Book by Book (3 page)

The “elective system” is “the democratic principle of admitting all subjects as of equal educational value.” In the end, this has always “resulted for the lazy in the search for what was not hard, and for the industrious in the search for what they could do best.”—E.K. Rand

I have never worked in a coal mine or a uranium mine, or in a herring trawler; but I know from experience that working in a bank from 9:15 to 5:30, and once in four weeks the whole of Saturday, with two weeks' holiday a year, was a rest cure compared to teaching in a school.—T. S. Eliot

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison,
for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books) and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly un-memorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body, but they do not torture your brains. . . .

Moreover, at school students are “taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty jokes, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguards' shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards.”—Bernard Shaw

Our culture tends “to regard the mere energy of impulse as being in every mental and moral way equivalent and even superior to defined intention.” Instead we should consider “an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of ‘making a life,' by which was meant conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment. . . . This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.”—Lionel Trilling

Within the contemporary university various groups advocate retreat into provincialisms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
or some other form of communitarian identity. These exclusionist tendencies stand in direct opposition to literal learning. They constitute the xenophobic mentality of the small town. . . . They champion the world of village athletes, smug in their neighborhoods, never testing themselves against the big league teams. —Frank M. Turner

Schools reek with puerile nonsense. Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. —H. L. Mencken

The truth is that much of American education aims, simply and brazenly, to turn out experts who are not intellectuals or men of culture at all: and when such men go into the service of government or business or the universities themselves, they do not suddenly become intellectuals.—Richard Hofstadter

Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge.—Nietzsche

Humankind, noted the dour T. S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. One way people avoid it is to imagine a time when society was truly courtly, genteel, or comradely. If only we could, say, reinspire our children with noble ideals, they—never us parents—
could build again a golden age and become its heroes, light-bringers, Nobel laureates. (We do tend to forget, as the poet Randall Jarrell quipped, that the people who lived in a golden age probably went around complaining how yellow everything was.)

The matter of ideals lies at the heart of education: What, finally, are the values we wish to impart? In some compendia of moral wisdom—such as William Bennett's
Book of Virtues
—we are bludgeoned with powerful accounts of good and evil, where virtue is nearly always triumphant. To endure times of crisis and doubt, we are told, people require strong, clear lessons, with unambiguous moral points. This is pure Aristotle, by the way, who felt that virtuous behavior was largely the product of habit and practice.

Certainly, such an approach will create a citizenry assured of itself, anchored in its convictions. Yet do we want a nation of true believers? Moralists tend to promulgate creeds of rationalism, individual self-discipline, faith—all the sturdy yeoman traits. But what of ecstasy, community, and doubt? Surely, as the poet Yeats said, body should not be bruised to pleasure soul. Ought our schools to produce young fogeys, ten-year-old saints and cautious teenagers who never jaywalk or drive too fast? Civility and courtesy are crucially important, yet, deep down, Americans seldom demonstrate any high regard for an obedient Little Lord Fauntleroy or Goody Two-shoes. Our heroes don't follow the rules; they flout them. We admire rebels, mavericks, drifters, scoundrels, and outcasts. The most archetypal Americans are, after all, Huckleberry Finn, Scarlett O'Hara, Malcolm X, and Bart
Simpson. We need to learn from them as well as from noble George Washington and Clara Barton.

In short, if you are given lined paper, write crosswise. At least occasionally.

True education always starts by granting some kind of initial authority to the teacher, for ultimately, in the words of the theological historian Robert Wilken, we learn best by placing our “confidence in men and women whose examples invite us to love what they love.”

In Saint Augustine's
On Christian Doctrine
—a short treatise on the nature of reading and intepretation—the church father declares that the path to appreciating a book or writer should always begin with love. This notion isn't strictly Christian, however. It lies at the heart of nearly all education in antiquity, for then the student looked to his teacher, to his patriotic ancestors, and to the great heroes of the past as models for the sort of man he might become. The classicist William Arrowsmith insists that such emulation should remain central to learning: “The teacher is both the end and the sanction of the education he gives. This is why it is completely reasonable that a student should expect a classicist to live classically. The man who teaches Shakespeare or Homer runs the supreme risk. This is surely as it should be. Charisma in a teacher is not a mystery or nimbus of personality, but radiant
exemplification to which the student contributes a correspondingly radiant hunger for becoming.”

Little wonder that William Arrowsmith's favorite play was Sophocles'
Philoctetes
and his favorite scene that in which Philoctetes allows the young Neoptolemus to hold the bow of Heracles. For Arrowsmith this sacerdotal moment represents the handing on of the heroic ideal—and is an emblem of the proper function of education.

Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement. Socrates or Alfred North Whitehead, Diotima or Albert Einstein, each represents the learning he or she expounds. Writing of the critic and teacher John Crowe Ransom, the poet Anthony Hecht recalled that “Mr. Ransom did not lecture, he inquired, and he invited the class to join his inquiry. . . . For one learned from him, not facts or positions, but a posture of the mind and spirit, a humanity and courtesy, a manly considerateness that inhabited his work as it did his person.”

Character, then, counts. The famous nineteenth-century master of Balliol, Benjamin Jo we tt, consistently advocated the delight of hard work. “The object of reading for the Schools,” he said, “is not primarily to obtain a first class [degree], but to elevate and strengthen the character for life.” To a lazy student he added, “You are a fool. You must be sick of idling. . .. But the class matters nothing. What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady working.” No lesson, in or out of the classroom, is more important than that one. The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in
history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind—these are right and proper ideals for life. Only by loving fiercely can we hope to be rewarded; only through such intensity do we make ourselves worthy of what we love.

Yet like God, teachers sometimes move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. Consider the opposing examples of the no-nonsense classicist Maurice Bowra and Richard Cobb, a historian of modern France. Of Bowra, the cultural historian Noel Annan writes, “He would approach the Michelangelo Holy Family, pause, regard it as if it were a recalcitrant colleague, deliver judgement, ‘Greatest work of man,' and plod along to the next.” Of Cobb, his student Colin Jones says that “undergraduates . . . told of tutorials spent with him variously asleep, drunk, talking for hours about Georges Simenon and other favoured French novelists, or going down on all fours and barking like a dog. His teaching life was interspersed with wild carousing, scandalous behaviour, perpetual spats with the Master of his college; he was thrown out of more hotels and bars than any Oxford professor of history before (and even since).” Certainly both these eminent scholars lived up to what the philosopher George Santayana whimsically described as the chief function of dons: “to expound a few classic documents, and to hand down as large and pleasant a store as possible of academic habits, maxims, and anecdotes.”

Above all, though, teachers and mentors should never let rules constrict their humanity. So insists Samuel Pickering, the model for the English teacher in the film
Dead Poets Society
, “To educate for the future, one must educate for the moment. Classes should sprawl beyond particular subjects. In digressions lie lessons.
Expose students to possibilities. Let them know about your fondness for china, birds, tag sales, and gardening. Talk to them about economics and sociology, to be sure, but also about places you have been and things you have seen and thought. Instill the awareness that for the interested person days and nights glitter.”

Nowadays our “self-help books” tend to concentrate on the soul; they teach us how to be happier with the people we are; they urge us to make friends with our inner or spiritual self, sometimes even with our inner child. But in the not-so-distant past “self-help” meant self-education, while “education” usually meant memorization and rote learning. You didn't learn in order to feel better about yourself; you (crassly) learned how to make people think the better of you. An extensive vocabulary, an “educated” accent, the mastery of rhetorical skills, a ready fund of poetry and snappy anecdotes—these sorts of attainments would convey to prospective employers or possible mates that the speaker was accomplished, intelligent, and personable. To those who could talk well, the world was waiting to listen. Or so implied books like Wilfred Funk's
Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary
and Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends and Influence People
or his
Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking.

Such rhetorical “surface” learning was even then frequently dismissed as merely a veneer of social grace and smooth talk covering an opportunistic, even slightly shady purpose. Hadn't Samuel
Johnson summed up Lord Chesterfield's similarly worldly and didactic letters to his son as teaching the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master? Nonetheless, a boy or girl could learn about the beauty of language and the power of words from the vocabulary-builder Funk, and if you studied the Carnegie manual diligently, you could give a speech people would pay heed to. Moreover, all the self-help mahatmas urged their acolytes to read the Bible for its prose, to memorize famous poems and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to practice reciting the speeches of Hamlet and Rosalind, Portia and Prospero.

Ultimately, these manuals underscored the esteem still attached to erudition. By stressing how to acquire the appearance of deep and extensive learning, they implicitly taught the importance of the real thing. But our values have altered: Today, anybody with a fair knowledge of world literature and history is commonly regarded as a kind of innocent fool or harmless fuddy-duddy. To possess humanistic learning, once widely aspired to, often seems elitist, unimportant, or simply eccentric. Who would be a scholarly E. R. Curtius or earnest Hannah Arendt in the edgy age of Microsoft? Quote a verse from the Bible or a line from William Wordsworth, mention the date of a battle or a character out of Charles Dickens, and expect to be regarded with a mixture of awe and suspicion. Erudition makes people feel uneasy; at worst it can seem vaguely undemocratic. Better to talk about last night's episode of the latest sitcom, something we can all enjoy equally.

Or is it?

Long ago, Aristotle proclaimed that all men and women desire to know. We instinctively want to learn things. In essence, this is
what makes us who we are, distinct from the other animals around us. And it is this passion that brings us our deepest happiness. To gain new knowledge of the world, the past, and our selves, to understand our place in the universe or discover the laws that govern it, these are the activities of human beings at their best. Most humanistic learning, however, builds on the achievements of the past. For instance, all Western philosophy has been called—by Alfred North Whitehead—a series of footnotes to Plato. But if you don't know Plato, the footnotes will make little sense. In San-tayana's much repeated aphorism, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Worse still, those who don't remember where they've been will soon find themselves utterly lost. Men and women who read and study and learn may go temporarily astray, but they can never be completely lost. Knowledge isn't only its own reward; it gives us maps through the wilderness, instruments to guide our progress, and the confidence that no matter where we are we will always be, fundamentally, at home.