The Hope of Democracy

Wow. Terrible Blogger. Right. Here.

So...I disappeared for a little while. I hope that my dedicated reader (Mike) can forgive me. In a related story, the guilt induced by reading Mike’s prolific blog prompted me to post something.

Things to share:

My parents are coming to visit me in Ottawa. Date of arrival: Unknown. Level of stress associated with 'The Unknown': Escalating.

Thesis? I do believe it rhymes with feces.

As I'm in a rush to get to the archives right now [kindly stifle your laughter], I'll post these pearls of wisdom from our very own Northrop Frye. The following is an excerpt from an address given by Frye on the occasion of his installation as Principal of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. I stumbled upon it in a DDF newsletter from 1960, but it was originally published in The Globe and Mail on 22 October 1959.

The Hope of Democracy

The lecturer facing his classroom is not dismayed by the small minority of slackers: they, like bacteria, can usually be identified by tests, and got rid of. The real sources of dismay are the personable docile, polite young people, who do all that they are asked to do, and yet are somehow not students, but merely young people at college… They may be operating at about ten per cent of their mental capacity, but they may not know this themselves… What they lack, from the teacher’s point of view, is drive or momentum, the sense of urgency of knowledge, the awfulness of ignorance, the crucial responsibilities of the educated man, the immense gap between wisdom and ordinary savoir fair. Such students have always been with us, and all the desperate remedies of panic have been tried to shock and startle them. Past ages have used everything from birch rods to the fear of hell; teachers today deliver harangues on complacency and appeal to the celestial publicity stunts of Communism. This last, of course, has thrown the problem into the form of a crisis. The American hare has wakened up to find that the Russian tortoise is not only close on his heels, but still has wind enough to announce with complete confidence that he will soon be in the lead. Hurt and angry, the American public has begun to ask question of some of its educators. Who took advantage of their good-natured, shallow, anti-intellectual optimism to lull them to sleep? Who watered the stock ideas, drained the content out of learning, cheated their children of the pleasures of intellect, crippled them for life in the arts of words and numbers, and then seized all the positions of power and influence to impose their miserable follies on future ages? Who threw up there in front of this a Maginot line of projects that do not accomplish anything, of surveys that do not see anything, of compulsory courses that do not teach anything, or pseudotheses that do not prove anything, or prove only the self-evident, of books that do not mean anything, and are written besides in the prose style of a zoo at feeding time. And above all, what has it been done for? If it were part of an organized revolution, like Communism, one could at least understand it; but what is the point of a revolution without purpose, a subversiveness so fumbling, so witless, so well-meaning?

Many culprits have been named, but witch-hunting in this area is as bad as it is anywhere else. The enemy of education in North America is not necessarily in teachers colleges or in “progressive” programs or in the work of John Dewey or in state or provincial departments. His headquarters may be in your minds, and in mine. The root of all the nonsense in our education is our stupefied satisfaction with what we call our own way of life. This is what leads us to assume that education is simply a means of achieving greater comfort and security in the world, and it is what inspires all the life adjustment programs and the like which pander to that assumption. Until it does; until the prevailing attitude is a little less like the Pharisee of Jesus’ parable and a little more like the publican, education on this continent will be radioactive with ignorance and illiterate blither. Meanwhile, the hope of democracy rests entirely on the earnest student and the dedicated teacher, and there are still too many of both for us to lose that hope.

Oh, Northrop. Thanks for that blast from the past.