The Graves of Academe | Page 9

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 self-contained classroom.
In fact, the destiny of this land, of any land, is exactly and inevitably determined by the nature and abilities of the children now in school. The future simply has no other resources. And, an even more dismaying fact, because it tells of us , not them, this land as it is today is