ENGLISH AND
EDUCATION
H. L. Mencken was stunned. As his train puffed through
the Pennsylvania countryside, he stared in shock at the horror that was
architecture in Westmoreland County, east of Pittsburgh. He recoiled before
“the appalling desolation . . . a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably
bleak. . . . What I allude to is the unbroken agonizing ugliness, the sheer
revolting monstrousness of every house in sight.” And he shuddered to this
portentous conclusion: “Here is something the psychologists have so far
neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world
intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a
race which hates beauty as it hates truth.”
Mencken was especially chilled, and puzzled, when he noted that the benighted
Pennsylvanians could so readily have built beautiful dwellings. But they chose
ugly ones. He was baffled by this perversity.
Many people have a quite parallel
experience when examining the state of the American language. Just what are we
to make of the jargon and gibberish beloved by so many of our bureaucrats and
middle managers—and, more crucially, our academics and educators? Mencken’s harsh
prophesy may well be true, and there is now among us a race that “hates
beauty.” How else do you explain this?
The functional methodology shall be
based on an inter-disciplinary process model, which employs a lateral feedback
syndrome across a sanction-constituency interface, coupled with a
circular-spiral recapitulatory function for variable-flux accommodation and
policy modification.
Mario Pei insists this example is
“authentic” and that it emanated from a “great university,” a prima facie
impossibility. I call this sort of egregious English “Ph.D. illiteracy.” Only
those with lots of education can synthesize the stuff. I say synthesize.
Please, no alibis based on the much-abused notion of “natural evolution” of
language. Ph.D. illiteracy is neither natural nor evolutionary, except in the
sense that formica “evolved” from marble.
Besides being ugly and artificial,
Ph.D. illiteracy is also dishonest. The intent is to deceive, to make the
simple seem complex, to make the obvious seem brilliantly and even arduously
discovered, to make the tautological seem like a giant leap forward for
mankind. The writer’s first priority is to impress or trick you. Conveying
information rates only second priority. The more that tricking outweighs
telling, the more language is deformed—that is the essential dynamic of Ph.D.
illiteracy.
Jacques Barzun has stated our
predicament best: “Today it is the educated who lead the way in
destruction”—the destruction of what we fondly call American civilization. The
crime is (if you'll indulge the coinage) culturecide. The murder weapon is
debased language. The murderer, as we’ll see, is debased education.
PROFESSORIAL
PERPETRATORS:
To be fair, I’d like to take a moment to put our professors in perspective.
Even professors of English can be Ph.D. illiterates, though they rarely are.
Biologists likewise are seldom Ph.D. illiterates—unless they happen to be
working for the Pentagon or seeking a grant from the National Science
Foundation. As for anthropologists and accountants, however, they are
plummeting to new depths. And when you come to social scientists and educators,
you find that Ph.D. illiteracy is practically the norm. Here is an educator
describing what he is going to teach to anyone silly enough to show up:
Learning System Design I: Introduction to development learning system design
concepts is provided with practical applications of the systems approach in
human learning. Concepts in topics such as needs assessment, task analysis,
goal formulation, and process and product evaluation are explored emphasizing
relevance in the learning process.
Perhaps you don’t object to high-toned dissimulation, and you’re now asking
yourself, “So what’s the big deal if social scientists play their little
games?” The problem, to quote Barzun again, is that “the condition is
progressive; loose language first makes analysis difficult, then absence of
thought is hidden by technical discourse.” In short: no Beauty, no Truth.
Furthermore, our Ph.D. illiterates are vastly influential. They are, of course,
often nomadic, foraging about from academia to business to government. With
their advanced degrees and presumed learning, they have clout. In consequence,
they have been able to sabotage American English. Their deceitful language has
washed like a dark tide through all the groves of academia, even muddying the
once-lucid physical sciences, and then flooding out into the larger society.
Here’s a marketing executive making the obvious opaque:
Target emphasis based on speciality productivity is presently being applied
almost universally in the journal selection process. The concept is a simple
one: the more productive the doctor on a per-man basis, the greater his
potential return per ad dollar spent. Therefore, the promotion spend is
apportioned according to the relative productivity of each target physician.
An important aspect of the problem is that Ph.D.
illiterates tend to be shameless. These are the “barbarian” specialists that
Ortega y Gasset warned us about. Too many will defend their imagined right to
speak in private codes—and to hell with the rest of us. In sum, Ph.D.
illiterates have exerted a pervasive and near-irresistible influence in favor
of wordiness, murkiness, and pseudo-scientific language in even the most
commonplace circumstances.
A NEW CLASS WITHOUT CLASS:
Much is being made of a so-called
New Class, which is just about everybody below 35 with a college degree. In a
book on this hot new topic, a political scientist named Alvin Gouldner notes
that the members of the New Class talk in a new way. He says their language
tends to be impersonal, precise sounding, and abstract. It is detached and
critical. It is alienated from ordinary life. The New Class thinks this is just
fine—their professors have encouraged precisely those tendencies.
Impersonality, abstraction, and detachment are, of course, excellent
prescriptions for engendering ugly prose and a surfeit of unreality (i.e.,
truthlessness).
Articles I’ve read speak of the New
Class as a coming master race—well-groomed, full of self-importance, ready to
run the world. I say it’s just as useful to regard these people as a race of
carriers, spreading the verbal and intellectual corruption that is Ph.D.
illiteracy throughout public life. Could this New Class be the full flowering
of the race that Mencken saw rising out of the melting pot, lacking culture and
depth, more deeply moved every time by pretension than by poetry or feelings or
the majesty of ordinary facts? The moribund language of the New Class will, I
predict, make its members inefficient and, finally, destructive. They lack
poetry, and so they lack truth.
Keats said that beauty and truth were one. Mencken similarly perceived that the
people who turn against either will turn against the other—“a race that hates
beauty as it hates truth.” To me this conjunction is an exquisite subtlety, not
at all obvious. Orwell neatly explained the correlation’s linguistic aspects:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. . . .When there is a gap
between one’s real and one’s declared aim, one turns as it were instinctively
to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” In
short, the instant that writers turn from truthfulness, they turn from beauty.
The “declared aim” of every memo, report, and scholarly article is, of course,
a pursuit or presentation of facts. The “real aims” are often more cynical,
more insincere—dazzling colleagues, impressing superiors, publishing at any
cost. The real aim is to make sure that people applaud the fit and cut of
clothes the Emperor is not wearing.
SOMETHING'S
ROTTEN:
Some might say that my laments are merely esthetic,
like objecting to a surfeit of garish signs along a highway. My answer is that
these phenomena are not esthetic at all, but are signs of pathology. Ph.D.
illiteracy diminishes the nation’s intellect and vitality. Signs along the
highway may well be an indication of vitality, as may many other eyesores. But
Ph.D. illiteracy and the detached language of the New Class are decay made
visible.
The inestimable George Steiner has written a pertinent analysis of the
relationship between the decline of the German language and the decline of the
German nation. He contends that German, starting before 1870, was debased by a
combined assault from the academic community, the government, and the military.
He feels that two things happened as a result: the nation’s literary output in
the years since has been less than it was before; and more dramatically, the
debasement of the German language made Naziism possible. German’s fall helped
Hitler to rise. The language became chunky and imprecise and fat with
emotionalism. Literature wasn’t possible. Truth wasn’t possible. The Third
Reich was possible. Orwell explains the synergistic, downward spiral in this
way:
An effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing
the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take
to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and fail all the more
completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to
the English language
.
Extending this analysis, I believe that a decline in any field or group is
signaled by a decline in the language used by the group. One decline causes the
other, and so on around.
EDUCATORS WANDERING IN THE VOID:
In education you find that Orwell’s and Steiner’s insights are particularly
apropos. This field produces some of the worst imaginable gibberish.
Frighteningly, it has often stopped producing much else. As we’ve all heard,
Johnny cannot read so well, and Mary cannot spell, and neither can count. SAT
scores slide. According to Lewis Lapham, formerly an editor at Saturday Evening
Post and Life before becoming editor of Harper’s: “In this country, there is a
definite decrease in the number of people who can express themselves clearly.”
All, I say, because educators spend too much time discussing important-sounding
but irrelevant theories and inventing important-sounding but useless
terminology and devising important-sounding but unnecessary tests. What
educators are not doing sufficiently is concerning themselves with Truth and
Beauty.
All of which, I submit (with thanks to Orwell and Steiner), can be deduced from
three words: “motorized attendance module.” That a field spawned such language,
that members of the field used these words in a discussion on TV—well, you just
know that the field has lost its way and may well be defunct. (A “motorized
attendance module” is a school bus.)
The simultaneous decline of American education and the language used by
America’s educators is a historical fact. I believe that they have spiraled
downward in tandem, causally connected, twin helices in a huge conspiracy,
albeit a mindless one for the most part. Educators may even believe that they
are doing good in the world. But the fact is, the educators’ product—that is,
both education itself and the educated themselves—deteriorate yearly. The
result, ten years hence, will be yet another generation of educators who are
less well equipped intellectually to handle their job, less able to see a way
out of the mess. These newer teachers (these New Classmen), in turn, create
still dumber students and more ignorant future teachers.
This next quote is particularly illuminating. All the downward-spiraling
elements of our predicament come together here. For the speaker is an educator,
and he is speaking to educators, and his overall subject is the education of
future educators, and his specific subject is language:
Nor is sentence combining always an option, even if we assume a plenitude of
ideational contents in the writer’s intention, since semantic constraints
governing the grammatically hierarchical arrangement of that content require
that much of it occur as subordinate inclusions within the boundaries of
orthographic sentences.
This foolishness comes from a director of “writing programs” at a large
university.
Here is one more little atrocity. The writer is an educator, and he is writing
about educating. In fact, his is the Party Line. But see how he puts his case:
Rigid course structures in which predominantly
content-oriented approaches are taken with predetermined and fragmented subject
matter, and which require little more of students than monotonous memorization
and regurgitation of often useless bits of information, must be superseded by
instructional strategies and programs that both motivate students and challenge
them toward increased levels of cognitive growth and self-discovery in relation
to the world and others.
HAND IN
HAND:
English and education are normally thought to be little more connected than,
say, botany and politics, or algebra and Latin. But more and more I’ve come to
think that these two words are virtually synonymous, as odd as that may seem at
first. The mind will have words, as surely as an organism will have food. The
question is, which words? Always there is the element of choice—of selection
and rejection. From the first word a child learns to the last book read by a
senior in college, there is choice. The question—and it recurs at a million
separate junctures in each life—is, what words? What books? And this question,
and the answers to it, are the gist of any education.
It’s more obvious that food and diet are synonymous. Every cell takes in food.
Diet introduces the concept of taking in certain foods, not others. In the same
way, language and education are two aspects of the same interplay of intake and
choice. Obviously, whole societies can settle on a bad diet and suffer bad
health. Education-wise and language-wise, we have done just that.
The American language is in decline; American education is in decline. To
discover that one of these is true is to be sure that the other is also true.
Conversely, to improve either, we will necessarily have to improve both.
EDUCATION
UNTIL RECENTLY:
For thousands of years, educators were chiefly concerned with filling heads
with facts. That is, Truth. There was one guiding principle: students should
learn from the best, most splendid examples and achievements supplied by the
culture. There is Beauty. The triumph of modern American education is that
Truth and Beauty are in eclipse. The emphasis has fled from fact and the
exemplary to affirmative nurturing and positive reinforcement, which sounds
fine but in practice seems to mean gentling the delicate darlings into mute and
stupid adulthood.
My own suspicion is that education is too important to leave to educators. Any
dozen adults picked off the street, by reflecting on their own schooling and
what worked and what did not, could probably make more sensible recommendations
than we have been receiving from our experts. Alas, these people are now a vast
special-interest group, with a towering glacier of pretension and foolishness
to guard.
Allan Tate has said just about everything we need to know about education, and
I think that the sooner we get back to this wisdom, the better off we’ll be:
The purpose of education is not happiness; it is not social integration, or
political system. Its purpose is . . . the discipline of the mind for its own
sake; these ends are to be achieved through the mastery of fundamental subjects
which cluster around language and number, the two chief instruments by which
man knows himself and understands his relation to the world.
Lovely, that.
A LITTLE REFORMATION
So what do we do? With regard to our language, now is the time for all good
people to come to its aid. We must not take seriously the pretensions of Ph.D.
illiterates and their clones in the New Class. We can laugh, for one thing. We
can also ignore or correct. We must all say again and again, “What exactly do
you mean? Express yourself clearly. Why do you choose such ugly and complex
ways to communicate? Isn’t what you’re saying really quite simple, something on
the order of . . . ?” We can quote Thomas Jefferson: “The most valuable of all
talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
Immersed in language, we must not forget that it is a precious cultural
institution, like democratic government or the Bill of Rights. Unprotected, it
will fade; it will mutate into a tired or grotesque parody.
In his book The Miracle of Language, Charlton Laird states what should be our
perennial philosophy:
The use of language is the use of the mind. Learning to use language
carefully would seem to be training in using the mind carefully, and it has
long been considered so. The Greeks and Romans were careful students of
rhetoric and grammar; during most of the history of Europe, the study of
classical writers was the basis of all education. Egyptian education was based
upon composition; Chinese education was based upon study of the Chinese
classics. In fact most of the great cultures of the world seem to have been
developed by civilizations which attached the greatest importance to the study
of language and choice pieces of writing.
With regard to education, we can extend to all subjects the sensible ideals
now confined to sports and music—namely, that excellence is expected,
respected, and rewarded. Every student should be pushed as far as possible in
every subject, no matter whether the subject is Latin, typing, biology,
carpentry, volleyball, or algebra. We needn’t waste time pitting subject
against subject, career against career. That children are not equally talented
is no matter. What does matter is that all children be exposed to the full
range of possibilities and then cunningly and creatively encouraged to pursue
each subject to the limit of each one’s talent.
What I plainly see is that teenagers in this country who are gifted at sports
are virtually catapulted upward toward excellence—whereas the teenagers who
show a gift for biology or history or Latin are herded toward mediocrity. Try
to grasp this: a tenth grade teacher in Rockville, Maryland, was suspended for
encouraging interested students to read books (Aristotle, Machiavelli) not in
the official curriculum. Now hear the official explanation: the principal and
the county superintendent insisted that teaching must be uniform. Oh, sure, and
in the Maryland schools every kid plays varsity football!? Well, modern
education piffle has evidently run amok in Maryland, with these two clear
results: some students will be less than they could be, and the country will
have less brain power than it should have.
A reformation needs leaders, and clearly they must be the country’s editors,
publishers, writers, journalists, columnists, business people, and all those
beleaguered administrators, professors, scholars, and teachers who have always
known in their bones that it’s clarity that is next to Godliness. I’ve been
emphatic that Ph.D. illiteracy is an artificial thing, an intellectual
aberration that little-minded people cook up for our mutual indigestion. The
converse is crucial to us now: large-minded people can clear the table, start
afresh. If the intellectual climate turns against the hideous in language and
the silly in educational “strategies,” we will see a remarkable vanishing act.
Why not today?
SOURCE:IMPROVE-EDUCATION.org,Established
2005.
