We Have Met the Future and It Is Us. Do We Care?

The following essay was written by Richard Mitchell, a professor at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, in his publication The Underground Grammarian. That work was Mitchell’s often cheeky commentary on the state of the teaching of teachers and it’s effects, then and in Mitchell’s future, on the education of the nation’s youth and, beyond that, on the nation.

The topic of the essay is education. However, it doesn’t take much thought to see clearly how it applies to us, here, now. Please read it through. At the end, I state when it was published and what it means to the present.

Let Something You Dismay

We sent a junior member of our staff to Racine to take part in a conference about illiteracy in the schools. Conferers convened from all parts of the country, and from every branch of the service engaged in the Great War against Illiteracy. Some of them were, in fact, against illiteracy. Others were in favor of the war.

The latter, we suppose, hoped to go home armed with new inputs and feedbacks out of which to cobble some new grant proposals for new monies to pilot some new programs much, much better than the old new programs. And they probably did. Our man, however, came home suggesting that we might do better printing comic books.

On the first evening, in a brief but disquieting keynote address, Clifton Fadiman sounded what our man thought would surely prove the dominant theme of the conference. That turned out, alas, not to be so; but Mr. Fadiman’s hypothesis has become, even more alas, the dominant theme of our conferences in the two and a half years or more that have passed since that evening.

Fadiman suggested that maybe there is some new thing under the sun. While education had never been a triumphant and thematic force in any time or place, he reminded those who might have been listening, neither had it ever been generally despised and rejected. Even those who had no education either wished for some or at least acknowledged, however grumpily, that it was probably all right for somebody to have some. Education has traditionally been held a Good Thing rather than a Bad Thing. And, leaving aside the occasional crackpot, no one seems to have taken the view that there shouldn’t be any such thing as education.

But now, Fadiman had come to suspect, an enemy had appeared on the field, an enemy heavily armed, cunning and determined, an Attila of Ignorance ushering in the decline and fall of the always shaky empire of the mind.

That hypothesis, which Mr. Fadiman may not have expressed quite so luridly, seemed to us both provocative and plausible, however expressed. It seemed a possible explanation for the prevalence of some general conditions and attitudes in the schools, often supposed to have something to do with education, which are utterly unlike anything we have seen in the past. We find in students, teachers, and especially in the devisers of doctrine and makers of policy, automatic ideas and habits of mind as unprecedented as they are astonishing. They are ideas and habits so unlikely, even perverse, that they could hardly have just come about in the natural course of events. It does seem reasonable, therefore, to guess that they were brought about.

Consider ignorance. Ignorance, even in the schools, is neither unprecedented nor astonishing, and certainly no cause for the wringing of hands. It is depressing, of course, when those few students who fancy that they have heard of the Laws of Motion also presume that they have something to do with football. And the heart sinks when no one in a class of college seniors can describe Fascism, locate Viet Nam, name a third poet to rank with Robert Frost and Rod McKuan, list the Protestant Reformation and the Napoleonic Wars in chronological order, or even recognize certain words such as “heirarchy,” “epigram,” or “clamor.” But all that, however late in the day, could be fixed.

However, the fixing is unlikely when those who don’t know, and don’t know that they don’t know, also can’t for the life of them imagine why they should know anything unrelated to their “needs,” which turn out to be conveniently small. It is as though an ordinary, natural human propensity, the desire to know and even to understand, has been eradicated in them. It is not out of that desire that they come seeking “education,” which is just the name of a process that causes diplomas. What idea of “education” do they have, and where did they get it?

We do know the answer to the second part of that question. They got it in school. That’s where they’ve been all these years. And please don’t tell us that they got it from their parents and peers, or from that wonderfully convenient culprit, “society.” Where do you think their parents and peers got it? How do you suppose “society” came to be what it is? Who taught us that awareness is better (and easier) than knowledge, and that appreciation is better (and easier) than understanding? And who equates literacy with basic minimum competence, and rapping with thoughtful inquiry? Who says that schools are better than ever and proves it by counting diplomas?

Fadiman was right. There is an enemy of education, an enemy bristling with methods and materials, and even activities kits, sweeping all before it with programmatic thrusts and film-strip projectors.

But Fadiman was also wrong, or at least incomprehensive. Yes, the enemy is on field, running amok, but it has in fact won no battles, for the simple reason that there haven’t yet been any battles. Those trampled crops and smoldering ruins, those disquietingly undersized corpses rotting in the streets, are neither the results of warfare nor the victories of a disciplined army. They are pillage and rapine, random depredations committed en passant by a mindless and leaderless rabble made up of people who may have heard of things like epistomology and logical fallacies and even the scientific method but can’t for the life of them figure out why they should have to understand such things. But there can be no battles until the other army appears on the field.

But don’t bother to listen for the neighing of its steeds just yet. Those who could, someday, consider beginning to prepare for battle all live in secure citadels. (They never did care much for the country folk, anyway.) They will think their duty done if they can just manage to prevent under-employed professors of educationism from seizing all the required courses. All they care to know of tactics is how to fake student outcomes and behavioral objectives so that they can sneak their own proposals through curriculum committees dominated by fifth-columnists, and past elementary school administrators retreaded as academic vice-presidents. The day of battle is far off.

This essay was published in December of 1981.

Glassboro State Teachers College, ranked in the January 1987 issue of Playboy magazine as the #28 Party School in the nation, has since had its title inflated to Rowan University. That far off day of battle is upon us, right now. The army of “mindless and leaderless rabble” are here, right now. Will we remain in our “secure citadels,” as those supposedly opposed to the left have done for decades, and think all is safe as long as the riots are elsewhere? That we can just let the revolt run its course and everything will go back to normal? That we want what was normal just a month ago? That somebody will take care of it all for us? Or will we stand up and fight to save our own lives?

If you would like to read more of Richard Mitchell’s sharp wit and insight, you can visit the web site for The Underground Grammarian.