A Barzun Sampler
Back In School A BARZUN SAMPLER Wisdom, reproach, and advice from one of America's most distinguished men of letters. Jacques Barzun, the eminent biographer, essayist, critic, and teacher, has...
...They knew that not every good learner and teacher has the gift of the true scholar, and they foresaw that the compulsion to act like one would only lead to make-believe scholarship...
...that is, not invariably methods and troubles, but substance as well...
...The good repute of the institution demands that they "contribute...
...Again, when it is so easy to "check off what's right," composition—the setting down of one word after another—comes to seem an unnecessary chore...
...The worst is the neglect of teaching—there is no time for both research and class preparation...
...The American people decided a good while ago that it wanted to ape the Chinese Empire and set up a Mandarin system...
...This enchanting new atmosphere found its counterpart in the work to be done—many hours of reading in real books, written by adults for adults, who were deemed capable of understanding all the words and of singling out the important points to remember...
...Not a particle of difference will result in the quality of mind of the degree holder...
...William James, Woodrow Wilson, Lawrence Lowell inveighed against its imposition as a prerequisite—as a union card—for college teachers...
...Legislatures are ever ready to add requirements that sound worthy or useful...
...casualty was free speech...
...This dilemma is also an obstacle to scholarly teaching...
...In addition, a teacher should have some interest beyond his or her specialty...
...They included: driver education, sex education, kindness to animals, shopping and local resources, care for endangered species, family living, global understanding, and no sex education...
...What Are Schools For...
...The obvious way .out is still open: since the Ph.D...
...The name college is magic by itself...
...in fact it was predicted almost as soon as the Ph.D...
...That being so, one can only hope less than perfect into the positively bad...
...Tailored to youthful tastes, such courses lack order and substance—invertebrate data in place of "disciplines...
...This lazy view of writing begins in kindergarten with the "workbooks"—silly questions, ugly paper, crude pencilled checkmarks...
...The head of the National Education Association, true to its baneful tradition, has said that "teachers must be social workers, psychologists, priests"—three professions for the price of one, and without benefit of seminary or graduate training...
...It seemed to give their words the authority they claimed and did not hesitate to exercise...
...Below, with permission, we present a sampling from that book, drawn from the brief introductory essay, newly written, that precede each chapter...
...But before this sion...
...was invented...
...He or she will have had practice in research by preparing the essay and will possess the same amount of teachable knowledge...
...Next, a strong interest in some branch of learning, meaning any one of the genuine school subjects...
...Life on Campus To the incoming freshman, college used to be a revelation—of freedom, of his own maturity, of high seriousness in things of the mind...
...What gets satisfied is mal- cent past, after which dedicated spirits consin requires every college to inform physical disruption, the small group co- ice, vanity, revenge, and kindred feelings...
...During the past half century, the difference between the two levels of higher education—college and graduate school —has been blurred as regards the role of the professoriate...
...students incapable and beyond rescue, but promoted yearly...
...In most cases the boy or girl had never been away from home and was now alone responsible for the use of time and resources, no longer pupil but student...
...Some years ago, a new school superintendent in the Southwest calculated that by state authority he must find room in the high school curriculum for about 200 subjects...
...Anything else is the nonsense we have been living with...
...Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work and, per-haps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done...
...But is it worth the crushing costs and the grand apparatus of scholars and deans and publications and curriculum committees...
...The wholly intellectual landscape was new: here were grave faculty members, friendly but not chummy, devoting a good many hours a week to teaching certain definite matters of agreed importance and also doing that mysterious thing "research...
...The blight comes from the refusal to admit that a teacher can in fact serve the ideal of scholarship without pushing his findings into print...
...Politics is a normal end comes with a bang and suppression with an instrument meant for something persons known or suspected of harbor- endeavor, rough or smooth, to obtain a follows—or reconstitution on saner else has recoiled and turned what was ing the wrong views on the issues of the tangible result for a public or private lines...
...they despise—instead of reforming—the department of education in their own university...
...In other countries all recognize that teaching has equal importance and merit at every rung of the ladder...
...There must be a small army of security guards, a corps of psychiatrists and counselors, facilities for free artistic productions, a supply of contraceptive information and devices, and housing and subsidies for political and ethnic separatism...
...puses from Dartmouth to Berkeley is rapidly worse, so that shame and defamiliar to every concerned parent and This is the sign of the peculiar democ- faction and feuding for intangibles and spair may awaken recollections of a de-every reader of the news...
...It cannot be too often repeated that reading, writing, speaking, and thinking are not four distinct powers but four modes of one power...
...Read the multiple-choice questions or the sentences to be dealt with in some prescribed way: their tone and shape are repetitious, colorless, uninspiring...
...But then the other great mistake of "publish or perish" will have to be reversed...
...They will know their subject, they will think about it and not some "strategy," they will not believe the absurd dogma that there is no transfer in learning ability from one subject to another...
...In bearing, in manner of thinking and talking, a teacher should quite naturally appear to be a person with a mental life, a person who reads books and whose converse with colleagues is not purely business shop...
...There is no hope of attracting students to any art or science and keeping up their interest without this spontaneous mental radiation...
...A college degree is required for any well-paid job in business, as well as for government service and the professions...
...that is, digging around in published matter for facts and ideas to reproduce in altered words, decorated with the usual emblems...
...orals...
...This is often The special function of a university does em society and train their charges to fol- guerrilla attitudes had set in...
...Good writing, done without groans at the injustice of the demand, comes only with frequent practice...
...Result: the inarticulate young whom one meets on every hand...
...As to the first requirement: brains enough to feel bewildered and revolted by the educationist language—and courage enough to admit it...
...The college or university, no longer a republic, is now a democracy of a peculiar kind...
...Short pieces must be called for regularly, carefully corrected by the teacher, and rewritten until acceptable...
...subject matter dictated by politics or current events...
...They scorn mere teachers without knowing any...
...Self-expression...
...is a fetish, award it after the completion of a master's essay and the passing of the present Ph.D...
...must no longer be forced to "produce' soon and abundantly so as to "get on the tenure track...
...Colleges abound and there is no assurance that the graduate from any of them knows anything in particular or knows it well...
...Environmental Education," proposes a retired professor of education...
...Essay examinations provide a second opportunity for writing, just as good readings provide the models...
...This description of the step up from high school as it was fifty years ago has lost all validity...
...That term is much too good for shifting control by warring groups...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 23...
...The newly made Ph.D...
...It works by verbal onslaught and abstractions...
...That last word is diagnostic: it means able to do at will...
...How often does that take place today...
...Writing With printed tests, students do not write as often as they once did...
...As long as these ideas are considered tenable, schoolwork properly so called remains an underground activity in a tyrannical regime...
...they do not review textbooks below the freshman level...
...It is now assumed that the faculty in either place must be composed exclusively of Ph.D.'s and that these certified scholars will continue to "do research" and publish it...
...This result was predictable...
...This self-evident remark holds the solution to the "writing problem" that schools vainly struggle with...
...a curriculum without plan or direction...
...The present intolerable (and immoral) pressure on the young teacher has "produced" only an appalling amount of pointless papers—junk research, to go with junk mail and junk bonds: things multiplied without heed to quality...
...He or she was called Mr...
...It does include the mental life, but certainly makes no fetish of it...
...Older students who are not compelled to think up sentences of their own, who feel that the really serious problem is in which little box to put the x, never develop the habit of trimming and putting order among the ideas that come to their minds helter-skelter, in spurts, as ideas do to most people most of the time...
...Around these attractions the campus recreates the whole of society: unions and strikes, protests, insults, violence, madness, and the agencies needed to cope with these diversions...
...will strive to re-establish the due forms prospective students of its crime rate ercing the large community into submis- and civil temper of a company of scholfor the preceding year...
...What is being witnessed on cam- that life on the campus today will get This worsened state of the campus is multuous and offensive fashion...
...The School Must Also Teach an End to Hate" is the plea of an anguished citizen...
...day were denied a hearing, often in tu- end...
...In the United States, college and university are undergoing the fitting punishment of their snobbish neglect: all the ills of the lower schools have infected the higher—bureaucratic rules and paperwork...
...And naturally assault begets retali- * * * ars...
...The college—and the university around it—have been transformed into a motley social organism dedicated to the full life...
...Jacques Barzun, the eminent biographer, essayist, critic, and teacher, has been writing on the subject of American education for many years...
...The well-named "scholarly apparatus" guarantees only a mechanical product...
...Mandarin" is here a courtesy word, for it hardly matters what the bachelor's degree is worth intellectually...
...What Is the Idea of a University...
...The printed test affords neither...
...The Professors For generations the proud professors have refused to have anything to do with elementary and secondary schooling—except to criticize it on their own hearth-rug...
...Overt teaching and official policy would show how enlightened 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 men and women think and act in mod- battlefield condition became general, ation in an endless round...
...It would be seen as quackery if the stubborn will of the educationists and the foolish hope of the public had not accustomed everybody to the imposture...
...or Miss in class, without irony...
...The most highly trained scholars begin by THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 21 teaching in the lye& or gymnasium or the English "public" and "grammar" schools...
...The As usual, a laudable purpose pursued bers of the faculty or guest speakers, what has happened...
...Just as the public school took on the task of reform, so the academy has taken on the role of showcase...
...Liberal arts majors, if their courses were truly liberal, will be free of crippling ideas about how to teach...
...The side effects upon higher education are many and dire...
...The first called the politicizing of higher educa- not survive the pseudo democracy of low the same high principles...
...The answer is implied in the announcement of yet another hopeful program offered at the Bread Loaf School of English: "Making Johnny a Better Writer By Getting Teachers to Write...
...Nobody writes about the poor showing in "Shopping and Community Resources...
...A law in Wis- racy...
...The popular propaganda in favor of heading for college is supported by the latest statistics, which show that the gap between college-graduate salaries and the rest is widening...
...Mingling for four years in miscellaneous classrooms with a loosely selected group of boys and girls from other parts has value, and the usual extracurricular activities may well "educate" in the worldly sense...
...Teaching What are the native qualities to look for in the person who, though not one of those born to the task, would make a good teacher...
...If instead of always using the jargon word "skills," school people used the word power, they might judge the result of their teaching more concretely...
...Here cultural, political, and ethnic pluralism would prevail...
...And what sort of training should such a person get...
...Which those are can be found every day in the newspaper articles that bewail the failure of the schools...
...They long for it, but too often it consists of fragments of thought jerked out with like and y'know as connectives and assembled for the listener only after several attempts...
...The present shortage of teachers, which has brought about the admission of college graduates without indoctrination in "methods," is an opportunity not to be missed...
...for it is clear that working on a little paper means a little subject, whereas the young teacher ought to be keeping up with the scholarship of the broad subject that he teaches...
...The University of Chicago Presss under the guidance of Morris Philipson, has recently collected fifteen of his articles and speeches—ranging over a period of nearly forty years—in a volume entitled Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning...
...They will deal with learning difficulties in the light of their own experience and not be so ready to ascribe them to "attention deficit" (located in the inner ear) or dyslexia, or home conditions, or lack of self-esteem...
...Rather, intellect weaves in and out of the main business, which is socialization, entertainment, political activism, and the struggle to get high grades so as to qualify for future employment...
...Few survive in practice, but enough are attempted to make a mockery of the idea of schooling...
...Whether mem- tion...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
