The Graves of Academe | Page 4

our constituents, and sometimes (as in the public schools)
upon the restriction of their liberty.
It was the genius of Jefferson to see that free people would rarely have
to defend their freedom against principalities and powers and satanic
enemies of the good, but that they would have to defend it daily against
the perfectly natural and inevitable propensities of functionaries. Any
fool, can see, eventually, the danger to freedom in a self-confessed
military dictatorship, but it takes informed discretion to see the same
danger in bland bureaucracies made up entirely of decent people who
are just doing their jobs. But Jefferson was optimistic. As to the liberty
and property of the people, he saw that "there is no safe deposit for
them but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them
without information." And he was convinced, alas, that the people
could easily come by that information: "Where the press is free, and
every man able to read, all is secure."
That sounds so simple. A free press, and universal literacy. We have
those things, don't we? So all is secure, no? No.
Just as we cannot assume that what we call "education" is the same as
Jefferson's "informed discretion," we cannot assume that Jefferson
meant what we mean by "press" and "able to read." In our time, the
press, in spite of threats real or imagined, is in fact free. And, if we
define "literacy" in a very special and limited way, almost everyone is
able to read, more or less. But when Jefferson looked at "the press,"
what did he see? Or, more to the point, what did he not see? He did not
see monthly periodicals devoted entirely to such things as hair care and
motorcycling and the imagined intimate details of the lives of television
stars and rock singers. He did not see a sports page, a fashion page, a
household hints column, or an astrological forecast. He did not see a
never-ending succession of breathless articles on low-budget decorating

for the executive couple in the big city, career enhancement through
creative haberdashery, and the achievement of orgasm through
enlightened self-interest. He did not see a nationwide portrayal of "the
important" as composed primarily of the doings and undoings of
entertainers, athletes, politicians, and criminals.
He would not, I think, have been unduly dismayed by all that. Of
course, he would have been dismayed , but not unduly. Such things are
implicit in the freedom of the press, and if enough people want them,
they'll have them. (Jefferson would surely have wondered why so many
people wanted such things, but that's not to the point just now.)
Jefferson did, naturally, see "the press" giving news and information,
but, more than that, he also saw in it the very practice of informed
discretion. In his time, after all, Common Sense and The Federalist
Papers were simply parts of "the press." And "every man able to read"
would have been, for Jefferson, every man able to read, weigh, and
consider things like Common Sense and The Federalist Papers. He
would have recognized at once our editorial pages and our journals of
enquiry and opinion, but he would have found it ominous that hardly
anyone reads those things, and positively portentous that this omission
arises not so much from casual neglect as from a common and
measurable inability to read such things with either comprehension or
pleasure.
Thus Jefferson is cheated. The press is free and almost everyone can
make out many words, but all is not secure. Wait. That's not quite clear.
Some things are secure. The agencies and institutions of government
are secure. The functionaries whose propensity it is to command our
liberty and property, they are secure. And, as the one-eyed man is the
more secure in proportion to the number of citizens he can blind, our
functionaries are the more secure in proportion to those of us who are
strangers to the powers of informed discretion. It is possible, of course,
to keep educated people unfree in a state of civilization, but it's much
easier to keep ignorant people unfree in a state of civilization. And it is
easiest of all if you can convince the ignorant that theyare educated, for
you can thus make them collaborators in your disposition of their
liberty and property. That is the institutionally assigned task, for all that

it may be invisible to those who perform it, of American public
education.
Public education does its work superbly, almost perfectly. It works in
fairly strict accordance with its own implicit theory of "education," an
elaborate ideology of which only some small details are generally
known to the public. This is hardly surprising, for the rare citizen who
actually wants to know something about educationistic theory, a dismal
subject,