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April
16, '01 Vol. 1, No. 7
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T H E S C H O O L L I B E R A T O R
**NEW** Cobbett's Caveat Edition
==================================
Alliance
for the Separation of School and State
-Permission granted to forward in its entirety.-
EUPHEMISMS MISLEAD, BLUNTNESS NEEDED
BOBBIE GENTRY, of Jumping-off-the-Tallahatchie-Bridge
fame, once told me, "Euphemism is a euphemism for lying." This
came to mind this week when I was working on some of the speech titles for
SepCon2001
and--not exactly at the same time--reading G.K. Chesterton's 1925 great
little book about 1820s historian William Cobbett.
Let's take a couple of ideas from Chesterton and try to apply them to the
School Liberation Movement and my quandary--and yours too, I'll bet-
when picking words: Just how blunt should we be?
GKC writes that the main weakness of modern urban society (remember, he
was writing in the 1920s, and must have thought that farmers and rustic
folks were not too far gone at the time) is the "great delusion of
the prior claim of printed
matter" on the mind, a delusion so strong it could contradict
experience. He writes: "The chief mark of modern man has been that he
has gone through the landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook,
and could actually deny in the one anything he could not find in the
other" and continues a bit later, "By a weird mesmerism, what
people read
has a sort of magic power over their sight. It lays a spell on their eyes,
so that they see what they expect to see. They do not see the most solid
and striking things that contradict what they expect to see. They believe
their schoolmasters too well to believe their eyes. Cobbett was a man
without these magic spectacles. He did not see what he expected to see,
but what he saw."
Let's apply this lesson to the typical journalistic reaction to the
opening of the Spring School Shooting Season: They bleat that we need more
gun control,
more metal detectors, and more pats-down upon school arrival. This is what
they read from each other.
Somehow, it makes sense to them. Cobbett would see the obvious: A school
child intent on murdering some fellow students and maybe a teacher or two
might just start off by shooting Officer Friendly who is staffing the
metal detector.
Chesterton recalls Cobbett on the subject of the fear of Napoleon:
"Nothing was ever better in its way than the dramatic derision with
which he [Cobbett]
pointed at the canal at Hythe, and told the people that this was meant to
keep out the French armies that had just crossed the Rhine and the
Danube."
Now back to the question of language for us School Liberators. Should we
be blunt or nuanced? Chesterton helps us by contrasting truth and style
and giving
a memorable example:
"Veracity has nothing to do with violence, one way or the other. One
historian may prefer to say, 'The Emperor Nero set on foot several
conspiracies against the life of Agrippina his mother, and expressed
satisfaction when the final attempt was successful.' Another may say, 'The
bloody and treacherous tyrant foully murdered his own mother, and
fiendishly exulted in the detestable deed.'
But the second statement records the same fact as the first, and records
it equally correctly....
"The violent man is telling the truth quite as logically and
precisely as the more dignified man. It is a question of what we consider
a superiority of literary form; not of any sort of superiority in history
fact."
Now at this point, I was resolving to be more blunt in my rhetoric. The
phrase "Public Schools are a Public Menace" was suggested to me
by an advisor just days before and I resolved to use it often.
Ah, but I got a bit of a shock a few pages later. My hero Chesterton
writes, "It is possible to speak much too plainly to be
understood." Uh-oh. Now what?
He continues, "In a confused and complicated age, men are used to
long words and cannot understand short ones. The world, in the sense of
the ordinary political and literary world, could not understand Cobbett
because he was not obscure enough. He did not soothe them with those
formless but familiar obscurities which they expected as the proper
prelude to any political suggestion. He came to the point too quickly; and
it deafened them like an explosion
and blinded them like a flash of lightning. People of this political and
literary sort understood much better the speakers they were used to; or
liked much better the speakers they did not understand. The pompous and
polysyllabic felicities of the diction of Pitt seemed to them comforting
if not comprehensible."
Wow. I had to read it twice, no, three times. My own literacy is so weak
that I don't do long sentences too good. But I got the point. We have no
Pitt, but
we do have a Bush whose edu-diction includes this odd name for his
Please-Trust-Me-Again-Charlie-Brown
Education Program, "No Child Will Be Left Behind."
Think about it. No child will be left behind in singing. No child will be
left behind in math. No child will be left behind in football. Track.
Swimming. Poetry. Dance. English grammar. Spanish vocabulary.
Latin conjugations. Geography. History.
Wait a minute! If I were a kid today, and no child is going to be left
behind, we're gonna have pretty low music standards so I can keep up and
not be left behind. After all, in my school in the fourth grade
all boys were required to join the boys' choir. Except you-know-who. I was
excluded from boys' choir, and not because of behavior or attitude or
anything likethat. I can still remember the lonely hour at 11am on
Thursdays when I sat in the classroom alone. Reading "Freddy the
Pig," not Chesterton.
Under the Bush Plan, I'd be in there with 60 other boys, but we'd be
reduced to humming along with Mitch. The only way to leave no child behind
is to have everybody stand still. Can't work. But
sweet words, eh? Whatever we think of emperor's intentions, we can be
appalled at his lack of sense, and the lack of sense of all who are
applauding him.
========ADVERTISEMENT===========
Each day, we get from 4 to 6 new signers of the Proclamation via the
Internet. On peak days when we are mentioned in a popular on-line
newsletter, we have gotten as many at 100 new signers!
I am convinced with effort, we can push our website and make 100 per day
the standard! That is 3,000 new signers per month!
(Yes, when we hit that, I will be developing a plan to take us to 1,000
signers a day, you can bet on that.)
We have a two step plan:
1) Upgrade the website so it looks better, is better organized, and sells
merchandise on-line.
2) Start pushing to get more traffic.
Here is where we are:
We have secured a young web designer named Steve Brock who can do much of
the work. You can see his design and
organization at
http://sbrock.hobbiton.org/clients/sepschool/
I am confident Steve can do the heavy lifting on the website, and have
decided to hold off on using very many volunteers until we get the site
re-designed and re-organized.
Steve's first priority is to put up an on-line store so people can buy
tapes, videos, reports, hand out cards, and other material from us just as
easily as shopping at Amazon.com.
He estimates it will take about three weeks. (I always double such
estimates by programmers, and then add a safety factor. :-)
But Steve will need to be paid. He is at the beginning of his web design
career and he is working for us at a very attractive rate. I like that,
but we still need to raise funds.
So, here is the request:
Can you please donate some part of the $25,000 budget we have for this
year? I am planning to pay Steve about $15,000 of that, and use the
remainder for promotion and other incidental web expenses.
Maybe you are the person who can do $5,000, or one of 2 or 3 who can do
$1,000-2,000, or one of the five or so who can do $300, or one of the
score who can do $120 each (nicely becomes $10/month on a credit card or
paypal).
And, we need a hundred or more to $25-50 one time, and maybe you can feel
comfortable being one of those.
Whatever you can do, you are part of something very big... convincing the
nation that public schools are a public menace and must be eradicated.
Oh... one more thing: Steve is using a 5 year old computer and needs an
upgrade. Maybe you have a pretty fast PC (400 mhz or more) that you can
donate
"in-kind." It would be tax-deductible, just like regular
contributions.
Please email your contribution amounts to
mailto:Morgen@psnw.com If you do it
by credit card, have her call you back for the number so all is secure.
Thank you, Marshall Fritz
==================================
BACK TO THE MAIN POINT, how to explain why it's a good idea to free the
schools from politics. My experience with mainstream educators has been
that
the vast majority must think that I "get to the point too
quickly." Attending their conferences, it is clear that they much
prefer the felicities of mainstream edubabble because it is somehow
"comforting if not comprehensible."
The same is true for a like high proportion of journalists and pundits.
On the other hand, most--way over half--of the regular folks find that I
make sense right from the get-go. My fairly large sample (200-300) is
drawn from
people who have by chance sat next to me on a plane, train, or bus over
the last seven years.
Back to my question, "How blunt should we be?" Well, if we're
trying to attract today's educational and literary leaders, not very
blunt. Because they have
no basis to refute our allegations, to be effective in their attack they
must stoop to the ad hominum that we're not very nice people. They flick
their "ist-spinner" like a children's game and accuse us
of being racist, sexist, elitist, misogynist,
pollutionist, monarchist, or even this- or that-phobic. Our bluntness just
makes them angry.
But more and more I am thinking the Glittery Litery are not our market.
Somebody has to be last to learn
that freedom works. We'll just have to leave some pundits behind (Imagine
the slogan, "No Pundit Left Behind."
I think our market is the regular Joe and Kristin.
For instance, imagine the proud parents of a "public school"
kindergarten child. One day he came home using
the m-f epithet, and not for Milton Friedman or Marshall Fritz. He learned
it on the playground. His schoolmates
watch South Park and are taken to R-movies. Joe and Kristin don't want to
be THAT multi-cultural.
If our market is Everyman and not the Glittery Litery, the guy reading
Popular Mechanix, not Atlantic Monthly, maybe we should be real blunt.
When Joe hears the phrase, "public schools are a public menace,"
he's likely to think, "Huhhhh! That's a new idea. Makes sense,
too. I hated school."
If we use euphemism, the Glittery Litery will silently appreciate our
linguistic cuteness and still reject our ideas.
If we use euphemism, Joe won't get the point.
When some educator says he's not undermining the virtues that Joe values,
and you've caught the educator red-handed doing just that, I think you
need to say that he's lying. He'll be furious, sure, and kick up a fuss.
But Joe and the other parents who overhear you will get the point. Indeed,
they'll get alarmed, too.
If you use the euphemism that the educator "seems discomfited by
veracity," the liar will still fight you,
but you'll have no allies. Your euphemism will have deceived Joe into
thinking there is no cause for alarm. That's why in the Ode to Billie Joe,
Bobbie Gentry didn't
sing that he "attempted to levitate in proximity to the Tallahatchie
Bridge."
==================================
COBBETT'S CAVEAT is an attempt by Marshall Fritz, founder and president of
the Alliance for the Separation of School
& State, to imitate the insightfulness and bluntness of William
Cobbett when writing about the public menace known as "public
schooling." Further, Cobbett is all the more heroic because, according
to Chesterton (p.45), "his whole
life was a resistance to the degradation of the poor." Mr. Fritz
hopes to avoid Cobbett's weaknesses, one of
which was a readiness to think evil of an adversary.
The quotations are from Chesterton's "William Cobbett,"
published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, about 1925,
from pp 145-149.
A Google search on "William Cobbett" found 2,700 listings,
including hundreds of biographies. Here is snippet from one
of them:
As a writer of English prose, Mr. Cobbett ranks among the highest. He was
extremely industrious and temperate
in his habits, and thus acquired a good deal of learning and accomplished
a great amount of literary work. Among his published books are a "
History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland." a
"History of England," " A Year's Residence in America, ....
Advice
to Young Men and Women," "Cottage Economy," and especially
his English and French grammars, which are of themselves very
entertaining. He also compiled twenty volumes of parliamentary debates. As
a satirist he has had few if
any superiors, after Swift and Junius, and he was so ready to wield his
stinging pen that Sir Henry Bulwer calls him. in the title of an essay,
"The Contentious Man." Yet he was very domestic in disposition,
and
devotedly loved by his family and friends.
http://virtualmuseumofhistory.com/williamcob
==================================
THE SCHOOL LIBERATOR is currently a FREE service Of The Alliance for the
Separation of School & State
4578 N First #310, Fresno CA 93726 (559) 292-1776.
We are a non-profit, grass roots educational organization dedicated to
informing people worldwide how education can be improved for all--not
only the poor--by liberating schools from politics.
For more information and to sign our "Proclamation for the Separation
of School and State" go to
http://www.sepschool.org.
Publisher: Marshall Fritz
Editor: Cathy Cuthbert
Copyright 2001, The Alliance for the Separation of School & State,
Inc. All rights reserved.
==================================
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