[This is number five in our informal series on Rebarbarization In The Academy.]
I revel in my biases.
--James Ryczek, Professor of Social Work, Rhode Island College
Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks.
--Was/Not Was
by Jerome du Bois
For over a dozen years now, the professoriat and official policymakers of many education colleges have proudly established and enforced a dismaying monoversity of political thinking --serve others, not yourself-- promoted by a uniform Zombie newspeak --an explicit attack on the English language-- that they use as a bludgeon on their teachers-in-training.
If you, as a teacher in training, do not agree with an evaluation committee or test score that there is no higher, or more admirable, individual behavior than social action toward social justice --a vague, collective, and frankly stinky socialist goal-- you may never become a teacher, you selfish, antisocial jerk. Getouttaheah! or get with the current academic program. Amazingly, the resentful twits who lost the public political culture to sanity continue to want to shape teachers into their stunted, dated mold. Ain't you academia nuts heard? Collectivism is dayud. Identity politics is dayud. And gay studies? C'monnn. Despite the current plethora of overripe fruit in academia --deader than Andy Warhol. They all went the way of the other chimeras.
But, like some kind of recurrent, accursed stain, the professors still foreground the forlorn and discredited "white male oppressor" meme. The first caricature they drug out so long ago to whack us with they now unashamedly abandon as the last one on the stage, rack-ribbed, nearly naked and shivering-- only now they want to extend this rusty voice-vise to the entire English language. English itself, they insist, is an instrument of oppression. Even as they use it, over and over, retreading dead ideas. I guess it doesn't affect them because they know better. They must be immune. Cuz they smart.
Uh-huh. All time kukai moa, I say.
These arrogant dummies claim that the most sophisticated, flexible, accommodating, liberal, capacious, and evolutionarily-stable language for the Western World --English-- the best verbal stew men, women, and children in this hemisphere ever cooked up, and to which we're still adding ingredients-- that this gloriously alive, future-facing, transcendental physiomental organism was whomped up by some wizened old ofays trying to squeeze everybody else's peaches!
And if you believe that . . .
But they do! Thousands of credulous students have been accepting this crap, becoming teachers, and passing it on to other malleable fools. (One vivid proof and result, supported by many posts on this blog: local Phoenix art, culture and writing.)
Think, people, think. What --there's some evaluation committee declaring what is a word, or an allowable word to put into the stream of the Great Conversation? No way. Whereyat, mon ami --France? Since the English language became interesting, several hundred years ago, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, George Gordon, William Blake, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, scientists, philosophers, philologists, and millions of other self-reflective human beings, most of them multilingual, all invented new words that eventually became part of the common coin of English that we all pass around. My own wife creates words in an ongoing fashion, flashy new florins tossed into the stream of the verbal trade; that may seem disjarring to some, but to me it's enlifting, and you don't have any problem deciphering either word, do you, reader?
We gotta get the chin music back into our heads.
In the meantime, I won't let any twisted turkey try to hijack my wonderful language. Nobody's going to dumb it down into a machine to shrink everybody else into a pinched, Procrustean view of the world.
They're on a doomed mission, of course --controlling a language like English!-- but the PC Police still patrol, in their increasingly ragged uniforms. There's an assistant professor at Brooklyn College's School of Education, Priya Parmar, who keeps fumbling with whatever handles, dials, and buttons that still function. From Jacob Gershman's article in the May 31, 2004 New York Sun:
A case in point, as Mr. Johnson of Brooklyn College has pointed out, is the way in which the term [social justice] was incorporated into Ms. Parmar's course, called Language Literacy in Secondary Education, which students said is required of all Brooklyn College education candidates who aspire to become secondary-school teachers. In the fall semester, Ms. Parmar was the only instructor who taught the course, according to students.
The course, which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of "social justice," according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed.
A preface to the listed course requirements includes a quotation from a South African scholar, Njabulo Ndebele: "The need to maintain control over English by its native speakers has given birth to a policy of manipulative open-mindedness in which it is held that English belongs to all who use it provided that it is used correctly. This is the art of giving away the bride while insisting that she still belongs to you."
Among the complaints cited by students in letters they delivered in December to the dean of the School of Education, Deborah Shanley, is Ms. Parmar's alleged disapproval of students who defended the ability to speak grammatically correct English.
You read that right. Jaw-dropping, eh? More:
Speaking of Ms. Parmar, one student, Evan Goldwyn, wrote: "She repeatedly referred to English as a language of oppressors and in particular denounced white people as the oppressors. When offended students raised their hands to challenge Professor Parmar's assertion, they were ignored. Those students that disagreed with her were altogether denied the opportunity to speak."
Students also complained that Ms. Parmar dedicated a class period to the screening of an anti-Bush documentary by Michael Moore, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a week before last November's presidential election, and required students to attend the class even if they had already seen the film. Students said Ms. Parmar described "Fahrenheit 9/11" as an important film to see before they voted in the election.
"Most troubling of all," Mr. Goldwyn wrote, "she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers."
This is fascism. But it is explicity codified in the profession as dispositions, and it is policy. One of the progenitors of dispositions policy is Linda Darling-Hammond. Gershman again:
Officials of the accreditation council said their policy on dispositions was heavily influenced by a consortium of state education agencies in 34 states, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. In 1992, the body drafted a report containing model standards for licensing new teachers that included the idea of dispositions. The chairwoman of the drafting committee, Linda Darling-Hammond, is a leading advocate of multicultural education and the author of the book "Learning To Teach for Social Justice."
If they formalized the notion in 1992, that means they have been yakking about it since probably 1985, scraping up the leftover asafoetida of collectivism and relabeling it. So the dispositions notion --very old vinegar in opaque new bottles-- has been bobbing back and forth through the concourse of academia for almost twenty years. Teachers College Press published Learning To Teach for Social Justice in 2002 ($54 hardcover: ouch!). From a review of that book:
In Part I, the authors look at the concept of diversity, the importance of inclusion of others’ perspectives, the danger of labeling individuals as part of a group and the value of incorporating the history of marginalized groups into the core of the school curriculum.
Yet I can easily believe that Priya Parmar wouldn't acknowledge that she doesn't believe these things, or believes in them in only one direction. Any teacher who even implies "that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers" has trampled on all four points in the quotation above. But that wouldn't matter to her, because she delusively believes that, like Humpty Dumpty, language serves her. Well, we know what happened to that bad egg.
In what follows, in grammatically correct and decidedly incorrect English, I'm going to attack two stupid ideas: that anybody could ever control English, and the antihuman and hellbound notion of "social justice."
I'll state my case for English briefly and sufficiently with two examples: first, a sweetly relevant recent anecdote from Christopher Hitchens, one of the language's best exemplars and champions:
They'll say, “Don't use the word 'Promethean.'” Actually, that happened recently. I used the word “Promethean” and the [magazine editors] said, “Take that out because people won't know what Promethean means.” I said, “Maybe they won't. I'll cut it out if you give me another synonym for it. You give the words that would stand in for it and I'll change it.” “There doesn't seem to be one,” they said. “No, there isn't, is there?” You either know what “Promethean” means or you don't. If you do, it saves you about 50 words. And if you don't, then you can look it up! So I said, “No. I'm going to keep it, because it's an important word and it's actually not condescending to Americans in the least. You have to condescend far more by finding the 50-word substitute. No, I won't change it. Fuck you. And I don't mean to publish in your magazine, either, for that matter.”
I love this guy! He's got all kinds of music in his head. And his remark applies also to "Procrustean," which I used above. I certainly don't know the whole story of Procrustes, the Greek bed-freak whom Theseus did in, to know that the term refers to shoehorning, another wonderfully allusive word. It also recalls, for me, the strange word "blivey," which, my father told me solemnly long ago, refers to "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag." Got the picture now, mes amis?
How you gonna keep down on the farm when they seen the big city? How you gonna put the cat back in the bag once it's out and running around? How can any so-called educated person think they can control a language like English?
Well, why not? They think they can control people, don't they? They, in their own shriveled insecurity, think people need controlling. But we believe that people are born for self-control, so that when my wife says, for my second example here,
Abortion is a lifesaver
mature human beings reflect on the words, kneejerkers react. But the sentence is in the world, free, intact, intense, reverberant.
Peter Berkowitz recently pointed to an important new book by Alexander Downs called Restoring Free Speech and Liberty On Campus (Cambridge U. Press, about $30). An excerpt from Berkowitz's review:
What forces have driven universities to clamp down on the free play of ideas and to collaborate in the vilification of moral and political opinions that depart from campus orthodoxies? One factor involves a transformation in the idea of the university. The last 25 years have witnessed the return of what Downs calls the “proprietary university,” which sees its central mission not as the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth but rather as the inculcation of a specific —in this case ostensibly progressive— moral and political agenda. Another involves a transformation in the progressive sensibility itself. As late as the mid-1960s, the dominant opinion on the left was that free speech and due process were essential to the creation of a more inclusive and just society. But belief in the progressive character of liberal principles has been under intense attack by influential scholars since the glory days of Martin Luther King Jr. Radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon argue that the oppression of women is itself a product of liberal commitments to fair process (notwithstanding that never in history have women enjoyed the freedom and equality achieved in contemporary liberal democracies). Critical legal theorists maintain the same about the oppression of the poor, and critical race theorists press the claim concerning the oppression of minorities (notwithstanding the reduction in the number and poverty of the poor and the unprecedented inclusion of minorities in public life in liberal democracies). At the same time, many campus theorists drew inspiration from Algerian social critic Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth argued that sympathy with those who suffer is a higher priority than respect for individual rights (even though respect for individual rights has proven over time the most successful means for alleviating suffering). Meanwhile, postmodern critics, believing themselves to be following Nietzsche, argued that individual rights were fictions invented by the strong to control the weak (never mind that Nietzsche decried modern liberalism as an invention of the weak to tyrannize the strong). Taken together, these opinions encouraged the idea of “progressive censorship,” the policing of speech to ensure that it conformed to standards deemed necessary to lift up and liberate the oppressed.
I hope many will join me in saying, Shove your progressive censorship and shove your proprietary university.
Not to mention the insane idea that one can produce character by extortion, intimidation, or bribery.
K.C. Johnson, Professor of History at Brooklyn College and CUNY Gradutate Center, identifies some of these collegiate incubators of rancid radicalism in the May 23rd online issue of Inside Higher Education:
At the State University of New York at Oneonta, prospective teachers must “provide evidence of their understanding of social justice in teaching activities, journals, and portfolios. . . and identify social action as the most advanced level.”
The program at the University of Kansas expects students to be “more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.”
The University of Vermont’s department envisions creating “a more humane and just society, free from oppression, that fosters respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.”
Marquette’s program “has a commitment to social justice in schools and society,” producing teachers who will use the classroom “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.”
According to the University of Toledo, “Education is our prime vehicle for creating the ‘just’ society,” since “we are preparing citizens to lead productive lives in a democratic society characterized by social justice.”
This rhetoric is admirable. Yet, as the hotly contested campaigns of 2000 and 2004 amply demonstrated, people of good faith disagree on the components of a “just society,” or what constitutes the “negative effects of the dominant culture,” or how best to achieve “world peace. . . and preservation of the environment.”
An intellectually diverse academic culture would ensure that these vague sentiments did not yield one-sided policy prescriptions for students. But the professoriate cannot dismiss its ideological and political imbalance as meaningless while simultaneously implementing initiatives based on a fundamentally partisan agenda.
Instead of downplaying the issue, education programs have adjusted their evaluation criteria to increase its importance. Traditionally, prospective teachers needed to demonstrate knowledge of their subject field and mastery of essential educational skills. In recent years, however, an amorphous third criterion called “dispositions” has emerged. As one conference devoted to the concept explained, using this standard would produce “teachers who possess knowledge and discernment of what is good or virtuous.” Advocates leave ideologically one-sided education departments to determine “what is good or virtuous” in the world.
In 2002, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education explicitly linked dispositions theory to ensuring ideological conformity among education students. Rather than asking why teachers’ political beliefs are in any way relevant to their ability to perform well in the classroom, NCATE issued new guidelines requiring education departments that listed social justice as a goal to “include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice” when evaluating the “dispositions” of their students. As neither traditional morality nor social justice commitment in any way guarantee high-quality teachers, this strategy only deflects attention away from the all-important goal of training educators who have command of content and the ability to instruct.
Barbara Winslow, a professor at Brooklyn College School of Education, wrote recently, according Gershman's NY Sun story:
"The School of Ed is trying to be more systematic in looking at what educators call 'dispositions,' that is behaviors necessary for being a successful teacher in the public schools. Being able to do excellent academic work, does not always translate into being a thoughtful, self-reflective and effective teacher for youngsters."
Later in Gersham's NY Sun article:
Officials of the national accreditation council said it provides a guide for teacher education schools but relies on the individual schools to develop their own specific definitions of dispositions. The president of the council, Arthur Wise, told the Sun that dispositions "deals with the softer side of teaching."
"It recognizes the fact that a person may have content knowledge, may well understand pedagogy and may be able to use it effectively on command," Mr. Wise said. "But the question is: How does the individual relate to children both individually and collectively?"
To paraphrase the bolded passages: "Don't know much about geometry? Not to worry. The most important thing you can learn is to never hurt a student's feelings."
Think I'm kidding? Then listen to the President of DePaul University in Chicago, the serendiptiously-named Suzanne Dumbleton, after firing Thomas Klocek for refusing to be a dhimmi to Palestinian students:
The students’ perspective was dishonored and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted . . . Our college acted immediately by removing the instructor from the classroom.
And this:
No students anywhere should ever have to be concerned that they will be verbally attacked for their religious belief or ethnicity. No one should ever use the role of teacher to demean the ideas of others or insist on the absoluteness of an opinion, much less press erroneous assertions.
One rarely reads such starry-eyed kumbaya anymore; it would charming if it wasn't just a cruel lie. (The students Ms. Dumbleton defends spend most of their time verbally equating Israeli Jews with Nazis, loudly advocating the destruction of Israel, handing out The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, and glorifying homicide bombers in posters and pamphlets.)
I know the old word for this tendentiousness: coddling. And the quality these teacher-trainers value most is in their charges is malleability. They even have seminars about it at their conferences.
So this is what I see: Bullies training sycophants to turn entitled brats into self-loathing Zombies who serve the needs of whoever their fascistic masters point them to. And the beat goes on, downhill all the way into the muck. And those who don't go along, who don't get molded, get gone, one way or another.
Here's just one example from the Foundation For Individual Rights In Education's (FIRE) online newsletter (which has many more):
PROVIDENCE, R.I., May 26, 2005—Rhode Island College’s (RIC’s) School of Social Work is requiring a conservative master’s student to publicly advocate for “progressive” social changes if he wants to continue pursuing a degree in social work policy. RIC’s appalling disregard for student Bill Felkner’s freedom of conscience is the latest in an ongoing string of abuses by RIC administrators and faculty members that violate the right to fundamental freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution.
That's like requiring a pro-choice activist to stuff envelopes for an anti-abortion church group. Or forcing a Democrat to campaign for the President's agenda. It is a transparently totalitarian practice, and it is widespread and officially sanctioned.
If you read Professor (and I use the honorific only formally) Ryczek's email to Mr. Felkner, it's couched in a faux-friendly style, but one can easily see the outlines of the fascist fist under the latex glove. It's long past time to strip off that glove and expose that fist.
Since the mid-1600s, one colorful and encouraging thread of Western culture, from the British Isles to the United States to Cuba, shows bright university students running their worthless, time-serving, and bullying professors off the campus precincts on a rail, or worse.
It could happen again, it could happen here, and it's long overdue. Real social justice.
Posted by Jerome at June 4, 2005 12:29 AM | TrackBack