The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell (best novels for beginners txt) 📕

they are, of course, as Hegel might have warned Wundt had he had the chance, clearly an expression of the Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. They are not evil any more than science itself is evil, but their “scientific” intentions take on a strange flavor when we consider that Zeitgeist. That was the age in which Zola embarked on a mighty series of novels, an enterprise that he fancied a genuinely scientific experiment. That’s the point of his now-forgotten book on the novel as a kind of science, Le Roman Experimental: True, we cannot raise whole generations in miniature worlds in the laboratory and chart their deeds and destinies, but we can, if we are sufficiently knowledgeable and disciplined, do pretty much the same thing in a book. Zola, thus, was never without his notebook, in which he jotted, probably to the consternation of all who knew him, his “observations” of (presumably) unguarded human behavior.

That was also the age of Marx and Freud, and the growing suspicion, the worm that late Victorian intellectuals were bound and determined to eat even if it didn’t kill them, that Darwin had shown us only one of the mighty determinisms that governed human behavior and destiny. Who can blame Wundt, therefore, if he imagined that one who knew enough could measure, predict, and even elicit all those things that we call feelings, sentiments, emotions, attitudes, and ideas, to say nothing of mere deeds. But while we are considerately not blaming him, let us call on his own “science” in a rough and ready way, without precise measurements, alas, and be a little suspicious of his motives.

People who make their livings in “soft” sciences and the arts are not entirely at ease in the company of chemists and physicists and other “hard” scientists. In such company, the psychologists and sociologists and the professors of English feel like touch-football enthusiasts who have wandered by mistake into the locker room of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Only true philosophers, not professors of philosophy, are entirely immune to that nasty suspicion that rises in the heart of the “humanist” when he hears about recombinant DNA or quarks. (Well, that’s not quite true. The untempered clod is also immune, a fact whose importance will appear later.) This is a modern condition, and quite unlike that of older times, in which the fledgling “hard” scientists were held in contempt by those who did their work entirely in the mind without the help of apparatus, proper only to artisans. It seems only fair; it’s the alchemist’s revenge.

Wundt, with his laboratory and machines, was certainly trying to better himself and win for his discipline a new kind of legitimacy. It was just for that reason that he attracted so many students, many of them Americans who came home to found schools of educational psychology and psychological testing and to impress upon our whole system of schooling the indelible mark of clinical practice. One of them was a certain James Cattell, who, while playing with some of Wundt’s apparatus, made a remarkable and portentous discovery. Here, in brief, is the story, as told by Lance J. Klass in The Leipzig Connection (The Delphian Press, 1978), a useful little book on the influence of Wundt in the history of American educationism:

One series of experiments Cattell performed while at Leipzig examined the manner in which a person sees the words he is reading. By testing adults who knew how to read, Cattell “discovered” that individuals can recognize words without having to sound out the letters. From this, he reasoned that words are not read by compounding the letters, but are perceived as “total word pictures.” He determined that little is gained by teaching the child his sounds and letters as the first step to being able to read. Since individuals could recognize words very rapidly, the way to teach children how to read was to show them words, and tell them what the words were. The result was the dropping of the phonic or alphabetic method of teaching reading, and its replacement by the sight-reading method in use throughout America.

The consequences of Cattell’s “discovery” have surely been enormous, for they include not only the stupefaction of almost the whole of American culture but even the birth and colossal growth of a lucrative industry devoted first to assuring that children won’t be able to read and then to selling an endless succession of “remedies” for that inability; but Wundt in fact brought us much worse. He brought us the very atmosphere in which such silliness can thrive. Out of the internal exigencies of his “science,” he was led to consider “education” a human phenomenon similar to other human psychic conditions, a conditioned response to stimuli. “Teaching” had to be seen as the application of stimuli that will elicit whatever response we choose to call “learning.” Contrariwise, anyone who has learned something, to read or cipher, for instance, must obviously have done so as a result of being exposed not simply to the substance of his learning, the reading or ciphering, but to some stimulus that probably, but by no means certainly, was visited upon him somewhere in the vicinity of reading and ciphering.

The widespread acceptance of the teaching of reading as inspired by Cattell was possible only where there was already a predisposition to concentrate not on the substance of what can be learned but on some attribute that can be detected in the supposed learner. Exactly that predisposition was provided by Wundt’s view of teaching and learning as psychological stimuli and responses, an arrangement presumed to have its own validity without reference to what was taught and learned. This view was gladly received in the United States, where, as we will see, a growing educationistic establishment made up mostly of people with little or no academic expertise was looking for attractive alternatives to the constricting demands of “subjects.”

Thus it is that our educationists prefer not to treat the multiplication table as something that just has to be learned. They rather think of multiplying as a desirable “student outcome,” a “behavioral modification” of one who does not know how to multiply. This would be only a harmless playing with words if it weren’t for the fact that not all students learn to multiply with equal ease. If we simply think of the multiplication table as a set of numbers that must be learned by brute force, we can demand more force of those who fail to learn. If we think of the ability to multiply as a “behavioral objective,” an appropriate response to stimuli, then the student who doesn’t learn to multiply must drive us to seek other stimuli and perhaps, in stubborn cases, to decide that learning the multiplication table has only limited value for the student outcome of multiplication. From such a view, other follies may flow.

The folly at hand, the word-recognition teaching of reading, is the result of just such tormented thinking. It is perfectly true that people who can read do not stop to sound out letters. That, therefore, is an attribute of readers. So, to the mortally wundted, the path to reading requires the not sounding out of letters as a student outcome, and student behavior must be modified accordingly. Thus, the rare and pesky student who has learned the sounds of some letters must be discouraged, which stimulus will elicit a response characteristic of those who do in fact know how to read. Simple, no?

Leaving aside the incidental, if momentous, destruction of a whole nation’s ability to read, we have still two far more important and ominous legacies from Wundt. We can afford to leave the reading problem aside because it is only a practice, a practice that can change, and, in fact, does show signs of changing. But the major principles that generated and maintained that practice show no signs of changing, and those principles generate and maintain numerous other unnatural practices and will yet bring us more. They can be put thus:

1. Mental and emotional conditions and events are natural phenomena subject to natural law and fully subsumable in a rigidly scientific system.

2. Teaching and learning are mental and emotional conditions and events.

In another context, of course, there would be no need to make of the second a “principle” equal in weight to the first, but here it seems useful. These principles are ominous legacies not because they are false. For all I know, and for all anyone knows, they may be true. But that wouldn’t make them ominous either, although it certainly would lead me to drop this project, and all others, here and now. What makes them ominous is that they are utterly, for humanity in its present state at least, beyond our powers to test. They require what we seem unable to achieve, the total understanding of human beings by human beings. We lack that. And, for all the promises of our Freuds, Marxes, and Wundts, we seem no closer to it then ever before. We may assume what suits us, of course, about the nature of humanity, and when we act on our assumptions, consequences will flow accordingly. American educationists have assumed the truth of Wundt’s principles, in spite of the fact that few of them have ever heard of Wundt, and the consequences are what we see.

It is possible to imagine — in fact, you don’t have to imagine, for Marx makes a good example — some meticulously logical and disciplined thinker who, having made assumptions something like Wundt’s, could derive from them an iron system, complete and internally consistent. Such might have been the nature of American education today had Wundtian psychology been adopted by expert and learned thinkers. But it was in fact adopted by the educationists, who already saw themselves as the appointed democratic supplanters of learned and expert thinkers, remnants of an elitist authoritarianism. When the principles of Wundt are taken up by people actually hostile to academic learning and traditional intellectualism, strange consequences will flow. Thus it is that educationistic thought and language have a disconcerting hermaphroditic quality, for the educationist is committed on the one hand to the proposition that human qualities are quantifiable and predictable (through the work of the intellect, presumably, for how else can we quantify and predict?), and on the other hand to the proposition that the practice of the intellect is of less significance and “value” than the possession of certain human qualities.

Here is an excerpt from The Underground Grammarian that shows how the automatic if unknowing adherence to Wundt’s principles, in combination with the disorder of the intellect enforced by anti-intellectualism, causes things to happen in the schools and teacher academies:

The Most Unkindest Cutting Edge of All

In March of 1979, we printed some gabble by a then-unidentified doctoral candidate at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. It was about “a short extrapolation to the prediction of transpersonal innovations from self-actualization traits.” Ten months later, the writer was identified as Robert D. Waterman. The man who fingered him was a colleague, James Dyke, who wanted not the handsome reward we had offered, but rather to rebuke us for our treatment of Waterman.

Having pointed out, as though it made a difference, that Waterman’s degree was not in guidance but in Educational Management/Development, Dyke said further:

I hold little faith in your critical abilities with respect to Bob Waterman until such time that you can demonstrate that you can handle the cutting edge of the exploration of ideas without bleeding.

And he even sent along an actual piece of the cutting edge, Waterman’s complete abstract and a thin slice from Chapter II of the dissertation, “Value and Philosophical Characteristics of Transpersonal Teachers.”

We admit that we have no “critical abilities with respect to Bob Waterman,” but Dyke may have meant something other than what he wrote. The critical abilities that we