The Dawn of Posthistory
Mitchell’s ideal of a teacher is close to Moses, a liberator. This notion fuels most of his essays—this one and “A Colossal Pain in the Bowel.”
The Underground Grammarian
May 1985
Except for American history, which was thought useful as preparation for citizenship, the place of history shrank in the schools. Even in the elementary schools, where earlier generations had studied biography and mythology as basic historical materials, the emphasis shifted to study of the neighborhood, the community, and preliterate peoples…
Those are a few words from an essay called “The Precarious State of History,” which can be found in American Educator, Spring ‘85. The author is Diane Ravitch, an active and influential member of a sort of new breed of educationists, whom we have come to think of, although they won’t like it a bit, as the New Right. They are discovering that the Old Ideas might indeed be best for the New Education and its goals of participatory democracy and industrial efficiency through mere literacy. Since some of them are readers of The Underground Grammarian, we find them not too bad a bunch.
They do, however, share with the common herd the oft-recited belief that no one ever actually did anything to bring the schools to their present state, but that, well, you know, problems arose, and some needs sort of changed, and one thing led to another, and, somehow or other, things happened.
Even in the passage excerpted above, which enumerates some of the consequences of the report, in 1916, of an NEA Committee on Social Studies, Ravitch is careful to add that the report was not, of course, responsible for its consequences, having “merely reflected the ideas, values, and attitudes of the emerging education profession,” a delicate distinction indeed, and one by which people paid for working with their own minds are excused for having instead parrotted the cant of popular opinion. But educationists do love to cop a plea, and their training is such that they imagine folly a lesser charge than vice.
Still, we give Ravitch high marks for having mentioned that singular obsession of educationists, the pre-literate society. In an earlier time, all children had at least a glimpse of those ancient civilizations that made us what we are and bequeathed to us great and powerful ideas. In these days, they have all watched the Bushmen of the Kalahari making camp as close as possible to a dead giraffe, just as they did when Sophocles was at work on Antigone. Where once even little tykes had some sense of the relation of great events to one another, nowadays as to whether the War of Independence came before or after the Protestant Reformation, college students can only guess; but they do know that, even as we sit here, certain right-minded Polynesians are expressing themselves creatively and enhancing their self-esteem by having their buttocks tattooed.
The mental condition of preliterate people is not hard to imagine. Or, more precisely, to remember. Each of us has lived through that condition. All of their knowing and understanding, and probably even their feeling, must have been induced by collective influence. The wellsprings of their inner life are at once omnipresent and inaccessible, as impalpable as water is to the fishes. Whatever they suppose that they know, even should it change from generation to generation, they have to accept as, simply, that which is known. It can not occur to them that there are such things as propositions to be tested, and even if such a strange thought were to arise in some mind, it would not know how to take the next step, or where to look for instruction. In a preliterate society, there is no publicly available example of the history of an idea, its growth and change, and thus no hint of its future possibilities. The life of the mind is everywhere bounded by concrete details of experience and suggestion. It is not enough to say that the wall surrounding the mind in a preliterate society is seamless and impenetrable, for that wall is also utterly invisible.
In a literate society, however, the wall of experience and suggestion is broken in many places; there is no stone in it on which some mind has not chiseled, leaving marks. And, as the preliterate mind to which we are all born comes slowly into literacy, it sees first that there is a wall, and later, that it can be knocked down.
Now it is a simple fact that there is no child so dull who can not see that the society in which Sophocles wrote Antigone is better than the one in which the hunters are as inexorably driven as the game they hunt. Thus, if the educationists were to permit some study of history, however simplified, along with their films and slides of desperate people leading meager, driven lives, they would not so easily engender in children the belief to which they themselves subscribe, or pretend to subscribe. It is nonsense to assert, as they do, that one life is as good as any other, one society as good as any other, one opinion as good as any other, and one idea of the good as good as any other. And it is more than nonsense, it is villainy, to celebrate before children the very life from which it is the goal of education to release them.
But the “education” of the educationists is well and truly displayed by the Bushmen of the Kalahari. It is made entirely of life skills, hands-on experience, show and tell, learning by doing, environmental awareness, adjustment to the needs of society, no end of problem solving, and of relating to self and others. The Bushmen do not study history; they have none. They need no books; they have learning materials. They do not study to magnify and perfect their powers of language, for the language with which they grow up is sufficient to their needs, a true case of “basic minimum competence.” They do not imagine the possibility of independent learning and thinking, for all they need to know, they know. They are content. And they all have jobs.
Many of us, of course, are just like them, but alas, not all of us. What is it that bars us from their contentedness and effectiveness, that prevents us from living in the amiable harmony of a people who all think the same thing, who all agree as to the nature of the good life? What but literacy?
It is literacy that brings the poison of discontent into our minds, suggesting that governors and counselors, and even the teachers and facilitators, might be wrong. It is literacy that astonishes us daily, and disturbs our repose, by putting questions we had never thought to ask. By literacy, we hear the voices of our brothers and sisters long dead, who say, to our amazement, what we have never heard, or dreamed to hear.
In the preliterate mind, no voice speaks but the voice of here and now, and in the prehistorical mind, all of life is here and now; in the schools, literacy is a job skill for the reception of communication, and history is current events and relating to the needs of self and society, just for now.
It is a neatly turned sentence but not a true one, which says that those who don’t remember their history are doomed to repeat it. That is the doom of those who misunderstand history. We do not misunderstand history; to do that you have to know some history. We have entered the age of Posthistory, and of Postliteracy. And the schools are working just fine.
Richard Mitchell
