“Education
in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it and commend
it, and are busy about it, at the same time as they are willing to degrade it
by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.”
How
prescient of the late Jacques Barzun to have diagnosed fifty-five years ago the
dawning symptoms of a disorder that today is pandemic. In his sense, as
expressed in The House of Intellect
(1959), we have virtually stopped educating children and young adults. We
demean them by expecting so little of them. Hugh Fitzgerald at The Iconoclast,
the blog of New English Review, praises
the volume as “one of the most bracing and important books ever produced in the United States,”
and notes that in the year of its publication, “incoming freshman at Columbia
College were assigned it as required summer reading, to be completed before
beginning the school year.” Earlier this week we noted what passes for assigned
summer reading for incoming freshmen by American colleges and universities. When
I quoted one sentence from the National Association of Scholars report – “The
list of readings continues to be dominated by recent, trendy, and
intellectually unchallenging books.” – I was thinking not of Barzun but of
another French writer, the great aphorist Chamfort (1741-1794):
“Most
books of the day seem to have been written in one day from books read the day
before.”
This
is from a very good book indeed, Products
of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort (trans. W.S.
Merwin, North Point Press, 1984). Like Barzun, Chamfort possessed the recessive
Gallic traits of clarity, honesty and wit. Both mourn the historical leveling that
has taken place, the arrogance of the present in its contempt for and erasure
of the past. When I was a student in public school, the chief obstacle to
getting on with education were the dumb kids, the slow, lazy, distracted ones
who every day gummed up the works with stupid questions and answers. Everyone,
smart and middling kids, and teachers alike, recognized them for what they were
and let them know it in ways both subtle and visceral. Today, the dumb kids
have powerful allies, teachers and administrators who are often themselves former
dumb kids. The curriculum has been radically recalibrated to suit their
diminished capacities. Barzun saw all of this coming more than half a century
ago:
“As
for keeping the schools `democratic’ in the sense of ignoring differences of
ability and `giving’ a college career to all who ask for it, this is the scheme
which has just broken down and brought many people to the realization that it
is wasteful, dangerous, and unjust. Ability and achievement are too important
to the country to be any longer trifled with, as has been done by maintaining
that failure is something a child must invariably be shielded from, lest he
take a dislike to learning.”
1 comment:
I was introduced to Chamfort by Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave in my '60s youth - later I read Nietzsche's encomium of him as well. Sound-bites and the cut-and-pasted text are the death-knell of civilised society, but the aphorism and epigram are the opposite of that. If recreation wrecks the nation, concentration might save it.
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