Books: Babel Builders

THE GRAVES OF ACADEME by Richard Mitchell Little, Brown; 229 pages; $11.95

For almost five years, Richard Mitchell, 51, professor of English at Glassboro (N.J.) State College, has made regular trips to his basement to pump from his ancient, tooth-rattling printing press a broadsheet called The Underground Grammarian. With gloriously abusive alliteration he has made it his business to assault deans and department heads for the bureaucratic academese that passes as English. For other professors, the activity might be a mere hobby. For Mitchell, it is a sacred mission. “A mind can be overthrown by words,” he says. “Bad language ultimately is immoral.” These thunderbolts have won the appreciation of such disparate authors as Edwin Newman and Howard Fast. But applause has not mollified him. Gazing at a sea of bad grammarians, he fulminates against “fools and frauds” who spout “mindless and mendacious babble!”

In Mitchellese, that now counts as understatement. For instead of mellowing with time, the stand-up comedian at the pedal press has become a scourging prophet. Woe to a people who have lost their power to read and write passably! Mitchell believes that they have also, verily, lost their power to reason and discriminate.

In The Graves of Academe the author, at full boil, arrives at the question behind all his vexations: Why, in spite of more and more education, are Americans less and less educated? Mitchell’s finger-pointing answer: the educationists. The very word sends him into a splutter.

Tunneling back into the late 19th century, the Underground Grammarian digs up the father of educationism, Wilhelm Max Wundt, a professor of psychology at the University of Leipzig. Mitchell describes the 70-year process by which Wundt’s disciples have nudged American teaching from the “cognitive domain” to the “affective domain.” Translation: Feeling comes first, with thinking an also-ran. The skills of reading, writing and arithmetic yield precedence to “values orientation.” The classroom turns into a behavior-modification lab, where, in the trade talk, one practices child-centered strategies that optimize the personological variables of interactive relationships, thus producing awareness enhancement.

When these innovations fail, according to the tests devised by the educationists themselves, and the terrible news registers that “Johnny can’t read,” do the reformers pack up their easy-learner kits and slink off into the night? Not at all. The shameless fellows ask for more money to repair the damage they have done, setting up “Communications Consultancy Centers” to cure illiteracy by means of every audiovisual tool known to the functionally illiterate.

Where will it all end? Mitchell offers no facile solution. The mob is already hard at work on the new Tower of Babel. Only individual men and women can bring it down, stone by misplaced stone. If enough solitaries of the word read and write with loving precision, treating language like a holy and joyous sacrament, well, who knows? “May be,” the Underground Grammarian whispers in his final sentence.

This is the only qualified statement in a book that makes H.L. Mencken sound like a waffler. But if Mitchell is given to a certain exaggeration, does that mean he is wrong? Only a nattering nitwit would dare think so.

—By Melvin Maddocks