The Graves of Academe | Page 2

its startling and horrifying
attributes, which are, in any case, the most important indicators of its
harmful powers. It's not a pretty sight. I have been, too, as brief as
possible. In consequence, there is probably no understanding in this
book of which it is not possible to say: "Well, true, but there's more to
it than that." Quite so. I hope that many will someday look for the
"more," but I will be content, for now, with the "true." I have

everywhere provided as true an understanding as I can discover, and I
am persuaded that a comprehensive and detailed historical analysis will,
if it ever appears, show that my assessment of American educationism
is encyclopaedically incomplete but right anyway. The prodigious
monster is down there, I know, and even if its tentacles and appendages,
its gross organs and protrusions, its subtle convolutions and recesses,
are invisible, I have still seen enough to know the nature of the beast.

Propositions Three and Seven
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king.
And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king.
And why not? It's only natural, and considering the circumstances, not
really a bad system. We do the best we can.
But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man
knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the
half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where
most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers,
therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs,
which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful
and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply
of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed
man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential
competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which
an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by
keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds.
Uneasy lies the head.
Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the
propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously,
threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed
man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those
potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the
construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced
system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and

thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as
little as possible. The system is called "education."
Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures,
institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only
to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact
occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than
their own survival, institutions are never capable of altruism, heroism,
or even self-denial. If you imagine that they are, if, for instance, you
fancy that the welfare system or the Federal Reserve exists and labors
for "the good of the people," then you can be sure that the minions of
the one-eyed man and the half-wit are pleased with you.
Furthermore, any institution that still stands must, by that very fact, be
successful. When we say, as we seem to more and more these days, that
education in America is "failing," it is because we don't understand the
institution. It is, in fact, succeeding enormously. It grows daily, hourly,
in power and wealth, and that precisely because of our accusations of
failure. The more we complain against it, the more it can lay claim to
our power and wealth, in the name of curing those ills of which we
complain. And, in our special case, in a land ostensibly committed to
individual freedom and rights, it can and does make the ultimate claim
- to be, that is, the free, universal system of public education that alone
can raise up to a free land citizens who will understand and love and
defend individual freedom and rights. Like any politician, the
institution of education claims direct descent in apostolic succession
from the Founding Fathers.
Jefferson was in favor of education, indubitably, but he meant the
condition, not the word. He held that there was no expectation, "in a
state of civilization," that we could be both free and ignorant. The
modifier is important; it is to suggest that we might indeed be "free"
and ignorant in savagery. Free at least from the conventional and
mutually admitted restraints to which civilized people bind themselves.
Using Jefferson's terms, we can