STOP DESTROYING YOUR DISCIPLINE.

We noted the suicidal tendencies of the National Council of Teachers of English a week ago.  "Whether it's incoherent jargon or question-begging or potted political economy is left for the reader as an exercise. I wonder if your typical English teacher can even compare and contrast the vanguardist from the evolutionary perspective on what structures a better world."

Let's pass the baton to Mark Bauerlein, who knows a thing or two about teaching English, and has his own take on the word salad of that position paper.  "You got all that? It’s quite a mouthful, imparted with all the confidence of experts who know the ways of the world and do not fear breaking old habits and keeping up-to-date. Other points in the statement reiterate the world-is-changing motif. In the 21st century, communication is ever more oral and pictorial, the authors say. Kids, especially, express themselves in non-print ways."  There's material for a Friday short take there.  I recommend people read and understand the essay in full.  Professor Bauerlein suggests the word salad is being made with life-expired ingredients.

The assumption about skills needed in college and professional spaces doesn’t hold up, but NCTE holds it too tightly and pleasingly for evidence to shake it loose, no matter how solid that evidence is. NCTE people utter this claim as if it were a nugget of the discipline’s wisdom, and also proof of the utterer’s membership in the ranks. Such revolutionary talk comes up all the time in education circles, in fact, and has for at least two decades, since the Web 2.0 phase of the internet began.

Indeed, if you’ve heard these claims of “new literacies” a few times, you start thinking less about the import of them and more about the language in which they are expressed. After a while, you start to see an irony open up, a gap between the content of the words and the words themselves. We have a radical meaning clothed in banal terms, epochal dimensions offered in clichéd, conventional, pseudo-radical diction. In spite of the declamatory tone and avant-garde ethos, the words are altogether familiar. We’ve heard them many times before. There’s nothing new about them.

Yes, and perhaps it is the kind of familiarity that should breed disrespect, if not the sounding of the Viking horn and the end to the woke business as usual in education.  Let the disrespect begin by the calling of b.s.

Two words, however, stand out as unusual: “decenter” and “valorize.” They have a lot of responsibility in that paragraph, but laymen can’t quite apprehend them. Such words don’t come up in ordinary conversation, not even in professional domains. They have the aura of complexity, adding intellectual cachet to the recommendation and making the shift away from print seem sophisticated and disciplinary. That’s the point. “Decentering” and “valorization” sound like acts of expertise. Only a trained person knows how to carry them out adroitly. The terms suggest that only the virtuosi at NCTE know what must be done, and only they are astute enough to do it.

But anyone with long experience in literary theory knows otherwise. The unfortunate truth about this particular locution, which is supposed to denote our proper advance into the 21st century, is that it rests on holdovers from more than 50 years ago.

It takes a special ability to obfuscate effectively, and the people at that national council lack it.

The phony sophistication undermines the credibility of NCTE more soundly than does a debate over the status of print in a digital era. The style undoes NCTE more than the content (as does the mixed metaphor in the first sentence of the passage, “decenter . . . pinnacles,” along with the treatment of “media” in the last sentence as singular.) The real question is how these middling talents and pompous declaimers ever attained positions of authority within the field. What kind of decadence afflicts us when the pedagogues of print are the vandals of print instruction? How did the guardianship of books become the duty of people who aren’t terribly bookish?

Our humanistic institutions are in the hands of people whose humanitas is feeble. They’re proud of that fact, though. They believe it’s warranted by social conditions, and they’re ready to pass along their ineptitude to the pupils they’re paid to edify.

Defund them, turf them out, undermine them with mockery.