Mitchell pitched into people who didn't get the point of school. Education and social conditioning are polar opposites for him, mortal enemies. This essay opens with a newspaper clipping.
December, 1987
More Friends Like These
This is a world that pays computer programmers more than essayists. Plumbers make more than journalists. High school dropouts run major corporations. Teachers borrow money from their mechanic brothers-in-law.
Only when educators realize the primary purpose of schools is not social conditioning but preparation for economic survival in a difficult world, will education reflect the realities and needs of the job market.
HE MAIL brought us, on the same day, two scraps of newspaper, each bearing what we think of as the worst possible news -- the half-bakery of those who say what is almost the right thing, for the utterly wrong reasons.
One of them was a letter to the editor in the New York Times . It came from a certain Alfred Posamentier. Posamentier is a professor of mathematics education at City College in New York. In certain current events, he found a way to prove that his work is important.
The NYT had said that some little aeroplane had come "within 200 feet" of the presidential helicopter. Not so, said Posamentier, reasoning thus:
"Your diagram caption says the plane 'passed 200-300 feet to the left of the helicopter,' making the minimum horizontal distance 200 feet. With the vertical distance of 150 feet that you show, a right triangle may be formed, whose hypotenuse length is the actual distance the plane was from the helicopter. To apply the Pythagorean theorem (a2+b2=c2), the one thing most people remember from high school mathematics, this distance is 250 feet -- more than 'within 200 feet.'"
So there you have it. Geometry as a trivial pursuit. And why not? After all, lots of folk take barrels of fun from their mastery of grammar, by whose power they can write snarky letters about the weatherman who says "between you and I."
Posamentier finds portent in his findings; for he concludes, with a wonderful solemnity: "This is offered as the sort of thing mathematics teachers (and even parents) ought to point out to students who question the value of mathematics." There. That'll take care of all those Yahoo complaints about teaching geometry to little children who, once school is behind them, will never geomet again.
We wonder what Patrick Cox would want to say about Posamentier's profound understanding of the purpose and meaning of education. Cox, who is a "political/economic analyst and writer," is responsible for the passage cited above. We found it on a sent-in op-ed page from USA Today . The whole page was devoted to the Great Writing Question: an editorial, four guest columnists, four "quotelines" from "experts," and seven micro-interviews with persons-in-the-street.
Everybody said exactly what you expect, although Mary Futrell, one of the union people, did point out that a school teacher who takes in 150 student papers a week is not going to do much more than put a few x's on "mechanics." Except for Cox, everybody was all in favor of writing. Everybody thought it a Good Thing, of which the children could not have too much.
But Cox was willing to come right out with it: Listen up. It's a jungle out there! Survival, survival in a difficult world! Hardly anyone needs to write, and those who do it for what they seem willing to call a "living" are people like those stumblebum journalists who never learned how to use a pipe-wrench.
He also points out that those "supposedly low test scores" simply mean that a bunch of "immigrant children" are still trying to learn English. And of them, he reminds us, and who would know better than a political/economic analyst, that "evidence shows that this nominally sub-literate group will eventually earn more per capita than the native born." And he also points out, as every one of us should, to someone, every day, that the latest writing brouhaha comes in the wave of yet another expensive (to us) and lucrative (to somebody else) national report that tells us exactly what we have been told by all the earlier national reports, and that it will have only one certain result: It will engender yet other reports, and grants, and fees, and lots of publicity in aid of those who live by reports, and grants, and fees.
Well, we sort of like Cox. His crass and trashy commercialism is at least not a pretense. We would like him better if he would go further and clear his mind of the misconception that "preparation for economic survival" is something other than social conditioning, and we do wish he would tell us whether a political/economic analyst makes more than a plumber -- after all, we can do that too -- but the times are hard, and we need all the friends we can find.
And we can not help but wonder about some of the other folk who came out in pious support of more writing for children, especially those civilians and Mary Futrell. How much writing do you suppose those people do?
There ought to be in our language some appropriately derogatory word for that person who loftily complains that others ought to learn some excellence or worth that he himself neither has nor seeks. "Hypocrite" is not enough. "Prig" comes closer, but it has almost gone out of English. So we do not know what to call them, these schoolteachers and educationists who call for more and better writing by students, and whose writing we have so often and gleefully examined. We know not how, sufficiently to defame the Posamentiers, who urge more study of mathematics by children, that is to say, more patronage for people in his business, and seriously put forth as an example of the worth of that study the power to find a mistake in a newspaper.
This is the important question: What is the worth of writing? In all of those people who bewail the inability of the young to write, whatever they mean by that, what does their writing do , in and for their lives? What do those sanctimonious schoolteachers write, and to what end? Who are they to say that other people should learn to write?
Considering the obvious fact that those who write anything at all after leaving school are only slightly more numerous than those who geomet after leaving school, and the only slightly less obvious fact that such things as shopping lists and phone messages are no more to be thought of as pieces of writing than the letters inscribed on faucets or lavatory doors, and leaving aside the very few who get paid for writing something or other and who probably would not do it if it weren't for the pay, there is practically nobody in the land who can be said to take any good from writing, to become better through it.
Here at The Underground Grammarian megacomplex, the only thing we need less than another essayist is a political/economic analyst; a plumber, or better yet an electrician, we could use. And if the worth and point of writing are nothing more than the trivial skills that all of these pious lamenters have in mind, it could very likely have the effect of turning a good plumber or electrician into a thoughtless clod. A man who can't write or read may, at least may , sit around with a friend or two and consider whether it is better to suffer an injustice or do one; but a man who has been led to believe that writing is a profitable skill like soldering, or a means of communication like the cry of the daw, or a vehicle for information that is better delivered in pictures anyway, or a social grace like eating with a fork, will probably have no inclination at all to make and test propositions, or to watch his (or anybody else's) language for false analogies, inapt metaphors, and failures of logic, for he will never have done any of those things. Epictetus, who couldn't read or write, is far more to be prized than Eichmann, who could.
If "learning to write" is understood as the acquisition of a certain skill useful to anyone, like balancing a checkbook, or a tool of trade for which someone might pay, it will, and should , disappear like butter-churning and type-setting. So let it. If it is understood as the practice of the mind in knowing and ordering itself, then the schools will never teach it in any case, and those who discover some need for it will do it. And the only important effect of writing teaching in the schools will be -- as it has been -- to prevent as many as possible from noticing that this difficult and unprofitable enterprise may be more valuable than all those skills for which the world pays money.Richard Mitchell
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