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 unrigid 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, “Rasputin. 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 talking 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.

Find out more...

Richard Mitchell’s entire corpus is available on the internet. His books are free on-line, but nonetheless they demand a high payment: You must pay attention. You can find them at: http://members.aol.com/hu4wahz/ug/index.html. Much better news, Mitchell’s books are coming back into print. “The Gift of Fire”, his finest work, is available in a hand-bound collector’s edition from Bob Shubert. His “Less Than Words Can Say” and “The Graves of Academe” have been re-issued by The Akadine Press. They plan to publish more of Mitchell’s books in the coming months.

Dr. Louisa C. Moats emotes from a web page almost all her own: www.proactiveparent.com.