BY ROBERT GUFFEY
Introduction
This
piece first appeared on the blog of investigative journalist Jon Rappoport on
February 24, 2014. On May 13, 2019, Rappoport
emailed the following message to all his subscribers: “This past
Saturday, between 2 and 3 PM Eastern Time, WordPress suddenly took down my blog
after ten years of continuous operation. There was no warning or advance notice
of any kind. This is outright censorship.” There’s little doubt in my mind that
Rappoport’s many years as a truth-seeking, hard-hitting journalist played a
significant role in WordPress’ decision.
When
he originally posted “The War Against the Imagination” on his blog, Rappoport
prefaced it with the following statement:
I had to print this article
because it’s so important to the future of what we call education, and because
it’s so important to the future of freedom and human consciousness. I would
like to see Guffey's article spread far and wide. I would like to see educators
and artists and parents and students and psychologists and everybody and
anybody read it thoroughly and ingest it and deal with it—and recognize
themselves in it. I certainly saw myself in it. I saw in it the great struggle
being waged, on both conscious and subconscious levels, as this civilization
tries to come to terms with, understand, accept, deny what imagination really
and profoundly means.
As
a result of WordPress’ decision to censor Rappoport’s website, my article “The
War Against the Imagination” was no longer available to be read... that is,
until now. I think it's important that people
have access to the information contained in this piece. Essentially, this
article pulls the curtain back on a not-so-quiet war waging on
campuses all across the United States. As I state below, I’ve never seen
more hostility directed towards the field of education than in recent
years. Unfortunately, most of that hostility comes from within. What with
the implementation of stringent “Common Core” requirements at the high
school level, and the flight from teaching art and literature occurring at
many American universities, this is not only a bad time for students—it’s
a bad time for the imagination as well. “The War Against the Imagination” analyzes this
hostile takeover of the American educational system by
the “Standardistos,” i.e., bureaucrats more interested in forcing students
to follow meaningless rules than in actually exercising their minds. I explore
various ways to stimulate the students’ imaginations in a system
specifically designed to do the exact opposite….
Part I: The War Against Education
There
has been much talk lately about the worthless quagmire into which the American
educational system has hopelessly sunk. I’ve been teaching English composition
at CSU Long Beach for over fifteen years, and have never seen more hostility
directed towards the field of education than now. About ten years ago, Cevin
Soling’s documentary The War on Kids took the American
educational system to task for all its numerous failings, comparing public
schools to prisons. This attitude reflects the feelings of many students, and
not just high school students. I see a great deal of resistance to learning
even at the college level. If students truly believe they’re stuck in a prison,
then such resistance is understandable—indeed, maybe even inevitable.
One
of the major problems any teacher has to face is resistance from his students. Resistance
is a natural response from someone who’s been forced to sit through hours and
hours of useless factoids in high school with little reward except smiley faces
and various letters of the alphabet. Though it can be frustrating to the
teacher, resistance is actually a healthy attitude that indicates students
aren’t quite as somnambulant as many people seem to think they are. A beginning
teacher would be advised to nurture that resistance (rather than stamp it out),
and then channel it into more positive areas, areas that encompass such
shopworn concepts as….
Wonder.
Enthusiasm.
The imagination.
Why
are these words used so rarely in classrooms these days? It’s as if most
teachers have forgotten what inspired their own love of reading. Whether in an
English 100 college classroom or a freshman English class on a high school
campus, students will inevitably resist studying topics they’re convinced are
transient and/or ephemeral. Does this mean they’ve all been brainwashed by far
too many zeros and ones, their medullae warped and atrophied due to overdosing
on too many videogames? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a natural reaction
to curricula that have come to represent a world with which they have no
connection, a world populated by instructors whose major concerns are
encapsulated within a solipsistic quantum bubble of their own devising, a world
in which the only legitimate reading material consists of staid essays about
events that seem to have no relevance to their daily lives. William Burroughs
once said, “Language is a virus,” and he was right. The Word is infectious, an
insidious virus that goes by many names.
Wonder.
Enthusiasm. The imagination.
Are
these considered dirty words these days? If so, the universities are no doubt to
blame. Of course, academia is an easy whipping boy, a target for politicos on
both the left and the right. Right-wingers are constantly accusing the
universities of being controlled by a secret cabal of Marxists intent on
brainwashing our precious young children into becoming dope-smoking homosexual
slaves for (gasp) the Democratic Party. On the other hand, left-wingers live in
constant fear of right-wingers somehow subverting the true purpose of the
university through corporate underwriting and undue political influence. Both
are missing the point. The true purpose of the university system is to bland
out the culture to such a degree that there will no longer be any extremes on
either side,—left or right—just the perpetual drone of academic discourse in
which nothing important ever gets said because the entire content is taken up
by preparations to say something important.
The
perpetrators of this discourse of meaninglessness are the very people in charge
of teaching our children today; their essays are the literary equivalent of
feather-bedding in the work world. Imagine an incompetent baker desperately
attempting to dress up a silver platter full of Twinkies to look like fine
French pastry. This is what “academic discourse” has become in America. Students
resist taking part in it for the same reason they don’t want to read Jacques
Derrida.[1] If you’re going to waste your time, you might
as well have fun while you’re doing
it. So they go to Palm Springs and drink beer and take drugs and have sex
instead. Who can blame them?
The
disaffected student has merely fallen for the lie of the Hegelian dialectic
process, a systematic method of control in which the status quo is granted
perpetual renewal via a delicate balancing act, a global shadow play in which
binary opposites are carefully maintained to create a false dichotomy in world
consciousness, a dichotomy consisting of left and right, black and white, good
and evil, cop and criminal, communist and capitalist, Republican and Democrat,
staff and faculty, student and teacher. These divisions, mere illusions,
manifest themselves on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scale. Including
the classroom.
The
reason most students reject the values of the university is because they don’t
believe there’s any alternative to the newspeak of academic discourse. Most of them have bought Hegel’s lie (without
even knowing who he is or what his theories are). One must, they believe,
either learn to speak meaningless gibberish, or reject the university system
outright. Many erudite scholars consciously decide to opt out of the system for
this very reason.
For
the vast majority of students, this decision will be an unconscious (and
unnecessary) one. Their resistance is a false dichotomy. If we encourage our
students to think “out of the box” (or, better yet, “out of the tetrahedron”),
to go beyond the false dichotomies that have been shoved down their throat
since they were in kindergarten, then they just might embrace the learning
experience a high school or university can offer them; they might very well
appropriate the notion of academic discourse and warp it to fit their own
aesthetics. Plenty of other “outsiders” have done so in the past, composition
instructors like Victor Villanueva being a prime example. It can be done. Sometimes it happens almost
by accident, by stumbling upon a sudden epiphany: that the status quo is not inviolate; that it
can, and will, bend if you push hard
enough.
Listen to these words by Victor Villanueva:
For all the wonders I had found in literature—and still
find—literature seemed to me self-enveloping. What I would do is read and enjoy.
And, when it was time to write, what I would write about would be an explanation
of what I had enjoyed […] essentially saying “this is what I saw” or “this is
how what I read took on a special meaning for me” (sometimes being told that
what I had seen or experienced was nonsense). I could imagine teaching
literature—and often I do, within the context of composition—but I knew that at
best I’d be imparting or imposing one view: the what I saw or the meaning for
me. […] But it did not seem to me that I
could somehow make someone enjoy. Enjoyment would be a personal matter: from the
self, for the self.[2]
How do we encourage the potential iconoclasts now
entering our classrooms to take the lance in hand and start out on their
quixotic quest to battle every windmill the system throws at them, to allow
their writing to flow from the self, for
the self? The first step is a simple one, often overlooked, the successful
completion of which requires the use of three basic tools. Perhaps you’ve heard
of them.
Wonder. Enthusiasm. The imagination.
In
his 1989 book Zen in the Art of Writing,
Ray Bradbury writes:
[I]f you are writing without zest, without gusto, without
love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping
one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde
coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the
first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and
enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or
digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.
How long has it been since you wrote […] your real love or
your real hatred […] onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a
cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the
best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get
around to whispering or shouting them?[3]
Unfortunately,
students aren’t encouraged to either shout or whisper anything. No, that would
be considered “extreme” and might unbalance the Hegelian status quo. They’re
asked to fill out Scan-Tron sheets instead—imprisoning their individual
personalities within those tiny lead-filled bubbles. The Scam-Tron is one of
the most basic examples of behavioral programming one can find in the school
system. Its intent is to instill in the student the idea that there exists only
a limited number of answers for any given question—a closed universe of
possibilities.
Zest?
Gusto? Bradbury has sound advice for would-be writers in his essays, all of it
ignored by the majority of high school and college English instructors. Imagine
a high school teacher encouraging his students to write about their most
deeply-held prejudices in an open and honest manner. Either some kid’s
left-wing parent would complain about fostering “hate speech” in a state-funded
institution, or some right-wing parent would complain about indoctrinating
their Precious One with kooky liberal values about “tolerance.” And instead of
protecting the instructor’s right to teach composition in any damn way he
pleases, the Principal or the Department Chair or the Dean would no doubt burn
the Constitution and sweep the ashy fragments underneath the photocopy machine
for fear of incurring a lawsuit that might attract media attention to the
school—not just “unfavorable” media attention, mind you, but any media
attention at all.
As
any bureaucrat will tell you (if you catch them in an honest and/or inebriated
mood), the very last thing they want is to see their name plastered all over
the news. As proof of this, please note the fact that almost the only time you
ever notice a politician’s name in the news is if they’ve screwed up. All
bureaucrats, whether they be Senators or school administrators, live in fear of
the day their existence is discovered by the outside world. They’re rather like
Bigfoot, truth to tell, constantly hiding behind rocks when civilization
encroaches too near their isolated abode. University Deans fear lawsuits as
much as Bigfoot fears stoned hikers and forest fires. Which is why so many high
school and college teachers are left out to dry when legal action is a
possibility; it doesn’t even have to be a real threat, just a possibility. The result? The students
learn nothing, and the First Amendment is driven one step further toward
extinction (yes, kind of like Bigfoot).
If
not for political correctness and the nightmare that has grown into
state-funded, compulsory education, universities wouldn’t need to foot the bill
for so many of these basic composition courses that fruitlessly attempt to make
up for twelve years worth of apathy and neglect in a single semester. At the
college level, English teachers are just playing catch-up. The best they can do
is sew up the bodies and send them back into the battlefield to get shot up
some more. This metaphor, of wartime Emergency Rooms and patchwork surgery, is
more appropriate than you might imagine, for many instructors perceive their
work with remedial students from a rigid, medico-militaristic perspective: as
babysitting doomed patients trapped on a terminal ward.
Education
scholar Mike Rose has commented on this point of view among so many teachers:
Such talk reveals an atomistic, mechanistic-medical model of
language that few contemporary students of the use of language, from educators
to literary theorists, would support. Furthermore, the notion of remediation,
carrying with it as it does the etymological wisps and traces of disease,
serves to exclude from the academic community those who are so labelled. They
sit in scholastic quarantine until their disease can be diagnosed and remedied.[4]
The
long-term solution to this problem is to fire everybody in the first and second
grades and replace them with teachers who know the meaning of the words zest
and gusto, who possess the innate ability to impart wonder and enthusiasm—and
above all a love of the imagination—in even the dullest of their students.
But
what about the present? What about the barely literate teenagers who are
filling up our high schools now, who will soon be sitting in entry level
English classes in colleges all across this nation, fully expecting to be
passed on to the next level even if they don’t do any work at all—a reasonable
expectation given their past experience with social promotion (another
insidious phenomenon inspired by the unreasonable fear of lawsuits)? What, you
may ask, do we do about these “lost kids” who have fallen between the cracks?
We
do the only thing we can do. We assault them with our enthusiasm. We attack
them with wonder. We pelt them with a fusillade of bullets packed with enough
imaginative power to knock their brains out of their skulls and leave them
bleeding and dying on the Pepsi-stained tiled floors of our classrooms. Of
course, their death will be a metaphorical one. (Any student of the Tarot knows
that death is merely another word for “transformation.”)
In
order to accomplish this transformation, the first thing that has to go is political
correctness. Next, the fear of lawsuits. And finally the Hegelian notion of
dialectics.[5] Human thought cannot be divided into thesis
and anti-thesis. No significant question has only three or four possible
answers. Though the universe might very well be contained within a grain of
sand, it cannot be contained within a Scan-Tron bubble. Similarly, the notion
of “Good” or “Bad”—“Appropriate” or “Inappropriate”—writing should be tossed
out the window along with good ol’ Hegel. Students should be allowed to read
whatever interests them. If the student doesn’t know what interests him, the
teacher has to take the time to find that out and match him with a book that
might appeal to him, that might stoke the fires of his imagination.
I’ve
had great success sparking a love of reading in culturally impoverished
students since 2002. Year after year students give my English classes glowing
reviews, mainly (I suspect) because I’m able to impart to them my passion for
the written word. In the past I’ve accomplished this by assigning great works
of literature: poems, short stories, novels, even some graphic novels. And yet,
despite this consistent success, a few years ago the English Department at CSULB
banned all literature from its composition courses. I’ve been told, for reasons
that seem purposely opaque, that I’m threatening the security of the entire
English Department if I assign Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (a novel I’ve used with undeniable success in the
past). A colleague of mine has been ordered to stop teaching George Orwell’s 1984. Perhaps most disturbing of all, I
have another colleague who used to assign Ray Bradbury’s classic
anti-censorship novel, Fahrenheit 451,
but will now be prevented from doing so. Many of my colleagues, in these
difficult economic times, plan to acquiesce to these demands for fear of losing
their jobs; meanwhile, classic works of literature are ripped out of the hands
of students who desperately need to understand how joyful reading and writing can be.
It
appears that the main reason the department heads are enforcing this ban on
literature is (simply) that they’re frightened. It’s been reported by several
news outlets that the CSU system has announced the development of a 24th campus
called “CSU Online” that will be entirely virtual. Because of this, there are
very real concerns that the CSU system will convert the English Department at
CSULB to an online program, thus causing the loss of numerous teaching positions.
What’s the easiest and least imaginative way of proving to The Powers That Be
that one can make substantial and sweeping changes in a university English
Department? Why, get rid of all that “unnecessary stuff” like poetry and novels
and short stories.
But
the fact is this: The only asset a human teacher has over an online, virtual experience is the
ability to transmit genuine passion
to his or her students. What better way to share passion than through great
literature? Alas, it’s this essential element, this passion, that’s being eliminated through de facto censorship. Without such passion, all need for a
non-virtual teaching experience vanishes. Therefore, the changes being
implemented to save the department are changes that will most likely lead to
the total destruction of the department. I needn’t tell you, of course, that
this is called irony… a literary
concept I myself learned about in an English class while studying literature.
When
seen in context, it’s clear that this ban on literature is merely part of a
larger trend that’s been occurring in American cities for some time now. The
poet Diane Di Prima once wrote, “The only war that matters is the war against
the imagination.” Though I wish it weren’t so, that war appears to be in full
swing in the English Department at CSULB and all across the nation, perhaps
best represented by the forced adoption of what is called the “Common Core
State Standards Initiative” among American public schools from sea to shining
sea.
A
prescient editorial published in the 12-27-12 edition of the Los Angeles Times warned about the
probable effects of this initiative:
[T]here’s no getting around it: The curriculum plan […] looks
almost certain to diminish exposure to works of literature, from Seuss to
Salinger. That goes too far.
The ruckus is over the new common core standards—public
school math and English curricula adopted by more than 45 states, including
California—that are supposed to raise the level of what students are being
taught. In addition, the core standards are intended to make it easier and less
expensive for states to devise better lesson plans, develop more meaningful
standardized tests and compare notes on how much students are learning.
[T]he standards emphasize, as they should, plenty of diverse
reading material. But they have become controversial over the requirement that
the reading assigned to younger students should be half fiction and half
nonfiction, and that by high school the ratio should be 30% fiction and 70%
nonfiction. This has led to allegations that T.S. Eliot will make way for
Environmental Protection Agency reports and that “Great Expectations” will be
dumped in favor of, well, lower expectations.[6]
Now
listen to these wise words by educator Susan Ohanian, extracted from her 6-19-12
article entitled “Business Week Revealed Why Common Core Disdains Fiction”:
[e.e. cummings] is the kind of writing primary graders savor.
I speak from first-hand, on-the-spot observation here. Of course, teacher
experience, knowledge, and intuition count for nothing. NCTE [National Council
of Teachers of English], my professional organization for decades, is deaf to
my expertise […].
An oft-repeated assertion of self-proclaimed Common Core
architect David Coleman is that nonfiction is where students get information
about the world and that’s why schools must stop teaching so much fiction. In
this assertion, Coleman is echoing the corporate world which he is hired to
serve […].
Downgrading the importance of fiction in our schools, saying
that children gain information about the world only through nonfiction, is the
Common Core’s role in “educating students” to fill […] in-demand jobs […].
In Empire of Illusion: The
End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle Chris Hedges points out that
universities have already accepted their corporate role, and “As universities
become glorified vocational schools for corporations they adopt values and
operating techniques of the corporations they serve” […].
Local newspapers are filled with stories of teachers “getting
ready for the Common Core.” What they mean is teachers are using the summer
break to prepare for visitation from bloated, opportunistic blood-sucking
Common Core vampire squad inspectors… making sure there’s no fiction glut
depriving youngsters of their job skill opportunities […].
[…] NCTE, IRA [International Reading Association], and NCTM [National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics] are too busy churning out […] books and
teacher training videos on how to use the Common Core. Yes, the complicity of
our professional organizations plus the complicity of the unions has made
Common Core a done deal. But if you believe in heaven and hell, you know where
the Standardistos who rob children of imagination and dreams will end up.
When a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of
exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. This
includes teachers. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt
against corporate power or you lose your profession.[7]
Part II: The War Against the Imagination
And
after your profession, your imagination? Your independence? Your life?
According
to the ancient teachings of Zen Buddhism, love and fear are the two primary
emotions that motivate the daily actions of human beings. My personal teaching
style is motivated by an intense love of the imagination and the freedom of
both speech and thought. The emotion that motivates the “Standardistos” is fear
and fear alone: the fear of taking a stand, the fear of losing their precarious
positions in a crumbling system, the fear of teachers losing control of their
students’ souls, the fear of students becoming independent and self-sufficient
at long last.
I
myself first learned independent thought from Lewis Carroll and Alice, from
Kenneth Graham and Mr. Toad, from L. Frank Baum and Dorothy Gale, from Edgar
Rice Burroughs and John Carter, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock
Holmes, from Edgar Allan Poe and C. Auguste Dupin. So many children first learn
to interact with the world around them—in
a questioning way—at the inception of an imagination in their developing
brains, an imagination most often introduced to them through the endless worlds
of fiction and poetry and song.
I
recently heard an interview with the actor/musician Ice T (whose best album, appropriately
enough, is called Freedom of Speech—Just
Watch What You Say) in which he talked about his love of reading fiction as
a boy. Though he grew up in a poverty-stricken environment in which reading was
not encouraged (not by his school teachers, not by his parents, and certainly
not by his friends), he somehow managed to stumble across a series of urban
novels by an African-American writer named Iceberg Slim. The first novel he
discovered was called Pimp. Slim is a
well-known writer in some circles. His novels are violent, racist, and
unapologetically realistic. He writes about what he knows and he does it well. This
gritty mimeticism struck a chord in the young Ice T. He proceeded to read all
of Slim’s novel at a fast clip, and went on from there to discover an even
broader world of literature. But he wouldn’t have been able to do so if he
hadn’t been inspired by the in-your-face realistic novels of Iceberg Slim.
Are
Iceberg Slim’s novels “literature”? Are they “appropriate” reading material for
high school kids? Who cares? Many of these same high school kids—as you’ve no
doubt noticed—are shooting each other with automatic rifles. Is that
appropriate? Why aren’t Iceberg Slim’s novels made available to high school
students? Why not allow them to read literature they can identify with instead
of the mawkish sentimentalism of staid essays extracted from the Reader’s Digest? If the purpose of
school was really to teach, this (or something like it) would already have
happened. The fact that it hasn’t happened can mean only one thing: The purpose of school is not to teach; the
purpose of school is to maintain the status quo.
Listen
to the words of Antony Sutton, a former economics professor at California State
University, Los Angeles:
A tragic failure of American education in this century has
been a failure to teach children how to read and write and how to express
themselves in a literary form. For the educational system this may not be too
distressing. As we shall see later, their prime purpose is not to teach subject
matter but to condition children to live as socially integrated citizen units
in an organic society—a real life enactment of the Hegelian absolute State. In
this State the individual finds freedom only in obedience to the State,
consequently the function of education is to prepare the individual citizen
unit for smooth entry into the organic whole.
However, it is puzzling that the educational system allowed
reading to deteriorate so markedly. It could be that [they want] the citizen
components of the organic State to be little more than automated order takers;
after all a citizen who cannot read and write is not going to challenge The
Order […]. This author spent five years teaching at a State University in the
early 1960s and was appalled by the general inability to write coherent
English, yet gratified that some students had not only evaded the system,
acquired vocabulary and writing skills, but these exceptions had the most
skepticism about The Establishment.[8]
This
is no coincidence. Any child or adult whose consciousness has been forged by
media imagery, who has no experience with literacy whatsoever, will inevitably
begin to mimic the clichés of popular entertainment. Their vision of the world
and the people in it will be filtered through a television screen. Their goals
will be based on a corporate-owned nightmare manufactured in a Hollywood studio
or an office on Madison Avenue or a think tank in Washington, D.C.
In
light of six decades’ worth of darkly surreal political scandal that have emerged
from our own White House (i.e., “Watergate,” “Irangate,” “Benghazi-gate,”
“AP-gate,” “IRS-gate,” “Russia-gate”), one can’t help but wonder if the real
reason Those In Power wish to eradicate fiction from American education is to
make the next generation of voters unfamiliar with the very concept of fiction
itself, thus rendering the citizenry incapable of recognizing pure fiction when
it appears on the nightly news or—more specifically—when it comes pouring out
of the mouth of a duplicitous President on a regular basis. Distinguishing
between lies and truth requires the skill to think independently, a skill best
reinforced by the imagination itself, the ability to consider possibilities.
One
day many years ago, back when I was in middle school, my Civics teacher became
ill all of a sudden. A substitute teacher came to take his place. I think he
was in his early to mid-twenties. He was a handsome blond gentleman, fairly
athletic looking. He didn’t seem like your normal kind of teacher at all. He
ignored the instructions our regular teacher had left for him and instead
launched into a monologue that went something like this: “Everything you know
is a lie. Everything you’ve been taught is a lie. History? It’s just a pack of
fairy tales. Hey, you, kid!” He pointed at a popular boy sitting in the front
row. “Who’s George Washington?”
The
boy laughed nervously, sensing a trick question in the air. “Uh… well, uh, the
first President of America?”
“Wrong.
The first President of the United
States was a man named John Hanson. So
what’s George Washington most famous for? What’d he do?”
“Uh…
he… well, he chopped down a cherry tree, right?”
“Yeah?
And then what he’d do?”
The
kid couldn’t answer, so somebody else jumped in: “He told his mom about it,
‘cause he couldn’t tell a lie!”
The
substitute replied, “Bullshit, man! Just more bullshit, never happened! None of
this ever fucking happened!”
An uncomfortable silence fell upon the room. The most
disruptive class clowns weren’t even making funny noises with their armpits. Nobody
knew what to do. Abruptly, everybody had been teleported to an alternate
dimension where everything seemed a lot more uncertain—and a lot more
serious—than ever before.
He suggested to us that if we wanted to understand “true”
history, we should read a novel entitled Illuminatus!,
a three-volume work of psychedelic fabulism by Robert Shea and Robert Anton
Wilson. Needless to say, we never saw that particular teacher again. I
shouldn’t have been surprised.
Nor
should I have been surprised when I discovered, ten years later, while doing
research among the stacks of the CSU Long Beach library, that John Hanson was
“elected President of the United States in Congress Assembled on November 5,
1781, the first of seven such one-year termed presidents,” whereas George
Washington wasn’t elected President until 1789.[9] My source for that little-known factoid is an
obscure 1978 book entitled The
Illuminoids. Is it possible that that weird substitute had read the same
book? Maybe he’d even read the same exact copy!
I wish I could ask him. I often wonder if he’s still in the teaching biz. Somehow
I doubt it.
By
the way, I’ve since read almost every single book (fiction and nonfiction) written by Robert Anton Wilson.
The reason students resist us is because they know, at
some subconscious level, that they’re not getting the whole story. They know
they’re being lied to. When they begin to hear even a small dollop of the truth
or at least some facsimile thereof—as I did that day in middle school
thirty-two years ago—they’ll sit up and take notice. And they’ll never forget
the experience. They’ll hunger for more.
Why
not combine creativity with honesty in our writing assignments? Why not begin
to teach critical thinking skills? This needn’t be done in a boring, perfunctory
manner. It can be fun. Indeed, how can it not
be fun? I suggest giving the students choice articles from the most recent Fortean Times[10]
accompanied by the following directions: “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I want
you to take this home, glance through it, read the articles that interest you,
then pick a particular article and write a four-page essay explaining why you
think it’s either true or not true. Now let me warn you, this isn’t a straw man
argument. Just because it’s in Fortean
Times doesn’t mean it’s not true. That’s the beauty of it all. There’s a
clever mixture of truth and untruth in here. It’s your job to separate the
wheat from the chaff. Think you can do it?”
I
guarantee you every single one of those students would find that assignment a hell
of a lot more intriguing than writing about the use of the semi-colon in Das Kapital. Not only will I be
strengthening my students’ skills in philosophy, logic, and composition, but
I’ll also be doing my basic civic duty; after all, the skills they’ll be honing
from this assignment will be the same ones they’ll need to exercise during the
next Presidential election. And no doubt the one after that.
One
of the most informative and entertaining writing assignments I ever worked on
in college was given to me not in an English class, oddly enough, but in a
logic class. We were asked to learn all the various categories of fallacies,
then—over the course of a month—comb through books, magazines, newspapers, and
TV shows to find examples of each. I found ad hominem arguments in The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, examples
of reductio ad absurdum in Awake (the
newspaper published by the Jehovah’s Witness), and a panoply of red herrings in
no less a scholarly source than Alice in
Wonderland. I’ve never forgotten that assignment, and the knowledge I drew
from it has come in quite handy in my everyday life. Composition students could
benefit from writing projects such as this, assignments that blur the
distinctions between curricula. I’m convinced such distinctions will become
less and less tenable in the holistic world we now find ourselves entering.
Just
as the CIA never pulls off a covert operation unless it has a good chance of
scratching a number of itches at once, I would never think of assigning an
essay topic that wasn’t holistic to some degree. As our post-quantum milieu
grows more and more complex, people will be forced to adopt a holistic
perspective toward life out of pure necessity, just to get through the day. It’s
no longer sufficient to become an expert in a single task, chained to an
assembly line going nowhere. As technology grows more and more baroque and
bizarre, as boundaries dissolve and paradigms shift, as old religions fade and
new ones rise to take their place, people must learn to become what Marshall
McLuhan called “Menippeans”: media ecologists who can slip in and out of
various artificial environments at will, as if said environments were nothing
more than cheap clothing.
The
confusing advent of virtual reality and nanotechnology machines will demand
that people either learn to exercise skills of perception and logic and
discernment or be left out in the cold. If you can change your bedroom into an African
veldt and your gender twice before lunch, you damn well better embrace a
holistic approach to life. The first half of the twenty-first century will be
nothing like what’s gone before, and by the time we reach 2050 we will have
arrived in a world wholly unrecognizable from the last decade of the 20th
century. As with most change, people will resist it kicking and screaming. There
will be political coups, religious autos-da-fe, and violence galore. Nonetheless,
the old paradigm will inevitably wilt away. It always does. If we as English
teachers can use our influence to help soften the transition by subtly
encouraging a multidisciplinary approach toward life via the essays (or “thought
experiments”) we assign, then so be it. If we’re going to have their porous
little brains in the palms of our hands anyway, why waste the opportunity?
In
his 1985 article “Inventing the University,” David Bartholomae presents a
rather unelastic and rigid view of teaching language, rhetoric, and art. He writes, “Teaching students to revise for
readers, then, will better prepare them to write initially with a reader in
mind. The success of this pedagogy depends on the degree to which a writer can
imagine and conform [emphasis mine]
to a reader’s goals.”[11] Bartholomae has everything ass-backwards. In
order to make the system succeed, the writer needn’t conform to the audience;
the audience must conform to the writer. Similarly, in the educational system,
the student needn’t conform to the teacher; the teacher needs to conform to the
student. Why teach if you’re not willing to adapt yourself to the needs of the
student?
Allow
me to make myself clear: Finding out what the student needs doesn’t necessarily
mean giving the student what he wants. Indeed, the answer will often be quite
the opposite. When Marshall McLuhan began teaching composition at the University of Wisconsin, he soon realized that his
students couldn’t care less about writers long dead. He began assigning them
such odd tasks as writing about commercials, TV shows, popular rock bands, and
movie stars, but had them do so in the same serious, scholarly manner that
would be expected of them if they were writing about Percy Shelley. By the end
of the semester, they were so sick of pop culture they went back to writing
about Shakespeare and/or Francis Bacon with glee. This is an example of reverse
psychology par excellence (and
another good example of what happens when a teacher embraces resistance rather
than attempting to stamp it out).
McLuhan
recognized that his students needed to be shocked out of their media-controlled
mindset, so he adapted his skills to their situation. But he had to be totally
free, emphasizing a holistic approach, in order to even begin accomplishing the difficult goal of bridging the vast divide
between teacher and student. One way this can be done is by embracing their
resistance through the language of Art.
In
a 1981 book entitled The Making of
Meaning, Ann E. Berthoff published a fascinating article entitled “The
Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand .” Berthoff’s views on Art and Language
are far more compelling than Bartholomae’s. Berthoff is a champion of the
imagination over the mechanistic. She writes, “I believe that for teachers of
composition, such a philosophy of mind is best thought of as a theory of
imagination. If we reclaim imagination as the forming power of mind, we will have
the theoretical wherewithal for teaching composition as a mode of thinking and
a way of learning.”[12]
In
his 1980 essay “Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing,” Richard E. Young
advocates a more systematic approach. At one point in the essay he quotes John
Genung as saying, “It is as mechanism that [rhetoric] must be taught; the rest
must be left to the student himself.”[13] But if we approach the teaching of grammar or
rhetoric or art or literature as a mere mechanistic process, if we don’t
emphasize creativity and inspiration and imagination and the sheer aesthetic
WOW that comes from reading an excellent piece of literature or seeing a
brilliant film or experiencing a well-acted play, then what is teaching for? Do
we really instill the love of reading in students by analyzing nonfiction
articles about possible racism in Internal Revenue Service hiring statistics, or
do we demonstrate the sheer LOVE of great art by allowing them to take part in
the process themselves, by letting them know that artists aren’t exotic
silver-haired creatures living atop mist-enshrouded mountains in some far away
land, writing on ancient parchments with fingers made of glass? Artists started
out (and still are, in most cases) the same exact grubby people as the students.
There’s no difference, except that one has learned to translate experience into
an aesthetic product for the enjoyment of everyone. Anyone can do the same,
even the dullest of us, if the love
of reading is instilled at the earliest age possible.
Marshall McLuhan once said, “I don’t explain, I explore.”[14] If they want to connect with their students,
teachers must encourage exploration over explanation. Robert Smithson, the
brilliant sculptor who created the breathtaking “Spiral Getty” in Utah, once
wrote, “Establish enigmas, not explanations.” If teachers can somehow learn how
to instill a love of enigmas over explanations in their students—even if they
succeed with only one student in a class of twenty or forty—then progress will
have been made. The language of Art is one of discovery. The teacher is merely
the guide, taking the student by the hand—without the student ever noticing,
ideally, since he or she should be too busy enjoying the ride—through a maze
that isn’t so intimidating at all once the student begins to love the journey
more than the destination.
The Reluctant Hero is a common trope in literature and
mythology. Joseph Campbell writes extensively about this pattern in his
numerous books on the power of myth. Whether in a fairy tale, a religious parable,
an epic poem, a literary masterpiece, a blockbuster summer movie, or a mere
comic book, the Hero very rarely embraces the call to adventure. He resists it
to the bitter end. Only a pre-programmed machine could be expected to do as
it’s instructed—to do “what’s best for it” without questioning the wisdom of
the programmer. Any reaction other than resistance would be somewhat less than
human. What well-read teacher, versed in the strange idiosyncrasies of human
behavior and history, could be surprised by such resistance?
As the late John Taylor Gatto, a former high school
teacher and author of the classic book Dumbing
Us Down, wrote in his September 2003 Harper’s
Magazine article entitled “Against School”:
First […] we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories
of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes
that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only
incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your
own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could
take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could
publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice
himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of
study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own
kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches,
I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only
because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men
and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage
themselves.[15]
Alas, I suspect many years will pass before the American
educational system endorses such a simple and glorious solution. As Buckminster
Fuller once said, “Human beings will always do the intelligent thing, after
they’ve exhausted all the stupid alternatives.” I believe an intelligent course
correction is inevitable; however, in the meantime teachers needn’t sit around
waiting for an official endorsement from the State. All they have to do is
exploit the most valuable asset in their classroom, one that requires no
funding from the government.
All they have to do is exercise the imaginations of their
students, as well as their own, by offering a panoply of choices and then
getting the hell out of the way.
Endnotes
[1] Personally, I try to avoid Derrida, as I’m lactose
intolerant.
[2] Victor
Villanueva, “Ingles in the Colleges”
in Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason and Louise Phelps (editors), Composition in Four Keys (Mountain View:
Mayfield, 1996), 509-10.
[3] Ray
Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
(Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1989), 4-5.
[4] Mike
Rose, “The Language of Exclusion” in Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason and Louise
Phelps (editors), Composition in Four
Keys (Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996), 452-53.
[6]
“What Students Read,” Editorial, Los
Angeles Times, December 27, 2012, A16.
[7] Susan
Ohanian, “Business Week Revealed Why Common Core Disdains Fiction in 2000,”
Susanohanian.org (website accessed June 19, 2012).
[8]
Anthony Sutton, America’s Secret
Establishment (Billings: Liberty House Press, 1986), 71.
[9]
Neal Wilgus, The Illuminoids
(Albuquerque: Sun Publishing Co., 1981), 29.
[10] Purveyor of such classic headlines as “POPOBAWA!: In
Search of Zanzibar’s Bat-winged Terror” or, a personal favorite, “HELL HOUND OF
THE TRENCHES: THE DEVIL DOG WITH A MADMAN’S BRAIN!”
[11] David
Bartholomae, “Inventing the University” in Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason and
Louise Phelps (editors), Composition in
Four Keys (Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996), 463.
[12] Ann
Berthoff, “The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand” in Mark Wiley, Barbara
Gleason and Louise Phelps (editors), Composition
in Four Keys (Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996), 41.
[13] Richard
Young, “Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing” in Mark Wiley, Barbara
Gleason and Louise Phelps (editors), Composition
in Four Keys (Mountain View: Mayfield, 1996), 177.
[14]
Marshall McLuhan, McLuhan: Hot & Cool
(New York: Signet, 1967), 12.
[15]
John Taylor Gatto, “Against School,” Harper’s
Magazine (September 2003), 38.
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. His most recent books are Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine, coauthored with Gary D. Rhodes (BearManor Media, 2019), and Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse, 2017), a darkly satirical novel about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. Forthcoming is a collection of four novellas entitled Widow of the Amputation and Other Weird Crimes (Eraserhead Press, 2020). Guffey’s previous books include the journalistic memoir Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015), which Flavorwire called, “By many miles, the weirdest and funniest book of 2015.” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has also written a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Believer, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Dandy, Catastrophia, The Chiron Review, Hypnos, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, New Reader Magazine, Pearl, The Pedestal, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, Selene Quarterly Magazine, The Temz Review, The Third Alternative, and TOR.com. Below is a photograph of Mr. Guffey using enigmatic methods from sources far-flung to spark the imaginations of his students....
