Disencattling the sovereign soul by Greg Swann There is a name for the quality I want for children to acquire, but I hate to say it. It would be enough to call it literacy, except that some professor of education would define literacy down to the ability to decode, "Run, Tip, run!", and then call the matter done when half of all children can do it. This is not conjecture; we lived through it. Richard Mitchell calls that special quality The Gift of Fire or The Gift of Mind, and I am apt to call it simply reason. But as soon as we pin down precisely what we mean--for instance, by saying that a person who can reason cannot be fooled into thinking Wednesday is a hat--some professor of education will trot out a claque of students, their faces scrubbed and glowing, as many as half of whom rarely confuse headgear with days of the week. The thing I seek for children is not some one particular quality, nor even a checklist of them. As soon as we name any particular attribute of human reason that we wish to see evinced in our children's behavior, the professors of education jump right in. They are busy people, industrious in the production of waste, and they are eager to oblige us. In very short order, we will either have children who can portray our pet aspect of reason, parrot-like, as well as any of our pets, or we will have an enormous sheaf of papers excusing the professors of education for their failure. And none of that matters. What _I_ want for children, what I think _we_ want for children, is for them to be able to reason wisely and well wherever they may find themselves. The delicious irony is, _that_ is not something that can be taught. What can be taught is fact and logic, procedure and practice, reading and writing and arithmetic. The so-called basic skills--derided and dismissed by the professors of education--are the swimming lessons our children must have before they can dive into the oceans of information. And it is only by exploring that vasty deep that they can accumulate the experience necessary to make use of the faculty of reason. And the pet rejoinder of the professors of education is: To what end? If it were vocation, it were better to study vocation. (Professors of education don't actually write this well, but this is the gist of the 'Schools to Work' program now being deployed in many states.) If it were higher education, students might just as well study for the SATs (which many do, of course). If the purpose of learning to reason is to avoid getting tricked, why not just memorize a list of tricks? And that's the point. Learning to use the mind is not _for_ anything, at least not anything I can name consistently. Not even for the sake of its own beauty and majesty. A strong, well-tuned mind can be turned to many practical ends, but pursuing any one of them, or even the lot of them in sequence, will not yield a mind able to reason wisely and well. There is but one practical benefit of learning that I can name with confidence, a benefit, not an end to be pursued: Independence. This is the liberation I talk about elsewhere, but this time it is not liberation from animal savagery but from dependence (or, as the smooth-talking professors of education like to call it, dependency). By gentle acts of dominance we compel our children to freedom, freedom from their own innate savagery, freedom from the beguilers and the despoilers, and freedom from _us,_ from dependence upon either our wealth or our wisdom. The children victimized by educationism come to be like cattle. They cannot know, they can only be told, and they cannot discern whether what they have been told is true. They can rebel against their herders, but only by becoming the property of another cadre of herders. They lack the means even to discover _that_ they are cattle, and, while they are genetically _homo sapiens,_ in crucial respects they never fully become human beings. But it is not sufficient to say that we want for our children to become human beings. As soon as we do that, the ever-ready professors of education will make pronouncements about DNA or statistical averages and it will turn out that becoming human is simultaneously already achieved and impossible to achieve--at least not without more funding. And it doesn't mean anything anyway. The word I'm looking for, the word I use in the quiet of my own mind, is sovereignty. A child is fully grown, fully human, when he can say, "I assert supreme authority over--and accept fully responsibility for--the dominion that is my mind, my body and my estate; I am my only master." Cyrano says, "I stand, not high it may be--but alone," and he does not mean without companionship, he means without leaning on the crutch of cowardly cattlitude. Literacy is no easy thing to test for, although I can suggest a tell-tale: A child is literate when he can read, relish and understand "Moby Dick". Reason is devilishly hard to measure; all we can do is test for logic, which even the most irrational children can master. Financial independence is easy, but testing for intellectual independence requires a risky subjective judgment. And how could we possibly test for sovereignty? Here's a dead giveaway: We will know that our children--at least half of them--are sovereigns, souls unto their own and not cattle, when the former professors of the formerly tax-funded former colleges of educationism are relocated to the freeway exit ramps, where they will hold signs reading, "Will issue incomprehensible inanities for food." _Sic semper tyrannosaurus._ From prideful mendacity to pitiful mendicancy. It's better than they deserve... Nox quondam, nox futura! _(January 1982)_ by Richard Mitchell _Students do not read, write and do arithmetic as well as they used to because they can get along quite nicely without these skills.... Americans are finding that they need to rely less and less on "basic skills" to find out what they want to know and what they want to do. Our basic skills are declining precisely because we need them less._ --Peter Wagschal, Futurist, University of Massachusetts Yeah. And that's not all! Just you take a good look at the standard American dogs and cats. They live pretty damn well, toiling not, neither spinning, and they've never even _heard_ of stuff like reading, writing, and arithmetic. They "do quite nicely without those skills," and so do tropical fish and baboons. And so, too, did black slaves and Russian serfs, and all those marvelously skillful and industrious ancestors of us all who gathered nuts and roots and killed small rodents with sticks. They all knew everything they needed to know. We would probably never have heard of Peter Wagschal, or of his neato Ouija Board Studies Program, if it hadn't been for one Larry Zenke, a pretty neato guy himself. Zenke is Superintendent of Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where men are still men. Did he quail when the national achievement test scores, which used to be quite good in that prosperous and orderly city, hit new lows last fall? Nosirree. When taxpayers grumbled, did he ignominiously promise to do better? And when the _Tulsa Tribune_ started shooting off its editorial mouth about "fads" and "anti-academic garbage," did Zenke tiptoe away into the piloting of experiential remediation enhancement parameters? No way. Not in Oklahoma. In the finest frontier fashion, he stood up tall in the middle of Main Street at high noon and told the unruly rabble that maybe they'd like to talk it over, before doing anything hasty, with his pal, Pete (The Persuader) Wagschal, who somehow just happened to drift into town. True grit. Then, having (by proxy) brought light to the benighted fuddy-duddies of Tulsa, Zenke, who obviously knows more than he lets on, laid a little groundwork for the defense of next year's test scores: "Wagschal even suggests that 50 years from now we could be the smartest, most knowledgeable society that has ever existed, _and yet be largely illiterate."_ The italics are Zenke's, not ours, and we're grateful for them. We have often wondered what kind of an idea it would take to make a school superintendent excited about the life of the intellect. And a dandy idea it is, especially for all those much misunderstood "educators," saddled (for now) with the thankless (and difficult) task of teaching what no one will need to know when the bright age dawns. All that burnout and stress! And for what? For nothing more than an arcane and elitist social grace no more necessary in a truly "knowledgeable society" than the ability to play polo, or the lute. And how, you ask, will people who are "largely illiterate" come to amass all that knowledge? Well, don't you worry, bless your heart. Someone will probably be quite willing to tell them what to know, even if it means all the trouble and expense of attaching loudspeakers to every lamp-post in America. The teachers, then, will be liberated to do what the teacher academies train them to do. Zenke foretells: Teachers, for example, will no longer be disseminators of cognitive information--machines will do that. Teachers will be program developers and/or facilitators of group membership, helping students develop interaction skills. Some educators, of course, will be found too rigid to survive this metamorphosis, but those who do will find excitement and fulfillment in their new "teaching roles." And that will be just dandy too. Happy, happy, the teachers of tomorrow, at long last fulfilled and excited! Freed forever from the stern constraints of the tiny smatterings of mere information still incongruously expected of teachers, the facilitator-trainees of the future won't have to take _any_ of those dull and irrelevant "subjects" that now impede their growth as _professionals_ and their group membership development. They'll be able to spend _all_ their time in the enhancement of their interaction skills, so that they can go forth and facilitate the same for little children. (Those cunning tots, of course, _do_ have to be _educated,_ you know, so that they will sit quietly in organized groups when it's time to hear some knowledge from the loudspeaker.) And the training program for superintendents of schools will be even more exciting and fulfilling. There's just no counting the skills that _they_ can get along nicely without. Which is it you've lost, Tulsans, your spirit or your minds? Could it be both? Do you lie awake in the still watches of the night worrying about those godless communists who are panting to nationalize oil? Do you fear that bleeding hearts will take away the guns by which you fancy that you won and may yet preserve your liberty? Pooh, Tulsans, pooh. The most dangerous threat to your liberty, the one that has by far the best chance of turning you all into docile clods, is right there in Tulsa. Think, dammit! Do you imagine that foreign enemies of this nation could devise for your children a more hideous and revolting destiny than the one so blithely envisioned--and as an _exoneration,_ no less--by the superintendent of schools? Do you yawn and turn to the sports section, citizens of Tulsa, when the man whom you have hired to oversee the growth of understanding and judgment in your children airily tells you that in a palmier day they will have no need of the literacy that alone can give those powers? Do you shrug when he tells you that the children will be spared the burden of whatever "cognitive information" they don't actually need, which must obviously, since the children will have no powers of judgment, be chosen by someone like Zenke? Do you, like Zenke, dream of the day when no one will be able to _read_ our Constitution, but it won't matter, because the machines provided by the government schools will tell us all we really need to know about it? Can you think of something to say to those teachers, and superintendents, who are _not_ excited and fulfilled with leading young minds into the ways of understanding and thoughtful discretion, and who are _un_rigid enough, flaccid and limp enough, not only to survive but to hail as liberation their metamorphosis into developers and facilitators? Does it not occur to you that the inculcation of "interaction skills" for the purpose of "group development" is exactly the opposite of an education, by which a mind can find its way _out_ of group-think and the pet promulgations of collectivisms? And in short, Tulsans, what are those strange black boxes we see on _your_ lamp-posts? What soothing message have they recited, even as you slept? How is it, O Pioneers, that you are not mad as hell? Oklahoma is much changed, but the descendants of the settlers still like to watch the hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Their bird-lore, however, is not what it was. In fact, there's hardly a damn one of them that can tell a hawk from a vulture nowadays. Anastasia in the light and shadow A Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie story by Greg Swann The very first thing she said to me was, "I'm Anastasia." She had pronounced the name 'Anna-stay-juh' but I took care to be more formal. I nodded gravely and said, "'Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh'. I'm honored." She giggled delightedly. "Why'd you say it that way?" "To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To embroider the air, to perfect it with the perfect sound: 'Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh'." She giggled again and that was answer enough. She was four-and-a-half on the day we met. Not awfully, terribly short, but at no risk of scraping her head on anything. She had a round little face that had borrowed too much mischief to be cherubic but was angelic nevertheless. Her hair was brown and it was almost always almost everywhere; it was obviously brushed and tied and obviously instantly disarrayed by her mischievous wanderings. She was a beautiful child, beautiful inside and out, but her eyes were the crowning glory of her nobility. They were bluer than blue, deep and dark and purple, as purple as the crest of a dynasty. They were clearer than any gemstone, and they seemed not to reap the light but to sow it. For all the days I knew her, I could never see enough of those purple gemstone eyes. "What're you doing there?" she asked. I was sitting in the shade of a little olive grove reading a book. She was standing on something behind the block wall of the property next door, just her head and shoulders above the wall. "House-sitting. You know what that means?" She shook her head and her hair flew into a more advanced state of disarray. "It's like baby-sitting only easier." "Why're you doing it?" I shrugged. "The official answer is, I'm helping out a friend. The unofficial answer is, TV, refrigerator, hot and cold running everything. Does that make any sense to you?" It might have or it might not, but we'll never know, because she changed the subject. "I have a kitten. His name is 'Sputin." I said, "_Ra_sputin. Somebody likes Russian names. Say it: 'Ra-spyoo-tin'." "Why?" "Just say it. 'Ra-spyoo-tin'." She said, "'Ra-spyoo-tin'." Her voice was high and sweet. And breathless of course. Her speech was good, but she had a tendency to thrust her words soundly through her upper lip. The tongue is a fearsome sword, but it takes time to master. I said, "Children must learn to enunciate. Can you say that word? 'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." She said, "'Ih-nun-sate'." "'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." "'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." "That's it. Say it again." "'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." "Bravo! Well done. First you crawl, then you walk, then you run. If you work at it, you can master anything." "Why?" 'Why?' is a dangerous question from a four-year-old. It may be a sincere request for more information and it may be nothing more than a doorstop to keep the conversation open. I said, "The purpose of mastery is mastery. The purpose of excellence is excellence. Can you say 'excellence'?" "Sure I can!" "Well say it." "Excellence." I said, "Excellent!" and she giggled. "I have to go," she confided. "I'm s'posed to clean up." "'Suh-posed'." "'Suh-posed'," she replied. I said, "'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." She scrunched her face up in a scowl. "Say it." "What for?" "To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To spin like a ballerina on the tip of your tongue, to glide across the universe and embroider the air with breathtaking sound." She laughed from her belly. "You're silly!" "You just figured that out?" The next afternoon she announced her presence at the top of the wall by declaiming, "'Ih-nun-cee-ate'." I nodded. "How do you fare, fair Empress?" "You said the same word twice." "Homonyms. Words that sound the same but mean different things. 'Hah-mow-nim'. Say it." "'Hah-mow-nim'." "That was homonimble of you." "What's _that_ mean?" "It's a made-up word. When you master the words, you get to make up words of your own. It's called wit, deservedly or not." I'm pretty sure that flew past her, but it didn't matter because all she wanted to do was chat; comprehension wasn't a grave necessity. And that kind of chatting about words set the pattern of our days, me in the olive grove and Anastasia at the top of the wall. The afternoons were never very hot and the evenings were never very cold and, even though the pollen from the trees made my eyes water, the air smelled so green and pure and that little girl's eyes were so alive with the light of life that I couldn't think of any more enjoyable way to spend my time. And you might think it odd that a little girl should tolerate so much word play, but the simple truth is that the prize children prize is a grown-up's full attention, and they don't care how it comes wrapped. For an adult, play requires a site, a uniform, equipment and a long list of rules. But a child needs no more than the sword of her tongue and the shield of her smile to conquer the vast empires of the imagination, to plunder abundance and always leave behind her more treasure than she could ever haul away. "'Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh'," I said one afternoon. "Do you know the story of the first Anastasia, the little girl who had your name first?" "I get to watch the movie when I'm bigger." "Yeah, it's kind of scary. There's a mean old man named Rasputin, like your cat, and he makes people think he's a sorcerer. But the little girl isn't scary, even though a lot of scary things happen to her." "What things?" "What really matters is that she gets lost, and she's so young that she forgets all about her family. She's a princess, an empress, and a lot of people hope that someday she'll claim her empire." "Does she?" I shrugged. "It's just a story. The real Anastasia died in 1918 with the rest of her family. But people like to tell that story because it makes them think that the most remarkable, wonderful things can happen anywhere." She gazed upon me with a regal certainty. "They can." "I agree completely. It's the difference between royalty and nobility. Royalty is just a pose, just a costume. But nobility shines through everything, through the most wretched squalor ever known." "What are you _talk_ing about?" "Every man a king, my Empress. Every fair maiden a fair princess in disguise. I never met an ignoble baby. Can you say 'igg-no-bel'?" "No." "Hardly anyone can. But all the babies are noble, as noble as a kitten, as noble as a wolf cub. Warriors in their way and champions of justice, if only of their own. Sovereigns who cannot conceive of an alternative to sovereignty and masters of all they survey. But somehow the crowns and the crests of nobility erode away and all that's left are scared little people chasing after the costumery of royalty, begging for something to kneel to. Do you want me to teach you something very noble to say?" She nodded solemnly. "This is the most noble thing I can think of for any human being to say: 'Do your worst. I will not kneel.'" She said, "Do your worst. I will not kneel." "That's right. Just the words, no special emphasis. Nobility triumphs when it fearlessly faces tragedy. And that, my Empress, is the most remarkable, wonderful thing that can ever happen..." Late one afternoon I said, "I know a very hard word. You want to try it?" "Sure." I said, "Chiaroscuro. 'Key-are-es-kyoor-oh'. Say it." "'Key-are-es-kyoor-oh'." "Excellent!" "'Key-are-es-kyoor-oh'," she said again. "What _are_ you teaching my daughter?" a woman's voice asked from the other side of the wall. "It's just words, mama." "Whatever for?" Very primly, very clearly, very precisely, Anastasia said, "The purpose of mastery is mastery." To me she said, "What's it mean?" "What?" "'Key-are-es-kyoor-oh'." "It's the interplay of light and shadow. In pictures, in paintings--but sometimes I think it means the conflict between good and evil, right and wrong. We have pictures and we have words and we have songs and poems and stories, and that's a testament to the triumph of the light, don't you think?" She shrugged and that was answer enough. One day when the fall had come to pay a call upon the olive trees Anastasia climbed to the top of the wall to tell me she was moving away. I bit my lower lip and blinked very fast, surprised at myself. "What's the matter?" I smiled a tight little smile, a smile for keeping things in. "This never happened before. It's always me who goes away, not the other way around." "Aren't you leaving soon?" "Couple of weeks. You're right, of course you're right. It's just new, that's all." And of course it took forever. I can bug-out in three minutes flat, but it took Anastasia's family days and days to pack up and go. She came to the wall to talk to me every day and it was so nice and so awful, sweet words embroidered around a black crepe deadline. I said good-bye to her at the curb in front of her house and I felt wretched and I tried very hard not to show it. Just a little kid, right? Just the most remarkable, wonderful thing there is, a young sovereign, wild and free. I held her tiny little hands in mine and said, "Ingenuous. Can you say it? 'In-jen-you-us'." "'In-jen-you-us'. What does it mean?" "It means a lot of things--open and honest and artless and innocent. But what it really means is to be born free. It means to be born without being required to kneel. That's what you are, Anastasia of the purple gemstone eyes. Born free. The hard job is to stay free." "Do your worst," she intoned with a regal delight. "I will not kneel." I kissed her on the forehead and she climbed into the back seat of the waiting car and sailed forth to claim her empire. "The Graves of Academe" is back in print Despite what you might gather by watching those bible-thumping shows on television, civilizations don't fall into decay when they become enamored of vice. That's a secondary consequence, a side-effect. Cultures collapse when they cease to be enamored of virtue. And while I hear a lot from diviners of dark portents for our own culture, I don't listen to them much. As bad as things might be, they have been worse. And even as the skies darken here they seem to clear over yonder. I tell children, when they are distraught, that the world can only fall to pieces so many times in a given day, and it seems good advice to give to myself, too. On the other hand, I have for quite a while taken it as a very dark portent that the works of Richard Mitchell were out of print. His absence from the bookstores was a mechanical sort of marketing decision, I'm sure, not the kind of conspiracy of lies that has been visited upon H. L. Mencken. Mitchell's books were and are available at better public libraries, and his corpus is accessible for free on line. But his not being in the bookstores was more than just sad for me; it seemed to say that Americans were indifferent to the causes of the steady decline of our culture. Perhaps that was so, and perhaps it still is. But there is this, at least, a ray of hope amidst the clouds: Richard Mitchell's books are being reissued by The Akadine Press. His "Less Than Words Can Say" has been available for a couple of months, and Akadine is now taking orders for "The Graves of Academe". The book is Mitchell's detailed inventory of how and why American education has gone to hell--in a hand-basket badly-weaved by students of educationism pursuing self-esteem. As a work of literature it is written with a breathtaking beauty, a stunning erudition and an acerbic wit. And as a polemic it is unmatched by anyone since Demosthenes. And that's an ominous comparison. I fervently hope that Richard Mitchell is not America's Demosthenes, doomed to be right. Even if he is, there's not a lot we can do. But what we can do we must do. And Athens was not great because no Athenians loved vice. Athens was great because the best people loved and celebrated and honored and _lived_ their virtues. The clouds of portent may come and go, but clarity begins at home. Perhaps by our strivings and his we can consign Dr. Mitchell to a different role, not our Demosthenes but our William Lloyd Garrison... --GSS Nobody Here But Us Professionals from "The Graves of Academe" by Richard Mitchell The works of Weischadle, associate professor of education at Montclair State College in New Jersey, can be studied at length in the New Jersey section of _The New York Times_ for July 16, 1978. His piece _is_ called, naturally, "Educating the Parents." Mass illiteracy he easily dismisses as a matter of "problem youngsters," but those uppity parents who are beginning to complain about illiteracy -- they need to be taught a lesson. They can vote! If we don't straighten those malcontents out right away, they might end up listening to demagogues and voting against some of our favorite monies. Worse yet, and it's with this fear that Weischadle begins his finger-wagging, some of them might _win_ those malpractice suits that they're discussing with their lawyers. Weischadle protests that even if illiteracy _were_ the fault of the schools, that wouldn't mean that the schools were to blame. Here's the delicate way he puts it: Have the critics been fair to the schools? To the extent that schools are responsible for a youngster's educational growth, the critics have dealt with the right party. However, it does not necessarily mean that professionals in the schools are inept. It does mean that educational leadership has failed to articulate the problem effectively and carry out the necessary programs. It's hard to know exactly what Weischadle means by that "articulate." First we thought that the "professionals" had been unable to utter intelligible sounds, for that reading does reflect experience. However, in this kind of writing, no "professional" would ever waste a nifty word like "articulate" on such a simple thought. Next we guessed that the man might be saying that the "professionals" had been unable to define the problem thoroughly and accurately. That, too, we had to reject. Such inability would be remarkably similar to ineptitude in "professionals," surely, but Weischadle says they're _not_ inept. Only one possibility remains: "To articulate the problem effectively" must mean to find some description that will keep irate parents from thinking that the "professionals" are inept. Of course! That's just what Weischadle's is up to in this piece -- _educating_ the parents. He does some pretty fancy articulating as well. Where do they learn that language? In the ordinary graduate school, candidates are expected to be competent in a couple of foreign languages, but in those education places they know that skill in language will cripple the budding "professional" by enabling him to say things plainly. You get no monies that way. Straight talk would mean the end of effective articulation as we know it. Here are some examples of bent talk from Weischadle's little piece. He won't say that people are talking about something; he says that "much recent discussion has focused on" it. He can't say, "Hurry"; he says that "delay should not be allowed to take place." He can't say that people should use wisely what they have; he says that "an enlightened utilization . . . must be present." He can't say that the people who deal out discipline should be consistent; he says that "the haphazard application of disciplinary action . . . must be eliminated." He can't say, "Don't worry." He says that "uneasiness should be settled." Still, we worry. For one thing, there is no clear meaning in the settling of uneasiness. In fact, it sounds ominous. If the settling of uneasiness has the same effect as the settling of terms or plans, we don't want any part of it. For another, how can we take any comfort from a teacher of teachers who condescends, in broken English, to explain why we should have "complete confidence" in him and other "professionals," so that they may get on, unhampered by our ill-informed and amateurish complaints, with the "acquisition . . . of monies to enact better programs" that will, _this_ time around, solve the illiteracy problem? In these examples of Weischadle's tortured English, the grammatical subjects are things, not persons, and abstract things at that. All things that must be done by people, but we see no people. This language suggests a world where responsible agents, the doers of deeds, have been magically occulted by the deeds themselves. A weird structure of that sort, "utilization must be present," for example, has the merit (?) of excusing somebody from an obligation to use something. If things go wrong, therefore, it's not any _person's_ fault; it's just that utilization wasn't present. Such structures, furthermore, often generate certain morally flavored auxiliary verbs: "delay should not" -- "application must," etc. This is another grammatically symbolized cop-out which implies that moral obligation falls upon deeds rather than doers. It is up to those negligent deeds to get themselves done. This is convenient for those "professionals" who won't be able to do them. Normal English, in its typical structure, a simple sentence in the active voice, implies a world where agents perform acts. There are times when we would wish it otherwise, and in our minds we can devise subterfuges that will make it seem otherwise. We do the business of the mind in language, and we make our subterfuges of the same stuff. Weischadle, in his grammatical gyrations, is not just writing bad English; he is positing a certain kind of world. In that world, one can _parler sans parler_ like Castorp and reject in advance all responsibility for what one says. Here's how Weischadle does it -- indeed, how almost anyone of those "professionals" would do it: "The pre-school years have been recognized as being important formulative years." He probably means "formative," although he may be thinking that the pre-school years are the years spent sucking a formula from bottles -- but no matter. The important thing is the grotesque contortion by which he escapes having to say that the pre-school years _are_ formative, or, if you like, formulative. It matters not at all to the "professional" that what he has to say is obvious and banal and widely enough known that it needs no saying; he still finds a way to evade responsibility for having said it. In this timid language of misdirection and abdication, no one would dare stand forth and proclaim that a turkey is a turkey. He might mutter, tentatively, that a turkey has been recognized as being a turkey -- although not necessarily by _him._ Into such prose, human beings vanish. No wonder we couldn't discover Weischadle's salary. He has withdrawn into the precincts of the passive voice. He has given over all doing of deeds and drawn up about him the mists of circumlocution. Far from our ken, he has sojourned in the land of the self-eliminating application and followed the spoor of the place-taking delay. He is, by now, by gloomy night and periphrastics compassed round. He is, in short, or sort of short, no longer recognized as being Weischadle. Now we see the truth. There is no Weischadle. Making the Moats of it with Hildy Johnson Pretend you're Hildy Johnson, the just-can't-help-himself reporter from _The Front Page._ Don a battered fedora, plant an unlit cigarette in your lips, park a pencil behind your ear and prepare to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Here's your assignment. Interview Dr. Louisa C. Moats, a very prosperous professor of education who flits about here and there, afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable. Under the imprimatur of the American Federation of Teachers--a notorious teacher's union that has the virtue of being not as notorious as the National Education Association--Dr. Moats has published a book (booklet? pamphlet?) called "Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science." The book is 32 pages long. Presumably that includes dedications, prologues, epilogues, acknowledgments, maybe even one or two pages left blank so that fevered readers can record their "Notes". Within the book, Dr. Moats argues that: * "Learning to read is neither natural nor easy for most children. Reading is an acquired skill." (We are quoting from an article published in the _Baltimore Sun._ Alas, the reporter was not Hildy Johnson.) * "Teaching reading 'is a job for an expert,' requiring considerable knowledge and skill, which must be acquired over several years through focused study and supervised practice." * "Teachers must understand the basic psychological processes involved in reading, how children develop reading skills, the ways in which good readers differ from poor readers, and how the English language is structured in spoken and written forms." * Et cetera. Your job, Hildy, is to pose some of those pointed questions for which newspaper reporters used to be famous. Like this: Dr. Moats, in saying, "Reading is an acquired skill," are you saying anything substantially different from, "Using the toilet is an acquired skill?" Ignoring the embarrassingly obvious question about what kinds of skills could _not_ require acquisition, how is it possible for non-professionals to teach flawless toilet use while you professionals fail so completely to teach reading? (We are reminded of an amusing essay called, "Why Johnny Can't Walk," which was about the consequences of turning over to the professionals of education what they might call "early-childhood ambulatory studies".) Dr. Moats, if teaching reading "is a job for an expert," how is it that so many people who learn to read _well_ are taught by _non-_experts? Even ignoring the fact that everyone who can read was taught by a non-expert, by your standards, the ACT test results released this week reveal that home-schooled children as a group did better than the students of any state except Rhode Island, whom they tied; how can this be, when they were taught to read by rank amateurs? Dr. Moats, isn't it true that _no one_ who actually learns to read learns to read in school? Isn't it the case that _all_ competent readers were taught by amateurs--their parents, their grandparents or the children themselves, puzzling things out on their own? Taking account that the purpose of your walking a high-wire stretched from the obvious to the inane is to secure more funding for more meaningless mandated education courses while excusing the failure of all the other meaningless mandated education courses to achieve the promised results, in what way should we expect to notice a difference once teachers are fully grounded in the pseudo-psychological underpinnings of the work they are already _not_ doing? And finally, Dr. Moats, how did you come by such a surfeit of gall as to insist that "Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science" and then dispatch the topic in 32 pages? Mind you, this is not a request for elaboration; one extra page would be 33 too many. But how _dare_ you spit on the _actual_ rocket scientists--and all of the other very serious, very rigorous, very scientific minds who do work in _real_ sciences and can damn well teach a child to read without your useless advice--how _dare_ you spit on them by comparing what they do with what you _fail_ to do? Teaching a child to read is not rocket science. It's not even difficult. Millions of people do it every year. Teaching newspaper reporters to work like Hildy Johnson instead of Caspar Milquetoast is harder, clearly. And teaching Americans to stop giving tax money to charlatans who produce newer and bigger disasters as the supposed cure to the older, smaller disasters--_that_ is difficult. --GSS > From: "Greg Swann" > "Dr. Louisa C. Moats" > CC: "Arizona Education Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan" , > "Arizona Education Association" , > "Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull" , > "Arizona Parents for Traditional Education" , > "Barry Young - KFYI" , > "Bev Medlyn/The Arizona Republic" , > "Bob Mohan - KFYI" , > "Bobbie Jo Buel - AZ Daily Star" , > "David Berliner - Dean ASU College of Education" , > "Doug MacEachern/The Arizona Republic" , > "Ed Walsh - KFYI" , > "Jennifer Dokes/The Arizona Republic" , > "Jeremy Voas - New Times" , > "John Taylor - Dean UA College of Education" , > "Ken Western/The Arizona Republic" , > "Lattie Coor - President ASU" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Marianne Moody Jennings - ASU/Arizona Republic" , > "Michael Limon - Tucson Citizen" , > "Patricia Biggs/The Arizona Republic" , > "Peter Likins - President UA" , > "Stephen Auslander - AZ Daily Star" , > "Mary Gifford" , > "Lew Rockwell" , > "Harry Browne" , > "The Separation of School and State Alliance" , > "Education Writers of America" , > "Center for Educational Reform" , > "Don Cloud" , > "Kansas Governor Bill Graves" , > "Andy Tompkins/Kansas Commissioner of Education" , > "Roger Myers/Topeka Capital-Journal" , > "Diane Carroll/Kansas City Star" , > "Kate Beem/Kansas City Star" , > "Edward M. Eveld/Kansas City Star" , > "Scott Rothschild/Wichita Eagle" , > "EducationNews.org" , > "Mike Bowler/Baltimore Sun" , > "Greg Swann - Corresponding Secretary" > BCC: > Subject: Guerrilla Schooling #4: Principles of pedagogical poisoning > Date: Sun, Aug 22, 1999, 6:04 AM Principles of pedagogical poisoning Here is a diabolical poisoning strategy worthy of the diabolical Borgias themselves: First, poison your victim slowly, giving him trace quantities of your favored potion with every meal. When he complains that he is unwell, blame it on this ill humor or that; ascribe his illness to causes so vague as to be inarguable. Sympathize. Comfort. Show compassion and solicitude. And feed him more poison at every turn. Second, when he finally figures out that he has been poisoned, have a confederate offer him a supposed antidote that is in fact a venom so similar to the first as to be indistinguishable. Smile devilishly when he perishes, to the last expressing his gratitude for being rescued. It is the second role, the role of the secret confederate, that belongs to Dr. Louisa C. Moats--seen above in the "To:" line--in the drama of American educationism. She is not a purely poisonous pedagogue--not like our favorite, Dr. David Berliner, whom we are getting to. Instead Dr. Moats is a poisonous reformer, assigned the important role of finishing the job of destroying education after the Berliners have been caught--unread-handed, as it were. And we are very sure that both Dr. Moats and Dr. Berliner are earnest, conscientious people. They are _not_ Borgias, cunning masters of _knowing_ evil. So much the worse for us. For if they are _not_ shrewd enough to see the awful havoc they wreak, it must be that they are very, very stupid indeed. And they write and they speak and they leave behind them a trail of evidence that can leave no doubt, in the minds of the thoughtful, that we have enfolded the business of education in the hands of precisely those people who are _least_ possessed of the gifts of reason. In their earnest, conscientious way they poison the wells of thought not because they are well-poisoners but simply because they are incompetent boobs. They don't know any better, and they're too dim to know what they don't know. And in the end it does not matter to us if we are poisoned by knowing Borgias or by unknowing baboons, we are still poisoned. Strive to contain your gratitude. And, yes, Dr. Moats is the honorary baboon for a brand new issue of _Guerrilla Schooling,_ the web-based magazine concerned with practical strategies for wresting a rigorous academic education for our children from an education establishment stoutly committed to doing everything _but_ providing rigorous academic education. We are guerrillas, not reformers, and what we seek is a _real_ education, not any of the many unreasonable, unreasoning facsimiles. For _our_ children, not all children everywhere. _Now,_ while they're still children. Dr. Moats earns her proud honor for the authorship of a tome called "Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science." By means of an Herculean effort, she manages to dispense with her immense topic in--this is not a typo--32 pages. If we may presume to direct her energies, her next book might be called "Rocket Science IS NOT Rocket Science," which could not possibly take up more than 16 pages. To gods and baboons all things are easy--except teaching reading. Whatever. We can get enough poison, even in tiny 32-page doses. A _true_ antidote is the sweet nectar of reason, which we find always in the works of Richard Mitchell. We plug away at him issue after issue not _just_ because he is so wise. He is, as well as being witty and trenchant and deliciously readable. But we keep plugging away at him because we are _plugging_ him, promoting his works as cash-money products. His book "The Graves of Academe" is back in print, thanks to The Akadkine Press. We want you to buy it, both because it is the absolute best book on what (the hell) is wrong with American education and because we want for Dr. Mitchell to be rewarded, substantively if not substantially, for the immense benefits he has conferred upon us all. There is no way we can repay what he has done for us, but at least we can pay him for his books. We have a few other things to say, of course, and, fools that we are, we dance where Dr. Moats fears to tread. Behold our dancing at: http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/ Just so no one can say they weren't warned, we reissue these warnings: If you should someday find your name in the 'To:' line, take heart. It's a rare honor, and you can only claim it by taking and failing to earn tax-dollars for the work of the mind. And you can always strive to do better in the future, although we won't be reserving any breaths awaiting that outcome. If you're in the 'CC:' line, it's because you are presumed to have an interest in education. Fair warning: Being in the 'CC:' line will not keep you out of the 'To:' line. The guerrillas are in the 'BCC:' line, the line you can't see. If you think we are laughing at you, you could be as much as half right. And since we have been so bold as to suggest that Dr. Moats and Dr. Berliner and their ilk--and no word suits them so well as 'ilk'--are incompetent to the jobs they hold, it is only fair to ask what jobs they _might_ be suited to, should we ever reach that happy day when we get _sick_ of being poisoned. Rocket science is out, of course, at least until rockets are powered by hubris and chutzpah. And when they're not being unwitting Borgias they are unknowingly building hollow hobby-horses, so we must always beware of geeks burying graft. And, in any case, they're so completely overtrained as to be ineducable; they are unable, even, to mimic their own best victims and say, "You want fries with that?" In the end there is only one job for which their unique mental qualities suit them: Food tasters. Isn't _that_ a dainty dish? And there is no poison better than a poison-pen letter. We are not that, exactly, but, our pen ever-venomed, we stand poised to strike. Well, sometimes we slouch a little; it's a long, lonely night. Keep us company with links and email addressees. Forward and repost at will. And mind what goes into your mind... Until next time, Greg Swann gswann@presenceofmind.net http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/