The Age of Outformation
Part of Mitchell’s extended assault on E.D. Hirsch, who put out a book called “Cultural Literacy” in 1987.
The Underground Grammarian
November, 1987
It is true that Jefferson saw some connection between the freedom of the press and the informed consent of the governed by which, and only by which, this land was to be governed. But nowadays “informed” does not mean what Jefferson meant by it, nor for that matter does “the press,” which was given more, in his day, to reasoned consideration than it is now.
In the current use of the word “information,” there is no hint of the process of forming, of putting into harmonious and coherent order, not only in the light of some set of facts, but equally by the establishment of an ordering principle. By the gossip that passes for information in the press, and our schools, always seduced by fads and a mania for “current events,” only an unusual mind is likely to be informed. “Cluttered” will better describe the mind that is full of bits of news of this and that, a junkyard in which everything lies where it fell, where nothing is chosen out to be set where it belongs, and where every useless piece of trash decays and is forgotten under the new heaps of trash. There, the fate even of the occasional treasure is no different.
Take Harriet Tubman, for instance. A recent survey conducted by the Department of Education revealed that an expectably large number of high school students had no clear idea even of the approximate date of the Civil War, but that a majority of the same students had heard of Harriet Tubman. Far from a bad thing, but that “heard of” is less than entirely encouraging. Whether those students understood some relationship between the war and the lady, by which they might also understand some principle, the survey, as no one will be surprised to hear, did not bother to inquire.
In another age—ours, we confess—we had not heard of Harriet Tubman. We had rather heard of the invention by Sir Humphry Davy of the miner’s safety lamp, and of the importance of substances called “naval stores.” We had tests in which those, and countless other bits of unrelated “information,” were the “correct” answers.
Where is Sir Humphry now? Where will Harriet Tubman be in fifty years?
Many supposed facts might be better thought of as phenomena, or ephemera. Facts, yes, but only by courtesy, as we might, if there is enough room on the program, list all the spear-carriers among the dramatis personae.
Yes, there was last night yet another fire of suspicious origin in some abandoned warehouse, and yet another politician accused of devious dealings. Yes, certain selected portions of our “heritage” are just now thought, by certain selectors, to be more important than certain others. And yes, a certain kind of music, or of dress, or of religion, or of literature, or of thought, is just now considered important by those who think themselves the ones who can best determine what is important. But it is not by themselves, not just because they are, that such things inform a mind. They become meaningful elements of a larger structure only to a mind that is already formed. Some of those facts—will it not be many?—an informed mind will sooner or later stow in the attic, not because they are irrelevant, for the informed mind can always find relevance, but because they are redundant. After all, how many arsonists or crooked politicians do we need in order to contemplate the vanity of human wishes?
For the health and vigor of the mind’s life, there is no indispensable fact. What, you have never heard of Shakespeare, or of the Treaty of Paris? You can not locate the Persian Gulf on a map, or the return key on a computer? You remember neither the Alamo, nor the Maine, or Pearl Harbor? It matters not at all. Of all of that, Aristotle and Epictetus were uninformed, but only in particular; in principle, they knew it all. And so will many in coming ages, when all such things will at last have disappeared even from footnotes in obscure monographs.
It isn’t truly information that we now peddle so industriously, and for the sake of which our schoolers now want to make lists. It is outformation. It leads the mind away from itself. It provides the illusion that the real reality is all out there, and that it comes in an infinite number of flying quanta, infinitesimally tiny packages, but, some of them at least, oh so necessary to “know”—just now. The mind might be at them forever, never to turn and come home, and the eye too busy counting photons ever to look for the light.
And so to Hirsch. His defenders—of whom none are more than mild—have made the points that a), he is at least doing something ; b), that it would do no harm for the children to learn something about something; and c), that he is at least not an educationist but an English professor. As to the last, pfui! We have some experience of English professors. They all have little lists, and Hirsch’s is just a bit longer than most.
As to the first, a reader has already provided an answer. He’s doing something? Sure, he’s doing something. Tyrants are always busy. A bit rough, but it is also true that the educationists are always doing something, always cooking up a grant, always looking for an angle, always making excuses, and always thrusting innovatively. You would be always busy too if people were nagging you to get done that which you promised to get done without any clear idea as to how to do it.
But it is because of the second that we have spent all this time getting to Hirsch. We have ourselves often whimpered about the astonishing ignorance of the young, and those social studies teachers of Minnesota who suspected that Mussolini might be something to eat. But the Hirsch business has had, for us at least, this great worth: it has led us to wonder whether we should have whimpered and out of what motive, exactly, we did whimper. Was it out of the sort of arrogance, not rare in English professors, that says: Well, humph, you can hardly think yourself an educated person if you have never heard of… And then follows a list of the things he happens to have heard of. Sir Humphry included. If so, Hirsch has instructed us. We don’t learn about things in order to read; we read in order to learn about things, and to make a form in the mind. We can understand little about those things that we have only heard about, but if the mind has taken form, we may well be able to understand a lot about—and because of—a surprisingly small number of things, provided that we have done more than just hear about them.
Richard Mitchell
