The Average Student: A Useful Fiction
Stein, Robert A.
"Your sister is given to government." "Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea (andI am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in favor of the Lords...
...Despite the substantial differences between the average and elite students' cultural equipment, they do share varying amounts of disillusionment...
...He cannot rattle off an "analysis" of the military-industrial-academic complex, but he is not dumb about its pressures, nor about what would happen were he to try to change his destiny...
...286-88, where Mailer sounds like the ideologue of sex he rightly complainsabout elsewhere...
...National secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1964-65, Kessinger described his shop as a sporting goods store but said he had sold between $6,000 and $7,000 worth of guns since he opened in June...
...He may feel little enthusiasm about his future job, yet looks forward to its financial rewards...
...He is lamentably cynical about politics, yet it does not at all follow that he is politically insignificant...
...The average student hardly sees it as ominous, but he finds learning suspect partly because the moral and intellectual virtues glowingly attributed to schools and teachers—often during high school commencement exercises or a freshman orientation lecture—are unreal...
...As the elite student sees it, the black-power movement enacts a desirable sense of community...
...If there is a single detrimental element of the average students' school, it is the education department...
...Hence faculty and students are plagued by a sense of futility about their immediate circumstances which reinforces defensiveness and lack of self-respect...
...Unfamiliar as he is with the life of the mind, he is nevertheless willing to work hard at learning...
...Whatever the vocational goal of the average student may be, he has seized upon it, and he knows it...
...he was concerned with the sorts of compromises Pip makes along the way, the personal and social blackmail to which he succumbs that Dickens called attention to...
...Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1970 NOTEBOOK quired by state law), he is still dependent on his teachers' recommendations for future employment...
...To make matters worse, there is widespread anxiety and misunderstanding about the nature of protest and reform...
...If he has seen Blow-Up or Weekend, the average student may have felt bewildered, and if he discovers Mailer or Marcuse, it will be in the pages of Time...
...However his impulse to rebel may come about, it is an impulse that implies direct conflict with his vocational goal...
...Adult life, as he sees it, is an endlessly widening cycle of earning and spending: paying taxes is what defines a citizen...
...it is what work brings—a private home, two cars, perhaps greater respectability—that attracts...
...And there is nothing objectionable about seeking education for such pragmatic motives...
...With the help of an apologetic dean, he may be bitterly convinced that he is getting an inferior education because the legislature appropriated too little money for an adequate library or a faculty with prestige degrees...
...When it comes to working and living alongside blacks, the average student is as likely not to want to as his parents, yet he accepts black demands for university training: this is precisely the path toward higher status that the average student sees himself as following...
...And while responsive to mass media, he sees through its various forms of salesmanship...
...To put it perhaps too schematically: what for •the elite student symbolizes social and political evil is for the average student a sign of the inevitable...
...What shape does their disaffection with the lords of the treasury, admiralty, and education take...
...Ironically, he has learned from the mass media that candidates are selected for their ethnic appeal, that campaigns are pitched for "the labor vote," "the suburban vote," "the backlash...
...From one or another elitist viewpoint, "rising" is a priori illusory: our best students today see themselves as being "beyond" or above aspirations that authentically motivated their elders...
...Different though their ends are, smear campaigns and campaigns that legitimate public dissent work by similar means, and their impact will continue to determine the average students' tolerance for his elite counterpart—who is as savvy about playing for television as the average student is incapable of turning it off...
...Should he not be enrolled in a program leading to a teacher's certificate as well as a bachelor's degree, and thus be exempt from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (it is widely reWhatever Happened to . . . Appearing in the second day of hearings at Northwest Armory, North and Kedzie Avenues, Craig Connally, 26, an assistant chemistry instructor, raised his arm in a clenched fist when he was sworn in by Sen...
...He is no more enthusiastic about serving in the draft than the elite student...
...Oh...
...293-317...
...Unlike the average student, the elite stu dent can go quite a way toward educating himself in the library, and he can join energetic cliques for partying and protesting, always with fear of the fuzz and the technocrat to keep the psychodrama primed...
...His part-time job experience is not diverse, and he rarely changes the major specified during his freshman year...
...He usually stays near home and attends a public college, though he can sometimes be met at Harvard too, where he will be a stranger...
...But no alliance involving the average student has been achieved...
...He cannot afford to indulge his impulse to rebel...
...For reasons one must respect, the average student cannot easily become a rebel...
...And she ain't over partial to having scholars on the premises," Joe continued, "and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as Imight rise...
...I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea (andI am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in favor of the Lords ofthe Admiralty, or Treasury...
...How to involve the average student in reform of the university is a complex, difficult matter...
...he is a rather careful, paternalistic worker...
...46-49, describes the average students' classroom demands...
...What strikes me as sad, inhumanly blind, and politically liable about the average student is that while he is adept at recognizing how certain cues are used to stereotype and oppress people —after all, he has been treated that way himself— his awareness is not at all liberating...
...Some legitimate and politically neutral demands for reform, such as a wider range of course options, cannot be achieved because there is not enough money for adding facilities and staff...
...The average student is willing to support antimilitaristic politics and he understands (or can learn to understand) the need for uninhibited research within the university...
...Robert J. Potter's "Portait of a Working-ClassCollege," DISSENT, Winter 1964, pp...
...Asked if he solicited business from the revolutionary movement, Kessinger told the committee, "I solicit business from anyone with money...
...Seldom divorce outright, but something harder to balance...
...The average student has been trying to make peace with education since kindergarten (usually, by retreating...
...The average student is admittedly a somewhat fictive character, but since the elite student is getting so much attention in the mass media and highbrow journals, it may be worth recalling what the average student is like...
...So the average student is not too enchanted by a future of white-collar employment under GM or IBM, of elementary or high school teaching, of investing or engineering, and in a sense he shares the elite students' awareness that labor can be alienating...
...Wearing a brown and green camouflage shirt with a Mao Tse-tung medal and Eagle Scout badge pinned to it, Connally told the committee he was advised by an attorney not to testify on the grounds that he didn't want to "violate the separation of the legislature and the courts...
...Connally also refused to say whether he knew Clark Kessinger, owner of Harper's Ferry Ordnance, a gun store at 180 N. Wacker Dr...
...and the strategy of the New Left has failed to take this into account...
...For a sociological description ofAmerican college students of the sixties, classifying eight types and their "Stance vis -a-vis American institutions," see Richard E. Peterson, "The Student Left in American Higher Education," Daedalus, Winter 1968, pp...
...Let me therefore make a few observations about what I think will be decisive in shaping his political life...
...He may be inspired to rebel by noting discrepancies between the front page of the catalogue, promising "a flexible, well-rounded curriculum," and such facts of life as not being able to take anything but required courses, including one on the arts or Western civilization which is transparently just a gesture...
...A confrontation between the two is apt to create a spectacle of emulation or contempt...
...Average and elite students both know bow desperately we need, in our public life, suasive intelligence, and that what will be decisive ultimately are not chants of "No, no, we won't go" but the outcome of decisions like Judge Wyzanski's ruling on the discriminatory nature of conscientious objection to selective service which specifies only religious grounds, the realigning of international relations and its influence on domestic spending, and the extent to which the welfare state becomes, through legislation and administration, equitable...
...Maturing, he knows, is taking it...
...The average student sees through the manipulative techniques commonplace in our culture, yet he remains responsive...
...Reform requires more active faculty leadership at undistinguished schools than at distinguished ones, but it is less available...
...Great Expectations FOR "THE AVERAGE STUDENT," education means rising but not rebelling...
...For social and professional reasons, the average faculty member tends not to incline to dissent...
...Kessinger was called to testify yesterday after the committee obtained materials from Connally's class which said "movement" members could get a 20 per cent discount on purchases from Harper's Ferry...
...Which I meantersay the government of youand myself...
...His parents are not likely to respect their jobs...
...He may be inspired by noting that his training is not truly preparing him for a career, or that thinking is a liability because it frightens many teachers...
...He said he has a federal license to sell nonautomatic weapons...
...BY CONTRAST, WHAT MODELS of courage are available to the average student, what initiations into personal and political integrity...
...He justifies his experience in terms of vocational goals—and he has to do that NOTEBOOK because of his parents' relatively inferior education...
...Given to government," said Joe...
...Only in technology does the average student see an intimation of knowledge and reason working for the betterment of man —and technology includes training teachers as well as dental assistants...
...Even though time wasted in education courses is now minimized (compared with the curriculum of the fifties), terribly authoritarian pressures come to dominate the average student through scholastic aptitude and psychological testing, the supervision and evaluation of student-teaching, and the considerable influence of the surrounding public-school systems...
...His demands in the classroom are at once naive and searching...
...And the values inherent in stereotypes like "the fraternity man," "the executive," or "the niceguy teacher" are understood by the average student, whose demonology is as thorough as the elite student's, albeit less dramatic...
...As for the confrontation of the average and elitestudent: in effect, they are the working-classsoldiers and urban middle-class protesters described in a passage of The Armies of the Night (New York: Signet Books, The New AmericanLibrary, 1968), pp...
...In judging hippies or activists, his sense of American "fair play" goes no deeper than Eric Hoffer's...
...He is still living at home...
...The elite student's most worthwhile goal for university reform is to free it from militaristic ties...
...So if political activity is afoot, all an administrator has to do is invoke the specter of violence by mentioning San Francisco or Kent State and everyone will smugly stay cool...
...Nobody likes "troublemakers"— least of all educationists...
...At CCNY that obviously didn't work, but New York City really is a separate matter...
...Like a sort of a rebel, don't you see...
...Mostly, the dull, aimless, lonely ambiance of American life...
...Dickens did not criticize Pip's wanting to be a gentleman...
...He can, of course, be indolent and banal —as can his elite counterpart, about whose drugs and posters and motives he is curious...
...He has a part-time job so that he can afford to put a few frills on the colorless, weekly grind, and he wants to maintain his draft exemption...
...unfortunately, the average and elite student all too often find themselves as antagonists...
...But the average student cannot tolerate strategies like protesting against campus employment recruiters, against ranking academic performance, or the blocking of classes—in general, against any concrete form of the university's services for a competitive labor market...
...William Horsley [R., Springfield], chairman of the Illinois Joint Senate House Committee on Campus Unrest...
...But meanwhile, average and elite students both know that making it—and having to make it— leaves little elbowroom for acting freely...
...The elite student may well end up on the university's pay roll...
...The average student may be temporarily "radicalized" by some brutal police work on a campus or at a Chicago, but he is not likely to find the New Left inspiring...
...The elite student believes that learning is tarnished by •the CIA...
...He is pragmatic in choosing what he wants to learn and parochial in selecting which "expert" he will listen to...
...Hence the elite student usually supports (even before NOTEBOOK the police are called) struggles that blacks are carrying on effectively by themselves...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
