I just returned from a conference in New York city sponsored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA). I was not a registered participant. My wife was chained to one of the book booths that sprout like fungi at these affairs and between the various food runs I made for her, I had a chance to dawdle at the workshops and exhibits and observe the conspirators who inhabited the New York Hilton at Rockefeller Center for that weekend.
There is something ensorceling about conferences. This apiary of a conference produced a honey of busyness that, from the outside, exuded an aroma of sweetly incisive investigation. People from all over hill and dale were being lavishly funded to bite the Big Apple, and they enjoyed that distilled spirit of business and pleasure that gives one the heady illusion of power. Of course they were there for important matters, there to fulfill the AERA's injunction to improve the educational process through scholarly inquiry, dissemination of the results, and practical application. From nine to five the lobbies and conferences and exhibits (and bars) bristled with people on a roll. Big things, it appeared, were getting done.
Or course, that is all ersatz, all illusion -- very little substantive work ever gets done at educational conferences. But it is an illusion that can not ever be called, like a bluff hand in poker can. Packaging is important here: the conference must appear to be producing something, not only to justify the expenses but also to nourish the participants through incredibly boring, tendentious, and often valueless hours of workshops and book-looking.
The booksellers barnumize best of all. They glaze the mind by scholarly mesmerism, yet induce the conferees to believe they indeed walks among the honored. How else to explain the sheaves of money handed over for such educational salves as "Ideology, Commitment, and Curriculum" or "Parents, Interface, and the Politics of Calculators" or "Statistical Analyses of School Management Objectives" or "Education, Its Future: Troubled or Triumphant?" or "Interactive Reading Modules: The Case for Interventionist Behavior in the Pre-School Population." Christian was not more beguiled at Vanity Fair, nor the sellers in the Temple more persuasive. Again, it appears as if things are really happening in this agora of ideas, and the conferees can take their baubles back along whatever spice routes they came by with the conviction that they have indeed made the proper pilgrimage.
What is going on here? Has the knowledge that all these conferences have excreted trickled down through the cathedrals of schools and departments of education into the hearts and minds of actual teachers and helped make children more intelligent, more wise, more understanding, more proficient in life? Obviously not. So it seems that all the bluster, logistics, concentration, and money have gone for naught.
Well, not really for naught. Because something is going on here. What one observes at these three-ring festivals is a mutual admiration society given over to the continuance of a very profitable incestuous relationship. Most people who read the books or study the testing procedures do not realistically expect to ever apply that knowledge to the classroom: just reading the books would be a full-time job. No, these books will be fodder for other books and studies that will be marketed to other people who will go on and write more books, and so on, so that eventually everyone can own a piece of a very lucrative pie, while the rest of us try to cope with the excreta of their blindness. The industry sired here between educationists, the test companies, the book publishers, and, secondarily, hotels and airlines, is a thriving closed system in which the infinite images off facing mirrors assure the participants that their substance is indeed equally infinite.
Which would be all right if they were philosophers, for philosophers can arc through the stratosphere without any appreciable harm done to themselves or others, and they can be safely ignored. But not these people. When we think of the teachers and students who will ultimately be victimized by wrong-headed policies or abstruse directives, then the danger is urgent and evident.
And the danger is not from an advocacy of reductive or authoritarian measures. Exactly the opposite. We are threatened by a blandly toxic indifference to the aesthetic, economic, and political plagues of education. And the best indicator of this is the language. The linguistic narcotic of book titles and workshop names can so dilute a sense of urgency and moral conviction that a researcher could easily say that today's educational problems have nothing personally to do with him, they are simply an area of expertise. For instance (and this instance is merely representative: it is not singled out as the only culprit), Academic Press publishes The Language of Children Reared in Poverty: Implications for Evaluation and Intervention by Lynne Feagans and Dale Clark Farran. The book is the result of a conference about language and poverty in May 1980 at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The title proposes a topic fraught with emotion, urgency, and moral dimension. Yet the language betrays this neatly. No picture of poor children comes through in the jacket blurb: "In the 1960s, the reasons given for these problems [with poor children] were dominated by an emphasis on a 'deficit' model in which language development played an important role." No voice here, no sense of any person articulating these children's concerns, just nice, safe, unenlightening exposition. And Dale Farran's final essay, "Intervention for Poverty Children: Alternative Approaches," does more than its share of acrobatics to avoid saying anything that might indicate moral judgment or an inclination to act politically. Note the conditionals:
There are alternative approaches. One is to attempt to change the living conditions of the poor....One can argue that this alternative is not an actual one because it involves restructuring society. Perhaps that is true: it is not a likely alternative; however, it may still be the best alternative. [Emphasis original]
Orwell stated many years ago that corrupt language corrupts thought. That corruption has many colorations, and one of them is the employment of bland language in the service of "objectivity." The effort to be politically neutral ultimately ends in being politically neutered, and this is exactly what conferences like this prove. The minds that run the systems that train teachers and students show clearly that, as Richard Mitchell's new book, The Graves of Academe, states, intellectuals "have trained themselves to imagine that the dull business of public education has nothing to do with their high endeavors," such as chasing one another from conference to conference. When the neutered try to run the world, sterility is the only offspring. Where do we go from here?