The Graves of Academe | Page 7

to vote or what to buy according to whim or fancied
self-interest, either of which is easily engendered in us by the
manipulation of language, which we have neither the will nor the
ability to analyze. We believe that we can reach conclusions without
having the faintest idea of the difference between inferences and
statements of fact, often without any suspicions that there are such
things and that they are different. We are easily persuaded and
repersuaded by what seems authoritative, without any notion of those
attributes and abilities that characterize authority. We do not notice
elementary fallacies in logic; it doesn't even occur to us to look for
them; few of us are even aware that such things exist. We make no
regular distinctions between those kinds of things that can be known
and objectively verified and those that can only be believed or not. Nor
are we likely to examine, when we believe or not, the induced
predispositions that may make us do the one or the other. We are easy
prey.
That these seem to be the traits of the human condition always and
everywhere is not to the point. They just won't do for a free society.
Jefferson and his friends made a revolution against ignorance and

unreason, which would preclude freedom in any form of government
whatsoever. If we cannot make ourselves a knowledgeable and
thoughtful people - those are the requisites of informed discretion -
then we cannot be free. But our revolutionists did at least provide us
with that form of government which, unlike others, does grant the
possibility of freedom, provided, of course, the public has the habit of
informed discretion. That possibility is all we have just now.
Proposition 3 is in effect. We are largely a nation of ill-informed and
casually thoughtless captives. Even when we are well-informed and
thoughtful, however, we cannot be free where the character of the
nation and its institutions must reflect the ignorance and unreason of
the popular will. But if we are well-informed and thoughtful, we can
take comfort in the fact that our form of government is carefully
designed to preclude that condition described in Proposition 7. As long
as we remain a constitutional republic, we cannot ever be both educated
and unfree. It just won't work, and that may be the single greatest
insight of the makers of our revolution.
Therefore, whatever it is they do in the teachers' colleges of America
has had and will always have tremendous consequences. By
comparison with the attitudes and intellectual habits and ideological
predispositions inculcated in American teachers, the acts of Congress
are trivial. Indeed, the latter proceed from the former. If, as a result of
the labors of our educationists, we were obviously clear-sighted and
thoughtful and thus able to enjoy the freedom promised in our
constitutional system, then we would know something about those
educationists. If, on the other hand, we are blind and witless, then we
would know - if there are any of us who can know - something else
about them. To know anything at all about those educationists, however,
we must look at what they do, at what they say they do, and even at
how they say what they do.

The End of the String
As a schoolboy, I always presumed that my teachers were experts in the

subjects that they taught. My physics teacher must, of course, be a
physicist, and my history teacher a historian. I knew that my music
teacher was a musician, for I had actually heard him play, and, during a
dismal year in military school, I could see with my own eyes that the
Professor of Military Science and Tactics was a bird colonel.
Even when I became a schoolteacher myself, quite by accident, I
imagined that I had been chosen for the work because of my knowledge
of the subject I was to teach. It turned out not to be exactly so, for I was
soon asked to teach something else, of which my knowledge was
scanty. No matter, I was told. I could bone up over the summer.
Eventually, I was asked to teach something about which I knew nothing,
nothing at all. Still no matter. I seemed to be a fairly effective teacher
and at least smart enough to stay a lesson or two ahead of the students.
That's just what I did. No one saw anything wrong with that, and the
students never caught me. It was nevertheless depressing, for it led me
to suspect that my physics teacher perhaps hadn't been a physicist after
all.
What then, exactly , was he? What was it that made a teacher a teacher,
if it wasn't, as it obviously wasn't, an expert knowledge of some subject
matter? How could it be