Having made certain, that any moron can be graduated from a high school, they are now striving to make certain that every graduate will be a moron

Bestor - Restoration of Lenrning review by

Revilo Oliver:

In his new volume Bestor again suryeys modestly and dispassionately the present status of public education from the kinder-garden to the graduate school. It is a dismal and frightening story.

Although, he reminds us, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone ever became a better teacher by subjecting himself to the tedium and hypocrisy of courses in the "science" of "education," the shamans long ago bamboozled the legislators of every state into granting them a virtual dictatorship over the elementary and secondary schools. They then proceeded, by terrorizing competent teachers and befuddling the public with their own brand of conjurer's jargon, to eliminate intellectual discipline from the teaching of the established subjects of study, thus degrading them to suit the mentality of nincompoops and the taste of louts. By this process the minds of intelligent children are, of course, debauched and crippled, and the result is that almost everywhere, as Bestor puts it, "the elementary and secondary schools are, with devastating success, killing off every budding intellectual interest." That goal attained, the professional boob-breeders are now suppressing even what was left of the usual curriculum, and are replacing all the normal subjects of instruction, from English to mathematics, with classes in "life adjustment" designed for the feeble-minded.

Having made certain, in other words, that any moron can be graduated from a high school, they are now striving to make certain that every graduate will be a moron. Some pupils, they recognize, have been denied the benefits of imbecility by birth; but strenuous application of modem techniques for twelve years should correct this deficiency. In the meantime the colleges imd themselves inundated by an ever-increasing horde of illiterates, and are desperately trying to provide the elements of a secondary education in "survey" or "remedial" courses - or are cynically consoling themselves with the reflection that anything that can stand on its hind legs long enough to receive an A.B. is worth at least two thousand bucks on the hoof (counting, of course, both what is collected as tuition and what is wheedled from alumni or legislators). The very thought of attracting another thousand head of customers suffices to make the ideals drool down the jaw of an ambitious diploma-peddler, and the land now resounds with singsong cries about "modern needs" and "wider opportunities". And finally, the corruption has inevitably spread to the graduate schools in some of which, at least, the highest academic degree, PhD, is now being sold to incompetents whom their examiners admit to be incapable of original investigation or even lucid thought, and who, often enough, cannot write a paragraph of correct, intelligible English.

The general accuracy of Professor Bestor's account of what has happened and what is happening cannot be disputed. But some readers, at least, will suspect that in one respect he has been less than fair to the self-appointed "educational experts." For, whether from courtesy or from a desire to delimit his subject, he avoids discussion of the experts' motives, and leaves it to be inferred that their activities have been largely or entirely instinctive, determined subconsciously by the blind forces of ignorance and greed.

It is a delicate and difficult question. When termites find lodgement in the beams of your house, they instinctively settle down to multiply and to exercise their mandibles; and when your piano descends suddenly to the basement, to speak of a conspiracy or even of a motive would be absurd. But the educationalists are, after all, human beings, and we are accustomed to think of human beings as acting with a rational purpose which may usually be deduced from the probable consequences of the act. When a man rolls a boulder onto a railway track, we infer that he intends to wreck a train, and we should be skeptical were he to assure us that, in the spirit of blithe experimentation which the pedagogues hold sacred, he merely wishes to ascertain whether railroads can be used as rock crushers. We cannot avoid, therefore, the question whether the educational Harpies, or at least the more intelligent among them, are not acting from rational motives and carrying out a consciously formulated plan.

To answer that question with certainty will be difficult, perhaps impossible. But once it is asked, one's mind is beset by a swarm of disturbingly suggestive recollections.

One remembers, for example, that in the palmy days in which Hitler and Roosevelt came to power, the educationalists of both countries were talking openly of using the schools to produce "a new social order". And was this not in some measure produced?

One remembers, furthermore, that the only perfect example of an educational system pragmatically operated to produce "life adjustment" is the one that now functions so successfully in Russia. And one vainly strives to discern a perceptible difference, other than in the jargon used as camouflage, between the announced objectives of the American educators and the avowed practice of their Soviet counterparts - or should we say colleagues?

The rational mind instinctively recoils from so sweeping a generalization, from so drastic a conclusion. But then one must ask onself, What other intelligible purpose can be served by systematically instilling into the adolescent mind contempt for the traditional culture of Western man? What results would a man expect to produce by inculcating the brutalizing doctrine that the intellectual, aesthetic and moral values which have always been the object of true learning are now the "snobbish relics" of a dead past, and that the true function of society is to satisfy the animal appetites of the proletarian? Would a man strive to produce boobs if he did not intend to have serfs?

These are questions which each of us must anxiously answer for himself. In fairness to the architects of the new "education," we must note that they - unanimously, I believe - protest they are not Communists, though some of them have only recently ceased to swing the censers before the shrine of St Marx, and that some have expressed mild disapproval of the thugs who succeeded Stalin. I wish we could find in these facts complete reassurance.

"Truth", said a noted educationalist to me one day with the iron dogmatism of his tribe, "must be Social Truth". "And what", I asked, "is Social Truth?" "It is", he said quite simply, "what it is expedient for a society to tell its members."

Unusual suicide

 The grey mouse with the black whiskers made one final effort and at last got through. Behind it the ceiling sharply crashed down to the floor and long worms of grey spaghetti oozed out, slowly twisting through the cracks and broken joints. The mouse scooted as fast as it could across the darkened corridor whose trembling walls were crumbling closer and closer together, and managed to squeeze under the door. It reached the staircase and tumbled down, head over heels. Only when it was on the pavement did it stop. It stood still for a second, thought about which way to go, and started off again for the boneyard.

 68‘To tell the truth,’ said the cat, ‘I don’t really find the proposition very exciting.’

‘But you’re so wrong,’ said the mouse. ‘I’m still quite young and, until quite recently, I was very well fed.’

‘But I’m well fed now,’ said the cat, ‘and I haven’t got the slightest desire to commit suicide. That’s why I find it all so extraordinary.’

‘But then you didn’t know him,’ said the little mouse.

‘Tell me about him,’ said the cat.

It didn’t really want to know. It was a warm day and the tips of its fur were tingling.

‘He’s standing at the water’s edge,’ said the mouse, ‘waiting. When it’s visiting time, he steps on to the plank and waits in the middle. He can see something.’

‘I shouldn’t think he could see much,’ said the cat. ‘Perhaps it’s a water-lily.’

‘Probably,’ said the mouse. ‘He’s waiting for it to come up so that he can kill it.’

‘That’s stupid,’ said the cat. ‘It’s not in the least bit inspiring.’

‘When visiting time is over,’ the mouse went on, ‘he goes back on the bank and stares at her photo.’

‘Doesn’t he ever eat anything?’ asked the cat.

‘No,’ said the mouse, ‘and he’s growing so weak. I can’t bear it. One of these days he’s going to slip.’

‘Why should you care?’ asked the cat. ‘Is he unhappy?’

‘He’s not unhappy,’ said the mouse, ‘He’s grieving. And that’s what I can’t bear. One day he’ll fall into the water through leaning over too far.’

‘Well,’ said the cat, ‘if that’s the way it is, I’ll see what I can do for you – although I don’t know why I said “If that’s  the way it is”, because I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about.’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said the mouse.

‘Just put your head in my mouth,’ said the cat, ‘and wait.’

‘Will it take long?’ asked the mouse.

‘Only until somebody treads on my tail,’ said the cat. ‘I just need something to make me jump. I’ll leave it stretched out, so don’t worry.’

The mouse opened the cat’s jaws and placed its head between the sharp teeth. It pulled it out again almost as quickly.

‘Ugh!’ it said. ‘Did you have shark for breakfast?’

‘Now look here,’ said the cat, ‘if you don’t like it, you can clear off. The whole story’s a bore. You’ll have to manage by yourself.’

It seemed angry.

‘Don’t lose your temper,’ said the mouse.

It closed its little black eyes and put its head back. The cat let its pointed canine teeth close delicately on the soft grey throat. The mouse’s black whiskers brushed against the cat’s. The cat’s bushy tail unrolled across the pavement.

The voices of eleven little girls, coming in a crocodile from the Orphanage of Pope John the Twenty-third, could be heard getting nearer. They were singing. And they were blind.

Boris Vian

Mood Indigo

The Most Well-Educated Man I Ever Knew

THE UNITED STATES HAS BECOME a nation of boobs. This is partly the work of the public boob-hatcheries, which operate to prevent their victims from being educated. After a brain has been soaked and pickled in “One World” pus, it becomes incapable of coherent thought about the real world, and so irremediably credulous that it will believe in the equality of races, the Holohoax, ‘parapsychology,’ astral influences, spooks, and every other kind of claptrap that violates common sense.

We all have to educate ourselves. The function of genuine schools is to impart, at the earliest possible age, the essentials which cannot be easily learned without a teacher: language, mathematics, and scientific method (which requires a fairly good laboratory). A youth thus equipped can then learn whatever he wants to know. Time in school is really wasted by such subjects as English literature, history, “sociology,” etc., which can be mastered by anyone willing to read the requisite books.

I suppose that the most widely learned man I have known, i.e., one who had extensive knowledge of the greatest number of fields of study, was a man who left high school in his second year. His name was Jack Macbeth and he was middle aged when I met him in Chicago around 1930. He had worked out, years before, a satisfactory mode of life for himself. He rented a loft in an old building on Wabash, as I remember, for which he probably paid little, since tenancy reduced the cost of insurance for the owner. The hall was bare: a crude podium for a speaker and rows of folding chairs, doubtless discarded by some business and obtained for almost nothing. At the back was a cot on which Macbeth slept.

He operated what he called on the sign outside the separate stairway (written in Greek letters!) “Hobo College.” On two nights a week, as I recall, an audience, chiefly hobos from the hobo-jungles near the railway yards, would come to hear a lecture on some cultural subject and pay twenty-five cents admission. Macbeth obtained his lecturers from the young faculty members of the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and the lesser universities in the city, who were glad to address an audience on their own subject of study and hear themselves talk. Sometimes Macbeth obtained really distinguished men, e.g. Professor William Edgerton, who succeeded Breasted in Egyptology.

The income from his “college” sufficed to maintain Macbeth, who lived as parsimoniously as anyone I have ever known. I doubt that he ever spent five cents to buy a cup of coffee for a lecturer, who, of course, paid for his own transportation. He obtained lecturers for one or two five-cent telephone calls, since he could flatter them by showing an almost expert knowledge of their field, and would urge the importance of what is now called “continuing education” for the poor.

He ate at the cheapest restaurants, and bought only a minimum of respectable clothing. But he had almost the whole of six days a week free, and these he spent in the Crerar and Newberry Libraries, from opening time to closing time, reading assiduously and storing a phenomenally capacious memory. A decade or two of this will do wonders. It was impossible to mention a subject of which he was ignorant. He was, as I have said, the most widely educated man I have known.

Today, I doubt that you could find a university professor or even instructor who would think of giving a lecture without a suitable fee (‘honorarium’). And such audiences could not be found anywhere. All the hobos have long since been corralled by “democratic” despotism.

It was an experience to face an audience of perhaps a hundred, of whom ninety were obviously bums, some even with straw in their hair or on their shabby garments, see them listen attentively to rational discourse on some intellectual subject, and hear them after the lecture ask questions that were almost invariably intelligent. They were living the life they preferred, however squalid and repulsive it may seem to you and me. And there were doubtless unrecorded tragedies among them. Professor Edgerton told me that after he lectured on Ancient Egypt, he was asked questions by one hobo who must have had some knowledge of hieroglyphics.

Equally significant is the fact that Macbeth needed to do no advertising. Once “Hobo College” became known, word about it evidently spread among the hobos, and he always had an audience of a hundred or more, of whom no more than ten were respectable men who had discovered a pleasant way of spending an evening. The hobos always drifted from place to place by stealing rides on freight trains, and were seldom in one place for more than two or three days, but many in Macbeth’s audiences would return when they next came to Chicago, months or years later.

It would be hard today to assemble a comparable audience, intelligent and willing to learn, anywhere. At the local university, highly paid lecturers are brought in, advertised through the university mail; and an audience is given coffee and cookies after each lecture, for which, of course, there is no charge for admission. But it is rare to find more than forty or fifty men and women at such lectures, and when one deducts the members of the department concerned, who are more or less obliged to be present, that leaves a tiny audience that has come out of interest.

Revilo Oliver
— August, 1990