The Graves of Academe | Page 9

knew how to hook up and operate. I
could hear them in the next classroom shoving the desks into sociable
circles so that, as in King Arthur's court, no one would be
disadvantaged by having to sit below the salt, or breaking up into small
groups, so that understanding could be reached by democratic
consensus rather than imposed by authority. Sometimes whole classes
could be heard singing - a delightful change of atmosphere in precincts
otherwise darkened by realism and naturalism and the intellectual
despair of eminent Victorians.
All in all, I thought the teacher-trainers harmless and childlike,
optimistic and ingenuous. I knew, to be sure, that many of them held
what they called doctorates in things like comparative storage systems
for badminton supplies and for cafeteria management, but so what?
They weren't pretending to teach anything that called for traditional
training in scholarship, were they? Doctorates in education, I
remembered from my days in graduate school, are much easier to get
than any other kind, but what did that matter? A doctorate, after all was
just a union card, a ticket of admission to a remarkably good life, and

why shouldn't those decent and well-meaning people have doctorates
just like everybody else? As to whether what they did had any value in
the training of teachers, I just didn't know. I wasn't curious enough to
pay thoughtful attention, and they didn't seem to be hurting anyone.
Live and let live.
So I did. Once the novelty of their techniques wore off, and long before
it dawned on me that those techniques were better called "antics," I just
stopped thinking about them. The teacher-trainers were not in my mind
at all when I started to publish The Underground Grammarian in 1976.
The Bicentennial Year was in my mind, and Tom Paine and even
William Lloyd Garrison, and, most of all, the ghastly, fractured,
ignorant English that is routinely written and spread around by college
administrators, the people charged with the making and executing of
policy in the cause of higher education in America. I presumed that
those administrators would be the natural prey of a journal devoted to
the display of ignorance in unlikely places. It never even struck me then
that most administrators were once the teacher-trainers who were not in
my mind.
And I will beg your indulgence, reader, in suggesting that when you
look at the world and wonder what's going on, the teacher-trainers are
not in your mind. Nuclear weapons and taxes are in your mind, along
with politicians and other criminals. Pollution and racial discord are in
your mind. Prices double and pleasures dwindle, violence and
ignorance multiply and expectations diminish, and all the season's new
television shows are aimed at demented children, and master sergeants
have to puzzle out in comic-book style manuals how to pull the triggers
on their Titan missiles, and sometimes, in a moment of pure panic, you
wonder whether you shouldn't have voted for Goldwater after all. And
when you wave a finger this way and that, trying to point it at someone,
anyone, the teacher-trainers are not in your mind.
Sometimes, to be sure, you do suspect and even indict "the schools."
Ah, if only "the schools" would do this or that. But what? Everybody
has a formula, sort of. Money, obviously, isn't the answer. They have
money beyond counting. Less money can hardly be the answer - just

ask the National Education Association. So what are we to do? Public
schools? Private schools? Vouchers? Integration? Remediation?
Consolidation? Back to basics? Forward to relevancy in bold
innovative thrusts?
Then again, you may not even ask these questions, for to do so is to see
a connection that not many Americans have thought to make. Millions
of us have nothing at all to do with the schools. We have no children in
the schools, and we don't know what they're doing, and we don't much
care, except about the taxes we pay to support the enterprise. We can
easily think of many things that must be far more important than
education, a notably dreary topic in any case. Surely politics is more
important than education. So is economics. Technology. National
defense. Even art! And the six o'clock news in any city in the land
makes it perfectly clear that the most important things that happened in
your part of the world today were murders, rapes, and a fire of
unknown origin in an abandoned warehouse. And as for the schools,
most of us just hope that they'll teach the children to read and write and
cipher someday soon and just not bother us. We have all those
important things to worry about and we really can't be bothered with
wondering about whether the schools should experiment with a
groundbreaking return to the