thier children, helped along in that endeavor, no doubt, by years of sex education and exercises in the enhancement of self-esteem. The children of those mothers, who make only one tiny entry in a list of children whose parents have never heard of anything, and don’t much want to either, may well be under-nourished in more ways than one. That is no exoneration of the schools, however, for it is the schools that made the mothers. And the mothers of the mothers, too.

It is a long time, now, that schooling has been devoted most energetically to the non-academic, the persuasive and manipulative ceremonies of the arousal of feelings and attitudes. It is a simple fact, and one upon which a decent sort of education depends, that the knowledge of facts has the power to change feelings and attitudes, and even the dearest beliefs. Facts do not take sides. If they are to be used in the persuasion and manipulation of feelings, they must be chosen very carefully indeed, and even then there is always the danger that one safe little fact may suggest, if only to one dangerous, alert little mind, some small possibility of another fact that is not so safe.

For those who would inculcate feelings and beliefs, therefore, the safest policy is first, to do whatever is needful to preclude alertness of mind, and then to make as little use of facts as possible, taking care to call them, even the tame ones, “mere” facts. And so they are called by educationists, who “recognize the point of view,” as Bloom’s Taxonomy phrases it, “that truth and knowledge are only relative and that there are no hard and fast truths which exist for all times and all places.”

(Whether to “recognize” a point of view is also, in their minds and language, to espouse it, we have to guess, but other evidence suggests that they mean the latter. In subduing alertness of mind, they start with themselves.)

Now, poor Hirsch is going to emit (“write”, of course, is not the apt word) a whole book of hard and fast truths that don’t exist, including a list of the names of some Pre-1965 people. We can hardly wait to scrutinize it. (“Read,” of course, is not the apt word.) It will “list thousands of words and concepts,” Shanker reveals. Just what we need.

And sure to be a hit, too. The school people will buy it because it will leave them free to relate to self and others by saving them the trouble, small as it is, of teaching history, geography, science, literature, foreign languages, and mathematics. (Hirsch will probably list Euclid and Newton along with Tolstoi, Cardinal Richelieu, Evel Knievel, and all of the Marxes from Harpo to Karl). And trivial pursuitists of all sorts will want to keep it right next to the Guiness Book of Records.

All of this is standard practice among the schoolers. First, they guess. Then, out of their guessing, in this case, their old guess that the learning of facts is a sterile exercise in the “mere,” they do serious harm to countless children. In time, but far too late for those children, they notice, when outsiders make some noise, that serious harm has been done. (They always put it in the passive.) So they guess again, and take, as they always do, profit from their guessing. A bold, innovative thrust is expensive, but, golly, we do have to pay if we want “quality education.” This time.

The next guess is already on the drawing board. “Future lists,” Shanker asserts, “will undoubtedly be less male, Anglo-Saxon, and white.” He says that not, as mere logic would suggest, out of clairvoyance, but rather out of intention. No matter what the facts, no matter who it is who does what among the ranks of the Post-1985 people, the schoolers will make what lists they please, for whatever purpose they guess to be useful.

And that is why they can never teach reading. They do not care for the worth in the book. They care only for what they want to happen in the reader. Thus it is that Shanker can say, “. . . there’s a legitimate need to provide reading materials [not books, of course] to enhance the image of groups.” Thus there will be a “legitimate need” for the right kind of list, to replace once and for all the academic disciplines out of which children might hear of something.

But, “until we can change the literate culture,” Hirsch admits that his lists will seem biased, having to depend on what is merely so. The italics are ours.

The Epistle to the Civilians

 

From the emphasis you put on castigating the educationists, I suspect your readership is primarily teachers. I am a civilian. My preference is for the pieces that encourage, explain and demonstrate (usually by horrible examples of its lack) clear thinking. Your piece on the father whose literal reading of the Bible led to the death of his small child was very moving and, in my opinion, a far more telling indictment of the failure of education than recounting grammatical errors.

SHE is absolutely right, the lady from whose letter those words are taken. The piece to which she refers is “Hunger in America.” and it is exactly the sort of consideration of the meaning of illiteracy and diseducation that we most want to provide. The mere display of the grammatical errors of the self-styled educated is not any more interesting to us than to her, and we never intend it. It is only when they are clues to meaning and the mind’s work that we find passives and participles worth any mention at all.

But she is wrong when she supposes that most of our readers are in the education business. Far from it. Some few there are, and many of them are careful to ask that their issues not be sent to the schools in which they work. If we do seem to castigate educationists, it is a strange sort of castigation, for, with a very few exceptions, they have no idea that they are being castigated. And their betterment is not our aim. For us, they are merely useful examples of the work of the mind done badly. That the work of the mind is done so badly by so many people who claim the title of “educator” is, of course, an interesting irony, but we think it more important that their mindlessness be revealed not as a ludicrous foible in the pompous, but as a poison that is spread wherever their influence is felt–which is everywhere.

In last month’s issue, there was a case in point, which point was there set aside for the sake of another. The Chief of Literacy in New York had said that “for at least thirty years, reading and writing have not been connected.” We can say one supremely important thing about his saying–It is a lie. Had he spoken for himself–“I have (or have not) connected reading and writing”–he could have told the truth.

His saying is not only a lie; it is an arrogant and presumptuous lie, airily dismissing as of no worth countless legitimate members of “we” who have indeed, for more than thirty years, not failed to connect reading and writing. It is as though all the rest of “we” were not licensed to connect or disconnect in such matters, and that only the word of his “we” counted, the very “we” that got it wrong. Such an exclusion would surely be his defense against the charge of lying. He would say, Oh, I didn’t mean other people, I meant we who do know about these things. And that is cause to speculate as to the entertaining possibility the he and his literacy tribe were in fact the only disconnectors of reading and writing. Could be.

That leaves him in an intriguing position. He is either a liar, or a man who, having called himself an expert, and taken his pay accordingly, points out that he was not, after all, an expert then, but has now become one, at our expense. And it is now, therefore, that he deserves the confidence of those who have been paying him all these years, which is to say that in the past, he didn’t. Was he a liar in the past, willfully embracing a wrong understanding of literacy, or was he simply a fool, ignorantly embracing a wrong understanding of literacy, and an understanding that, as he now says, is utterly contrary to “common sense”? Is there some third possibility? We can’t think of it.

It is not because of his deceptive pronoun or his thoughtless passive that what he says is worth attention, but because those events are visible clues to what is invisible in the mind of the sayer. His “remediation,” should he seek it, lies not in avoiding passives, but in understanding his own mind well enough that he notices passives, and considers whether, in this one or that one, he has chosen wisely, with an eye for accuracy and clarity. That is not a “question of style,” or of “communication enhancement.” It is a concern for Truth. Any one who has the colossal brass to call himself an “educator” had damn well better demonstrate, in his every saying, that his first concern, like his second and third, is for Truth. He who does not care to measure and judge every single word that comes out of his mouth may easily do surgery or design microchips, or show someone how to do surgery or design microchips, or make his way to the top of any bureaucracy, but he is not fit for the betterment of others.

Our kind of concern for language and its meaning has, as far as we can see, nothing in common with the mania of word-buffs or the frenzy of grammatical vigilantes who just can’t stand to listen to television weathermen or to players of third base. Nor would we say that we just can’t stand to listen to the unwitting mendacity of the schoolers. We can stand it. What such language tells us about third-basemen is of no importance. They do not put themselves forth as leaders of minds. What it tells us about schoolers is of tremendous importance, for it helps us to understand why things are as they are, and we hold it an axiom that to understand is better than not to understand.

That, truly, is our whole endeavor. We are just trying to understand, trying to tell plain sense from rubbish. So we go, of course, to where the rubbish is.

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Published eight times a year, September to May, except January.
Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $10US;
Persons elsewhere, $14; Institutions, $25.

Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre;
nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Seven…………November 1985

In the Year Zero

 

We must honor the comrade children
who are uncorrupted by the past.

THAT sentiment is from The Killing Fields, a movie about the recent, and apparently perpetual wars and disorders in Cambodia. It is one of the slogans recited in the “schools” of that land, the re-education camps, where those who were once adjusted to the wrong life are re-adjusted to a different life. They live in the Year Zero, where there is no remembrance of things past, no history. And the children, who have never had any history, are appointed their mentors, accusers, and judges. The executions, however, are seen to by some of their slightly older comrades.

In their particulars, the re-education camps of the Khmer Rouge are somewhat different from the government schools of the United States. In principle, however, like the Hitler Youth Movement, or like any “education” provided by an agency of government, they are the same. Both are instruments of policy, social programs of manipulation in the affective domain, and intended not just primarily but entirely for the good of the state.

And, while the particulars are somewhat different, they are only somewhat different. All government adjustment programs must, by their own logic, have it in common that they do not look with favor on the study of history. Knowledge impedes adjustment, and understanding makes it impossible. It is important, therefore, that Japanese children remember Hiroshima but not Pearl Harbor, and that the young people of West Germany suppose the story of some pact or other between Hitler and Stalin is a transparent lie put about by elderly war-mongers. Among us, in these days, children remember the Datsun rather than the Death March, and when it comes to be the other way around, we will all know what to expect.

And in England there is Pamela Pullen, educatress. She goes by the title of Divisional Primary Inspector for the Inner London Education Authority. The libraries trouble her. She has actually found in them certain dangerous and illiberal books more than ten years old, dating from the bad old days that the young should not remember. There is nothing but the corruption of Classism to be taken from illustrations showing neatly dressed children, thus flaunting before the eyes of the slovenly poor the arrogant pretensions of the (once) ruling class. There is nothing but Sexism to be learned from musty tomes in which girls help their mothers in the kitchen while the boys and their fathers play ball. There is only the incentive to Handicappism and Racism in any story that does not include a West Indian hunchback who swims the channel in record time.

In short, according to Pamela Pullen, any book more than ten years old is just “not relevant” any longer, and not suitable in a school library.

There was a time, and less than ten years ago at that, when we would have been astonished and outraged to hear of the doings of a Pamela Pullen. Now, not so. We are a little surprised at her pretense to moderation–after all, why ten years rather than two?–but now we recognize such doings for what they are, nothing but Politics as Usual. She is, like everybody who takes pay from a school system anywhere on the face of the Earth, a government agent, a loyal member of the New Servant Class, which has discovered the joys of working for the most indulgent of Masters. She does not work for the children committed to her charge; she works on them.

Which brings us to Bill [sic] Honig, California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. He has concluded, presumably out of either sheer ignorance or astonishing opacity, that the public schools are “values-neutral.” That passeth all understanding here, where we have documented regularly for almost ten years the Great Program of feeling inculcation and attitude manipulation which has almost entirely replaced academic disciplines in the public schools. It is one thing to conclude that the values preached in the schools are intellectually incompatible with each other and all too obviously designed to form a certain society rather than to inform a certain mind, but who finds them “values-neutral” is either blind or up to some values-inculcation scheme of his own.

The latter is what we suspect. Honig has written a book called Last Chance for Our Children. If his title is accurate, then we can stop worrying about the Nuclear Winter, which would bring at least the benefit of the closing of quite a few government schools, and the consequent escape of whatever few children might survive. Maybe in the frigid Aftermath, some of them might find reason to wonder whether there is some difference between having been taught the values in whose service their parents blew the world up, and having learned, as they didn’t, how to distinguish in principle the truly valuable from the recycled trash of social and political ideology.

Honig, of course, wants the schools to “teach values,” which is exactly what the schools have been doing. He just wants them to teach some other values. He has met opposition among “educators,” of course, who call him “reactionary,” substituting, as usual, labeling for rational argument, and who suspect that what he really has in mind is prayer. That’s always the way it is with cranks and zealots. They always come, like matter and anti-matter, in reversed reflections of each other. And, like matter and anti-matter, they meet each other in terrible explosions that blow the rest of us up.

Honig does stumble across the truth, but, like any educationist, he gets up and hurries on. “Children,” he says, to the outrage of the romantic wing, “are not automatically moral or ethical.” He supposes that is so because they have not been told what is moral or ethical. Aristotle knew better. Children are those of any age who can not be moral or ethical, being under the governance of their appetites. They do in very fact live in the Year Zero. The aim of education is to bring an end to childhood. That is not accomplished by telling them what is good, but by showing them how to govern themselves and distinguish for themselves the good from the bad. Or we can leave them in Year Zero forever.

The Evidencing of Realization

 

Educators are dissatisfied. They have no specifics, but intuition tells them that something needs to be done. Realization of neglected human potential is evidenced when we use single factor tests of general intelligence. Emphasis on mental abilities points vaguely at the need for a more comprehensive program. It may become acceptable to assume that cognitive ability cannot be nourished apart from affective and/or psychomotor consciousness. The range of criteria in the process of assessing giftedness needs to consider differentiated programming.

EVERY year, as Turkey Time draws nigh, we like to find some truly deserving member of the academic tribe upon whom to bestow the exclusive and prestigious Order of the Steaming Bird. The competition this year, as in every other year, has been ferocious. So many worthy candidates, and, alas, only one Steaming Bird of 1985.

But choose we must, and this year’s winner is a certain Pat Swanson, who is something or other at the Campus Laboratory School of Minot State College in North Dakota. You see above a small but superbly typical example of Pat’s really swell and bird-worthy work. We found it in Perspective, a poopsheet emitted by that state’s Department of Public Instruction. Her little essay is called “The Development of Immediate Criteria to Indicate Giftedness, Precocity in Children.” The comma alone is worth a little slice of the bird.

Pat is into giftedness. It’s the coming thing. It’s also the going thing. Lots of dough to be shelled out there, especially now that giftedness has at last been officially defined by no less an authority than the United States Office of Education. The gifted, we now know, are “those children, as identified by professionally qualified persons, who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of high performance.” Pat is, ça va sans dire, a professionally qualified person.

Even her prose is professionally qualified. Out of no specifics, realization is evidenced. Emphasis points vaguely at a need, in true professional fashion, while range, the range of criteria, needs to consider. Now is that qualified, or is that qualified?

Qualifying, in fact, is their specialty. Notice how carefully Pat tells us non-professionals that we’d better brace ourselves for the day when “it may become acceptable to assume that cognitive ability cannot be nourished apart from affective and/or psychomotor consciousness.” Educationists, of course, have never had any trouble deeming it “acceptable to assume” where no certain knowledge can be had; but, like a kind teacher of slow children, Pat does no more than hint that soon the rest of us just may want to join them in that darling form of convenient irrationality. And, in the unlikely case that we prefer to do without the assumption by which the Affective Domain has been made a mighty kingdom, well, all she said was “may.” Neat job.

As for the educationists, though, they’re going to stick with it no matter what. Intuition tells them, even without specifics, that the DOE is right, and that giftedness is to be found in:

general intellectual ability

specific academic aptitude

creative or productive thinking

leadership ability [neat, eh?]

visual and performing arts

psychomotor ability [even neater!]

Is this, or is this not, a Great Democracy? Can there be anyone here who is not gifted? Surely, as even the apostle says, there are gifts and there are gifts. Why should the kid who has a great jump-shot, or a wonderful way with a spray-can, be left out of what Pat so aptly calls the “more comprehensive program,” at whose obvious need emphasis points vaguely?

“Our nation’s most valuable natural resource” she says, “is demanding an education. The response has proven successful. As we provided programs for individuals to achieve their exceptionality, the youth population has demonstrated potential. The lack of a rigid definition of giftedness preceding the program may assist the developers. The definition can be altered to fit the differences of each individual.”

Splendid. What could be better than a definition that can be altered as qualified professionals find convenient? As to whether such an arrangement can truly be called “creative thinking,” we can hardly say, since we can not speak as qualified professionals. We incline a bit to the unqualified side. But “productive” it certainly is. It could easily produce as many Giftedness Enhancement Programs as there are kids in the schools.

In fact, these educationists are pretty damn gifted themselves, and we would urge some special and appropriately expensive program just for them, if it weren’t for the obvious fact that they aleady have one, the one we call School.

____________

The Knowledge-Acquisition Component of the Experiential Continuum

 

Intelligence is the mental capability of emitting contextually appropriate behavior at those regions in the experiential continuum that involve response to novelty or automatization of information processing as a function of metacomponents, performance metacomponents, and knowledge-acquisition components.

THERE be two things, yea, three, which trouble the earth, and three for which the mind is boggled; the freshman composition, the exculpatory clarification of the official spokesperson, and the Definitive Findings of the Highly Qualified Professional of the Insubstantial.

What you see above is a quotation from Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence, by one Robert J. Stemberg. We found it in Science, in a review of said book. We are interested in intelligence, and would like to read anyone’s speculations about it, but since we were unable to understand the review, we have no hope of understanding the book. We must rest content with the reviewer’s summary:

The general message of Beyond IQ is that theories of intelligence have been dictated by available measures of intelligence and that a broader view must be taken. The locus of intelligence is not only in the individual, or only in behavior, or only in the context of behavior. The triarchic theory attempts to direct attention to all of these.

Our own “theory” of intelligence, we must confess, is not exactly triarchic. It isn’t even biarchic. It is Monarchic. Whatever else the intelligent mind may be, it is surely a ruled mind, and ruled, furthermore, by some consistent and absolute sovereign, who favors no party and whose laws do not change with fashion or whim.

That isn’t truly a theory, of course, but a metaphor. There is a difference, and the mighty quackeries of our time, which Peter Medawar^* has called “the unnatural sciences,” are preached and practiced by those who don’t understand the difference, lacking, perhaps, the intelligence to understand it.

All the thinkers of the past thought about thinking, but the notion that intelligence can and should be “defined” has only recently come among us. It is mostly the invention of the psychologists, and especially the pet preoccupation of the educational psychologists, who want, like all educationists, not truly to know what something is but how to do something to other people. So it is that the reviewer can state as though it weren’t preposterous the astonishing fact that “theories of intelligence have been dictated by available measures of intelligence.” That is to say that those who have been busily “measuring” intelligence have consistently done so in the absence of any clear idea as to what they should choose to measure. It is as though a man should presume to tell us all about seashells by pointing to the collection he assembled before he knew what seashells were, and claiming as well that his tin cans and candy wrappers were examples of various different sorts of seashells, which might even be seen as components, and the very stuff of metacomponents, of the capability of emitting contextually appropriate behavior in some as yet unknown species of clams and oysters.

And then there is that business about the “locus” of intelligence, which Sternberg has detected, if the reviewer has read him aright, “not only in the individual.” A diverting thought. It almost makes us want to read the book. What other “locus” could he have in mind? Could his own thought about that locus be somewhere other than in mind? Is he, like the educationists, asserting that understanding an idea is like dragging a great block of stone up the side of a pyramid, a job that even very feeble people can bring off if only there are enough of them? Is it something spooky, like a Sinngeist, perhaps, an invisible vapor of intelligence that can be detected, but only by a Highly Qualified Professional, seeping forth from the assembled minds of the sixth grade rap session, or of Society as a Whole, or even, on a good day, of the House of Representatives?

What person needs to “define” intelligence, or compassion, or honor, or any other insubstantial and exclusively human attribute? For a person, it is enough continually to consider how to live in accordance with what he means by those terms, and whether he makes sense in his considering. That is already a mighty work. He who would instruct the rest of us as to what those insubstantials are, must have something other in mind than searching out the best truth he can discover and considering how he should live. He must be getting ready to tell us, and with “scientific” authority, how we should live.

Definers of the insubstantial are always agents. Their imagined definitions–whether of intelligence, or tolerance, or good citizenship–are always tendentious, always the groundwork for some agenda. Or have we missed something? Is there some other use than the social manipulations of schooling to which all intelligence testing and defining has been put? When the Great Triarchic Theory gains acceptance, will the understanding of some child be deepened, or will some Innovative Thrust be funded?

The wolf published his definitive findings as to Prudence, but the doe, wiser than we, chose not to read them.

Brief Notes

IN FACT, we did have a little mail about a certain Jane Austin, an author hitherto but little known to most of our readers. We would love to give you the titles of some of her major, one might even say “pivotal,” works, but we just don’t happen to know of any.

To tell the truth, it was Jane Austen, with an “e,” whom we had in mind. We are heartily in favor of the reader who wrote to say that we deserved all the cries of Fie! that we would get. We’ll say it too. Fie!

It is a strange and interesting sort of mistake. A proofreader who misses it misses much more than a typo. An editor who lets it get by commits what is best understood as an irreverence, an act of disrespect. It could be excused only by the same ignorance that would disqualify him from his work. Had we discovered him out there in the world, we would speak thus to such an editor:

Think, continually, twerp, of those who were truly great. For your sake, for your goodness and for your joy, the great nourishing spirits, all of them mothers and fathers of us all, sought out truth, and left it here and there for us to find. Long dead, they speak to us still, and we, their dutiful children, are nourished by their words–by their very words, the signs they made on paper. We read, we mark, we learn, their words–nothing but their words. And the words are enough. All that we can know and understand comes from their words, and the words that we can come to speak by their teaching. Without the words of the truly great, we are brutes, and dumb.

Their very names command respect. Truth we love, but the truth-teller we love and praise as well, for there is no Truth but what some person has found and told. It was not out of heedlessness and haste that Jane Austen found and told you some Truth. But it was out of heedlessness and haste that you deprived her of praise and gave it to someone who isn’t. Don’t do it again.

 Freedom of the Press and License, Too

WE are often asked permission to reprint or duplicate or in some other way to circulate the pieces that appear in THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN. It always seems to us a good idea, and we always grant such permission. In fact, you may take this little notice as prior written permission to do likewise in any fashion that seems good to you. We neither ask nor expect any form of payment, but we would like to be cited as the source. But if admitting that you read this sheet will get you into hot water, we will be the first to understand.

____________

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

–Stephen Spender–

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

____________

* “Unnatural Science” is one of the many intelligent essays in Pluto’s Republic, a good book for those who want to think.

THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN

Volume Nine, Number Eight…………December 1985

The Year Zero Forever!

 

The future of the world depends on our willingness to suspend our own judgment of thoughts that we do not as yet understand, feelings with which we are not yet able to identify, and actions that we do not as yet approve.

ONE of our staffers has a job at a nearby State Mental Institution. He is not exactly one of the inmates, which is to say that he is not at the policy-making level, but he isn’t exactly right in his head either. All of that stuff rubs off, and on.

These days, his mind is bewildered by Critical Thinking, one of the latest trends in the treatment of mental cases of every sort. It is now clear–at the policy-making level–that such courses of cure as Mathematics Treatment and History Treatment and Language Treatment must have been conducted entirely without thought and have thus not provided any Thinking Treatment. That much, our man can understand. What troubles him is the difference and how to detect it–between Thinking Treatment and that Critical Thinking Treatment. Is the latter a special case of the former, and a threat of things to come? Will it be only one of the many future offerings of the Thinking Treatment Department? Will that soon-to-be flourishing department also provide, along with Creative Thinking and Business Thinking, such nifty novelties as Tolerant (uncritical) Thinking, Family Thinking, and even Career Development Thinking? And what’s to be done about staffing? Can just anybody come bopping in and dose out the Minority Thinking, or will it have to be a fully qualified Minority Thinker? And will Mother Theresa really agree to serve as a consultant for a minor concentration in Compassionate Thinking?

Such is the state of his mind. Nor is he consoled by the intriguing fact that Critical Thinking is taught, at his state mental institution, in accordance with the customary logic of such institutions, only to the sufferers who have conclusively demonstrated that they are utterly unable to read, write, or cipher.

We would like to tell him, Pooh. It will all blow over. But we’re not so sure, for we have recently come to see, if not to understand, the looming of a new Thinking. A big one.

The epigraph above is from a truly remarkable essay by a certain–all too certain–Julia To-Dutka, who is yet another assistant professor of education at Montclair State College.^* Exactly what assistance, and to whom, an assistant professor is supposed to provide, we have never been able to figure out, but this one has certainly assisted us into Fear and Loathing, and gloomy forebodings about Global Thinking, of which mysterious and baleful aberration her essay is a perfect example. It can be found (and we urge the finding, for we can never do it the justice it deserves) in the New Jersey section of the New York Times, September 22, 1985.

Global Thinking, like its apparent progenitor, Ethnic Thinking, seems to derive from the notion that we, on the one hand, would be enormously improved morally by studying the mating customs of the Ainu, and trying out some of their recipes for blubber, but that, on the other hand, the Ainu can learn from us nothing but crass materialism and callous indifference to the suffering of others, deficits of character to which the Ainu, thanks to their ignorance of us, are immune.

To that sort of general understanding, Julia To-Dukta adds the specific caveat that nothing less than “the future of the world” will depend on our readiness to “suspend judgment of…actions that we do not as yet approve.” Should it prove the case, for example, that we deem the mating habits of the Ainu as disgusting and reprehensible as their recipes for blubber, we must remember that we are culturally blind, and that we must learn to approve.

(Do you remember Alvarado? He was School Chancellor of New York until he got caught in strange dealings–big loans from pals and interesting jobs for ditto. At one point, he suggested that the only wrong-doing in the whole mess was really on the part of the reporters, whose parochial ethnocentricity had led them to misunderstand the folkways of Hispanic culture. Global Thinking.)

Another notion of the Global Thinkers is that “the world is no longer insular.” What that means, we don’t know. It should mean, of course, that the Martians have landed, but, if they have, no Global Thinker has mentioned it. If it means only, as Julia To-Dukta says, that “individual countries no longer can insulate themselves from the affairs of other countries,” then it is a distinction of dubious value, revealing also the fact that Global Thinkers feel no need to study history. Indeed, they imagine, and very much want to imagine, as this lady puts it, that “In a human sense, we live in a world severed from its ties to the future, as well as to the past.” She dreams not only of the Year Zero, but of a permanent Year Zero.

Even in that day when the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold–whose fold would that be, Julia?–the world was “no longer insular.” But Global Thinking is simply the newest version of Current Events Education, the trivial pursuit by which millions of us were convinced that particulars pop into and out of existence at random, and blinded even to the possibility of suspecting that history might unfold in obedience to some principle, and that events are the children of ideas.

Suddenly, we understand Thoreau’s contempt for newspapers. There is some absolute difference between those who are what they are by the force of events, and those who can make themselves what they ought to be by having ideas.

And Furthermore…

The great ambition professed by public school managers is, of course, education for citizenship and self-government, which harks back to Jefferson’s historic call for “general education to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” What the public schools practice with remorseless efficiency, however, is the stifling of self-government. When 58 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third party in America, we are dealing not with a sad educational failure, but with a remarkably subtle success.

Walter Karp Harper’s, June 1985

The Bright Angelic Mills

In a world where wands are waved over uniform product codes in supermarkets and where kids have personal computers…just why are we spending billions to teach arithmetic in the schools?

—Anthony Oettinger

Wise men say, Callicles, that heaven and earth, gods and men, are held together by the principles of sharing, by friendship and order, by self-control and justice; that, my friend, is the reason they call the universe “cosmos,” which is to say “order,” and not disorder or licentiousness. Clever though you are, you seem not to have paid enough attention to these matters; it has, in fact, escaped you what a mighty power is exercised, both among men and gods, by geometrical equality. And it is your neglect of geometry which brings about your opinion that one should strive for a larger share than that which other men possess.

—Socrates

THAT Oettinger fellow also asks, “Exactly what is the meaning of penmanship when keyboard skills are becoming more important?” We are abashed. For all the attention and thought we have given to reading and writing, we do have to admit that we have never elucidated the “meaning” of penmanship.

Oettinger is just as expert in history as he is in the art of writing. “In 1100,” he tells us, “educated people talked, only menials like clerics wrote. So the snobbery of writing only began around 1300. Before that snobs only spoke.” So there.

But that Oettinger fellow is not, as you probably suspect, a taxi-driver in Hoboken. We have the word from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record that he is a teacher of “applied mathematics” at Harvard, and a consultant to Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, as well as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the U. S. Defense Communications Agency. That tells us a lot about the state of our Republic, in which menials like clerics have been made obsolete and replaced by menials like consultants. And his words, along with many other such, were spoken–not penned–to a conference put on by the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy.

It is, of course, unlikely that we would be able to explain anything at all to a mind that equates writing with penmanship, thus easing enormously the work of literary criticism by making it possible to prove conclusively that Flaubert, for instance, was by far the very worst writer of his time. There is no hope of rational discourse with a man who holds that the “modern workplace” no longer needs “the people who could write and do arithmetic” in the “dark satanic mills and the Dickensian counting houses,” and that even “keyboard skills” will prove dispensible once the computers have learned to understand and produce speech, like the snobs of yesteryear. While Socrates would at least give it a try, we know not how to seek the betterment of the Oettingers of this age, and we have to leave them to that work for which they find themselves best suited, the making of public policy for the rest of us.

Callicles, the principal adversary in the Gorgias, was at least amenable to rational discourse and aware of the need to define his terms, although certainly neglectful of geometry. But even he, to say nothing of Socrates, would have been astounded by the proposition that the purpose of learning arithmetic is to be discovered in the bright angelic mills of the modern supermarket, where anyone who can wave a wand finds himself free from the need to cipher.

It is true that those who have learned arithmetic can, usually, calculate; but the idea that we should learn arithmetic in order to calculate is one of the many convenient notions of the schoolers, who will surely be delighted to hear from Oettinger that they will soon be relieved, by pocket wands, we suppose, of the tiresome work of teaching little children to balance their checkbooks. To those who can not understand mathematics–to say nothing of reading and writing–as anything more than “life skills,” Socrates’ mild rebuke of Callicles must prove mystifying indeed. For Socrates, and even for Callicles, although he didn’t like to think about it, the study of mathematics was nothing less than the soul’s discovery of order and proportion, of permanent and essential relationships, of rightness. And the idea of Rightness as revealed in mathematics provides understanding of the idea of Justice among men.

It was out of just such an understanding that the poet deemed Euclid alone the beholder of Beauty bare. Socrates would have nodded approval. And it was for his desire to live “out of proportion” that Callicles was rebuked. He was, as it were, an angle of the great polygon who supposed that he could gobble up more than his natural share of degrees without twistng the whole thing out of shape, or, even worse, without caring that he would twist it out of shape.

That such an ancient understanding of the study of mathematics should seem to us at least unusual, if not downright quirky, is, of course, the result of our schooling, and likewise a measure of the shallowness of our education. The schoolers like to think of themselves as “humanists.” They suppose that the study of mathematics–and of the hard sciences as well–is in some unspecifiable but nevertheless real way an inhuman enterprise, and not noticeably conducive to feelings of tolerance and kindness, and the burning desire to feed those of the hungry who happen to be very far away.

There is also the unhappy fact that mathematics, unlike relating to self and others, is both hard to teach and, for education majors, hard to learn. Ditto for chemistry and physics, of which Socrates, had he studied them, would have had some interesting things to say, and that entirely without regard to the daily work of the chemist or the physicist.

Thus the educationists find themselves in a pickle. On the one hand, they choose to see mathematics as a life-skill most particularly useful in the “modern marketplace,” and thus feel obliged to teach it as essential to their great mission, the production of employable workers who may some day be able to compete with the Japanese. On the other, they find the teaching of inhumane subjects a galling diversion from their even greater mission, the inculcation of “right feelings.” And so it is that they have sold us on the idea of minimum competence in subjects like mathematics, by which they mean just enough study for the needs of the modern workplace, but not enough to bring on the suspicion that Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are to be discerned not by the feelings but by the intellect.

From their dilemma, Anthony Oettinger will deliver them, and, noble fellow that he seems to be, at no small cost to himself. What work will there be for a teacher of applied mathematics when no one has to apply mathematics any more? His loss, however, will be the schoolers’ gain. Those who used to struggle with the teaching of writing will be able to justify the much easier task of teaching basic minimum keyboard skills, and, to replace the few and rapidly disappearing teachers of mathematics, the gym-teachers will stand forth as providers, even to tiny tykes, of just enough dexterity out of which to wave a wand over a checkout counter or a checkbook. It’s all in the wrist.

Things equal to the same thing, we seem to recall from somewhere, are equal to each other. Makes sense.

And that, of course, is another way to understand the worth of all sorts of studies not just now popular. Mathemetics makes sense, and it makes sense in anyone who contemplates it. Wandwaving does not make sense in the waver; it merely works. It is interesting that the latter is progress in the world, and the former, betterment in a person.

Stillness Education

 

It is my belief that Physical Education is movement education, and it is the ability of students to think critically in a movement context that distinguishes Physical Education from other disciplines. Therefore, all Physical Education classes should focus on maximizing constructive movement time (“learning by doing”) and minimizing the verbal components of the lesson.

—M. Lazar, Assistant Principal

SUDDENLY, while thinking critically in a stillness context, we understood just why it is that, utterly unlike Dinah Shore, or even Patti Page, the pop singers of our time can not hold still. They have all been to school. And their productions, also unlike those of Dinah Shore, are intended to please children by maximizing movement time while minimizing verbal components in the great cause of thinking critically in a movement context. And most children, although they do have enough sense to despise gym and to feel the appropriate mixture of pity and contempt for gym teachers, do not have enough sense to withstand the influence of “learning by doing.” Horses and dogs have the same problem, luckily for some of us.

In every schoolhouse, the aroma of gymthink seeps upward from the dank locker-room into the libraries and the classrooms, and even into the office of M. Lazar, the Assistant Principal, who may well be, like so many other holders of that exalted rank, an erstwhile gym teacher who also felt the appropriate mixture of pity and contempt for gym teachers, and, having no papers to grade, easily found time to attend night classes in Ed. Admin., and fulfill the American Dream by rising from lowly status into the aristocracy of the mind. And so it is that his mere belief is authority enough upon which to found the “discipline” of Critical Thinking in a Movement Context.

Like the rocking rollers, those school people can not hold still. They wriggle and twitch to the latest sound and, just now, they are gyrating prodigiously to the hot, pounding rhythms of Critical Thinking, an electrifying group, particularly adept at the minimization of the verbal component. Well, you know how it is. Some, to be sure, are born to boogie, but some, like the aristocrats of the mind, must learn to boogie, and others, especially all of the children in schools, will just have to have boogie thrust upon them. For their own good.

The conditions necessary for thinking, as for writing, are stillness, silence, and solitude. In schools, they are all accounted signs of deviance, which can only lead to Deviant Thinking. Their opposites are classroom activities, participation in group discussion, and relating well to others, all of which produce warm, cozy Nondeviant Thinking.

____________

The Hinterback of the Debate

 

Now that writing as a tool of thinking is about to return to fashionable consciousness, instructors everywhere are rushing to the forefront of the debate on how to encourage writing assignments in the regular curriculum.

—Martha J. Pierce

So I beheld, and lo! an ensign borne whirling, that span and ran, as in disdain of any rest; and there the folk forlorn rushed after it, in such an endless train, it never would have entered in my head there were so many men whom death had slain.

—Inferno, III: 49-54

ONE of the most entertaining one-page frequentlies in America is Innovation Abstracts, a little poopsheet put out by an educationist welfare organization called the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, which seems to be one of those countless shelters from the stormy blast dreamed up by, and for, people who like the cozy and uncompetitive comfort of the academic life, but who have no academic interests, convictions, or powers. Such folk are always hot for “development,” of what, and why, they don’t care. All they need is the semblance of work in the shop. It is largely to the existence of their ilk that we owe the never-ending succession of fake and zany innovations that disorder our schools and our minds three or four times a year.

It was in Innovation Abstracts that we found Martha Pierce’s despatch on the late, breaking news of the coming of the Great Writing Revolution to the sleepy (we guess) campus of North Harris County College in Houston. We thought, at first, that her writing needed a little help, but now we’re not so sure. Her opening sentence does sound as though it might have come from a Glamour piece on the return of the skirt, but it may be that she has found just the right voice in which to announce yet another twirling of the “fashionable consciousness” of which schooling is always made.

She has it right. It’s all a question of fashion. Schoolers are people who rush from time to time to the forefront of this or that debate. An endless train of folk forlorn, sometimes they suppose that the deliberate ordering of facts and ideas is a “tool of thinking,” and sometimes they suppose that it isn’t. They are consistent, but without knowing it, in only one thing, and that is in supposing that supposition is the Way. And why not? Their neglect of geometry has led them to suppose that there can be no such thing as Knowing.

Or maybe it’s all political. There is a whiff of the absolute in Knowing; the free and democratic way is Guessing.

The Underground
Grammarian
R. Mitchell, Assistant Circulation Manager
Post Office Box 203
Glassboro, New Jersey 08028

Eight issues a year. Yearly subscription: Persons in USA & Canada, $15US;
Persons elsewhere, $20; Non-personal entities of any sort, $25, or even more.

____________

* Long-time readers of this sheet may remember that many years ago our work took a serious turn, from which it has never fully recovered, in the course of examining the words of a man named Weischadle. It was he who led us to ask: Is there something more than “grammar” to be understood in the fact that a man would prefer not to say that A is B, but would rather choose to say that A “may be perceived as being B.” It led us into many thoughts. Weischadle, like Julia To-Dutka, is an assistant professor of education at Montclair State College.

Volume 10