Reconciliation

Siegfried Sassoon, November 1918

“When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.”

Thanks to Sunni Maravillosa  for posting this great piece, The Bartleby Project,  by John Gatto.

“The Bartleby Project

By the end of WWII, schooling had replaced education in the US, and shortly afterwards, standardized testing became the steel band holding the entire enterprise together. Test scores rather than accomplishment became the mark of excellence as early as 1960, and step by step the public was brought, through various forms of coercion including journalism, to believe that marks on a piece of paper were a fair and accurate proxy for human quality. As Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Nobel Prize winning Russian author, said, in a Pravda article on September 18, 1988, entitled “How to Revitalize Russia:”

No road for the people [to recover from Communism] will ever be open unless the government completely gives up control over us or any aspect of our lives. It has led the country into an abyss and it does not know the way out.

Break the grip of official testing on students, parents and teachers, and we will have taken the logical first step in revitalizing education. But nobody should believe this step can be taken politically—too much money and power is involved to allow the necessary legislative action; the dynamics of our society tend toward the creation of public opinion, not any response to it. There is only one major exception to that rule: Taking to the streets. In the past half-century the US has witnessed successful citizen action many times: In the overthrow of the Jim Crow laws and attitudes; in the violent conclusion to the military action in Vietnam; in the dismissal of a sitting American president from office. In each of these instances the people led, and the government reluctantly followed. So it will be with standardized testing. The key to its elimination is buried inside a maddening short story published in 1853 by Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

I first encountered “Bartleby” as a senior at Uniontown High School, where I was unable to understand what it might possibly signify. As a freshman at Cornell I read it again, surrounded by friendly associates doing the same. None of us could figure out what the story meant to communicate, not even the class instructor.

Bartleby is a human photocopy machine in the days before electro-mechanical duplication, a low-paid, low-status position in law offices and businesses. One day, without warning or explanation, Bartleby begins to exercise free will—he decides which orders he will obey and which he will not. If not, he replies, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to participate in a team-proofreading of a copy he’s just made, he announces without dramatics, “I would prefer not to.” To an order to pop around the corner to pick up mail at the post office, the same: “I would prefer not to.” He offers no emotion, no enlargement on any refusal; he prefers not to explain himself. Otherwise, he works hard at copying.

That is, until one day he prefers not to do that, either. Ever again. Bartleby is done with copying. But not done with the office which employed him to copy! You see, without the boss’ knowledge, he lives in the office, sleeping in it after others go home. He has no income sufficient for lodging. When asked to leave that office, and given what amounts to a generous severance pay for that age, he prefers not to leave—and not to take the severance. Eventually, Bartleby is taken to jail, where he prefers not to eat. In time, he sickens from starvation, and is buried in a pauper’s grave.

The simple exercise of free will, without any hysterics, denunciations, or bombast, throws consternation into social machinery—free will contradicts the management principle. Refusing to allow yourself to be regarded as a “human resource” is more revolutionary than any revolution on record. After years of struggling with Bartleby, he finally taught me how to break the chains of German Method schooling. It took a half-century for me to understand the awesome instrument each of us has through free will to defeat Germanic schooling, and to destroy the adhesive which holds it together—standardized testing…..”

by John Gatto

My Comment

I once wrote the libretto for a one-act opera about Bartleby composed by a friend of mine at Catholic University.  Unlike John Gatto, I always related to Bartleby and understood it because my first education was in India.

Education in the liberal arts was terribly rote-like in India in the 1980s. Long lists of figures to memorize. Map boundaries that had to be drawn from recollection. Senseless lists of obscure kings and their completely fungible achievements.  Venkatappa I built 40 highways, 500 hospitals and 35 colleges. Krishnayya III built 35 roads, 502 colleges, 25 temples. Chandravarma XX conquered the Marathas or Rajputs or whoever in 807 AD…etc., etc. Not much in the way of ideas. The whole thing was like a long catalog. Lists of the building materials (limestone, gypsum, white marble) used for various famous mosques, monuments, temples – none of which I’d ever seen, since traveling in India was difficult and expensive for middle-class families. Nehru’s Five-Year Plans, every dam and hydel project, with the exact monetary figure for each one.

We’d copy the whole thing onto a large piece of brown wrapping paper and then memorize it in sections until we could reel it off without a flaw.  Some of the girls took a few – shall we say – chemical stimulants to pull off this feat. The week after our exams, we would all be flat on our backs with exhaustion, fifteen pounds lighter, and hardly any more enlightened than before our labors.  The next term, we’d go back to “bunking” class (playing truant) for the first few weeks to make up for this torture.

There  was also a lot of long-hand copying of notes, because photocopy machines were nonexistent in our college and books were precious when you were living in a hostel. I copied scores of T. S. Eliot poems into a long notebook. In another I copied essays about Jane Austen. We took notes copiously in the classroom, although our lecturers were often less informed about things than we were. When things got boring, the more practical girls took to crocheting long scarves or eating lunch surreptitiously.

The whole thing was calculated to destroy any intelligence or interest in the subjects we were studying. It was a long, medieval exercise in mental gymnastics.

Amazingly, many of us ended up no worse intellectually than people who had had the finest undergraduate training.

But it was in spite of what we went through, not because.