The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  There is something irresistible about Babbitt’s innocent hijacking of words and ideas. He transforms familiar concepts beyond recognition through his odd pairings—“real thinker,” “spiritual . . . Efficiency.” And yet you have only to pay a little attention to what goes by the name of “spiritual” these days to see that his philosophy has had many converts. Whatever the field or arena, the language we use to describe (or, in today’s parlance, “market”) our policies, our ideas and feelings, is the same, reduced to a single, deceptively sincere and utilitarian slogan.

  Take “The Sermon on the Amount,” which tells us, “The next time you get paid, you write the first check to God. . . . And then you watch God take care of you,” and exhorts us to “Get involved with God financially,” because if you do, “God will provide for you.” You may think these words belong to Babbitt’s fictional preacher Mike Monday, the “Prophet with a Punch” and the “world’s greatest salesman of salvation,” who has “converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.” But the Sermon on the Amount is a real sermon, delivered by the very real Dr. David Jeremiah, radio show host, televangelist and pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, in San Diego. On his Sunday television show, Dr. Jeremiah will educate you about “God’s economic plan,” and offer to take you on a cruise along with his wife, and sell you 30 Days to Understanding the Christian Life in Just 15 Minutes a Day. He has also helpfully written a book called The Worst Financial Mistakes in the Bible and How You Can Avoid Them, advertised as a “‘What Not to Do’ guide for your finances from a biblical perspective!” Once your money problems are solved, you can then turn to ChristianMingle.com to help you find your true love: “God’s match for you!”

  We have come a long way from Babbitt’s desirable dictaphone to Christian Internet speed dating, but the mind-set that came up with the concept of “investing” in God is still very much with us. Slowly, imperceptibly, it has reshaped our thoughts and feelings. “I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt complains to his parents. Young Ted, who has to study “plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of Comus,” concedes, “I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ ’em—These teachers—how do they get that way?” His mother sympathizes and consoles him with the recollection that “when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice.”

  The ever utilitarian Babbitt tells his son he should soldier on and slog through the courses because they are required for college entrance. But he does not see why “Shakespeare and those” are required for college or “why they stuck ’em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state.” He believes it would be better if “you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull.” This argument is now all too familiar: learning “Shakespeare and those” won’t help you pull in a paycheck down the road.

  Despite Ted’s dislike of college and his desire to take up “mechanics,” Babbitt wants him to go to college and study law—no doubt because when he was young, his own ambition, derailed by his unexpected marriage, was to become a lawyer. “Trouble with you, Ted,” he tells his son, “is you always want to do something different! If you’re going to law-school—and you are!—I never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do—why, you’ll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”

  Babbitt is a fan of home-study courses, “which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education.” These courses entice the discerning mind with advertisements that begin like this:

  $$$$$$$$$

  POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING

  One in particular is taught by Professor W. F. Peet, “author of the Shortcut Course in Public-Speaking” and “easily the foremost figure in practical literature, psychology & oratory.” Babbitt figures that this “correspondence-school business had become a mighty profitable game.” We now have many versions of homeschooling, where the student does not have to actually attend school but can pay an online provider to get a degree. Had he been alive today, Babbitt would have been a sucker for for-profit education and a great mentor to those who are shaping and formulating our system of education. His terms “Business English” and “practical literature” would fit beautifully into the educational plans our policy makers have been dreaming up. Babbitt believed “somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out of it.” And how right he was!

  6

  Almost a century after Babbitt was conjured into being, what he could only dream of is on the point of being actualized. In college we are encouraged to learn “Corporate Communications,” and Democrats and Republicans have come together to relieve young kids like Ted of that “old junk.” The American public school system is being Babbittized, with learning increasingly seen as a means to an end, a vehicle for job creation. We all need jobs, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to help people who are struggling to find them, but why should earning wages be at odds with nurturing genuine knowledge and independent thought? It is no longer literature, philosophy or history that will preserve the nation in these complex times; it is practical-minded college graduates, comfortable in their new language of acronyms and shortcut, brandishing their diplomas and awash in debt.

  A heated controversy has broken out in education circles in the past few years over the “Common Core State Standards,” new guidelines released in 2010 and now endorsed by forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Although the Common Core was formulated and implemented by a Democratic administration, it was both supported and opposed by members of both parties. To understand its philosophical underpinnings, it is helpful to take a step back to the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative, and one more step back to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind.” Both of these programs were predicated on the belief that public schools in America were broken (one big worry was that we were falling behind China) and that the solution lay in instituting new systems of evaluation that would enable school administrators to punish the teachers of poor-performing students and reward those whose students passed the new tests. The idea was that this would motivate them to teach better, though by all appearances it has instead persuaded them to teach their students to fill out multiple-choice tests, which cannot be the best approach for preparing young people to live rich and meaningful lives. According to Diane Ravitch, an impassioned critic of these reforms, teachers have been encouraged to “teach to the tests,” resulting in a narrowing of the curriculum in most schools and a focus on reading and mathematics at the expense of art, history, civics, literature, geography, science and physical education.

  Where Bush opted for sticks, Obama chose to lure with carrots, and so Congress allocated an additional $5 billion to the Department of Education, and “Race to the Top” was born. States were made to compete for the jackpot and had to agree to certain rules as a condition for participation: they would have to evaluate teachers’ performances based on the results of students’ test scores and agree to adopt “College- and Career-Ready Standards.” This nebulous directive was the seed of the future Common Core. Suddenly, the goal of school was no longer to prepare children for the world and to turn out fully formed and informed citizens, but to create employable, college-worthy test takers capable of passing multiple-choice math and English tests.

  The Common Core was formulated by a nonprofit organization called Student Achievement Partners, headed by Dr. David Coleman, now president of the College Board. Its most significant supporter was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent around $200 million to help develop and promote the Common
Core. Many people have complained that the new standards were developed with the active participation of the testing-and-textbook industry and little input from actual teachers, but the problem is not so much one of corporate influence as of a creeping Babbitt-like mentality, which has no time for imaginative knowledge in its eagerness to create an efficient and productive “standardized man.” Coleman has worked at McKinsey and started several companies involved in educational policy, and he is by all accounts intelligent, affable and well-intentioned. But he has never stood in front of a classroom and does not seem to be much interested in what most good teachers hope to achieve: to kindle curiosity, passion, a desire to learn and know and live a full and meaningful life. Students are more than future employees.

  The most controversial aspect of the Common Core is its mandatory division of reading into nonfiction (redefined as “informational text”) and fiction. For high schools, the required ratio was set at 70/30 in favor of informational texts, which range from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Ronald Reagan’s 1988 speech at Moscow State University to material from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. Now, don’t get me wrong: I would have welcomed a more interdisciplinary approach, one in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be taught alongside James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and poems by Langston Hughes, but this was not the intention. The goal was not so much to illuminate the intersection between history and fiction or to demonstrate the rhetorical underpinnings and literary influences of historical speeches and documents as to replace anything that might invite subjective interpretation—the realm of imaginative knowledge—with tangible facts. Yet imaginative knowledge is one of the most potent ways of understanding and communicating with the world. This is something that was powerfully understood by those who wrote two of these informational texts: the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

  There is something distasteful about the current fashionable buzzwords in educational circles. The goal is to promote “higher-order thinking skills.” Students are “workers in the global economy” and need to be “career- and college-ready.” In our tech-friendly times, we are told that students must be fed “data-driven instruction,” and they need to be “evidence-based learners” familiar with “key academic concepts.” While they do need to think clearly—which may be what is meant by “evidence-based critical thinking”—even more than that, they need their teachers, as one university professor so eloquently put it, to “mess them up,” by which she meant that students should be made to feel uncomfortable. They should be given a desire to think and to know, and asked to articulate their own questions rather than simply scratch a pencil across a page and regurgitate the “right” answers.

  When I recently stumbled upon a piece by Coleen Bondy, an English teacher who participated in a training session for the implementation of the Common Core—an “exemplar for instruction,” to use the McKinsey-inflected terminology—I began to understand more clearly why fiction had been marginalized and found wanting: it is too subjective and insufficiently “evidence-based.” The “exemplar” for teaching the Gettysburg Address to ninth and tenth graders comes with a number of “text-dependent questions.” Teachers are forbidden from telling students about the context of its delivery; a trainer told Bondy that it was better “to give a cold, hard, assessment” of the text, saying, “we need to ‘remove the scaffolding sometime.’” Teachers are instructed to refrain from asking students whether they have ever been to a funeral, despite the fact that this was, of course, the occasion for the Gettysburg Address. Such questions, touching on “individual experience and opinion,” should not be asked. After a series of steps in which the students, to quote David Coleman, are made to “stay within the four corners of the text,” they will then be asked to write an essay about the “structure” of the address. This same dry methodology is to be applied to all “informational” texts; the suggestion is that the “facts” they contain will speak for themselves if teachers are sufficiently rigorous in their demands for their extraction and students sufficiently diligent in their efforts to retrieve and collect them. This “cold reading” as one high school teacher, Jeremiah Chaffee, writes, “mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.” He adds that such “pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.” As one critic complained, this is “New Criticism on steroids.”

  There is to be no interaction between the reader and the text, or the text and its context; students are simply asked to glean objective “evidence,” and all subjective interpretations are frowned upon. Is it any wonder that fiction—rife with exactly the kind of unanswerable questions that face us in life—is the unloved stepchild? Let us consider the teaching methods recommended in this “exemplar.” In an ideal classroom, would all students come to the same conclusion after reading the Gettysburg Address? Would the “evidence” point them all in the same direction?

  We are not, as some critics have suggested, dealing with a conspiracy involving policy makers, billionaires and the chamber of commerce, but something far more insidious and difficult to tackle: what we have is the product of a dangerous mind-set, an attitude that in all honesty wants to do good, as we all do.

  Is it a coincidence that the new standards look like a concoction of Mr. George F. Babbitt and his practical-minded Good Fellows when our policy makers are so antipathetic to education? The Republican party in particular, bent as it is on obstructing the Obama administration’s efforts to provide funding for the education of minorities and the poor, with its demands of steep cuts to the education budget and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts, are too outrageous to deserve an argument. The recent budget proposed by Paul Ryan for the 2015 fiscal year, according to Higher Ed, “proposes steep cuts to many domestic social programs, including reductions to Pell Grants, student loans and research funding.”

  The Republican senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, sent a letter to then-acting chairman of the NEH, Carol Watson, asking why she was spending money on worthless projects, which he enumerated as follows:

  “What is the meaning of life?” ($24,953)

  “Why are we interested in the past?” ($24,803)

  “What is the good life and how do I live it?” ($25,000)

  “Why are bad people bad?” ($23,390)

  “What is belief?” ($24,562)

  “What is a monster?” ($24,999)

  “Why do humans write?” ($24,774)

  Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, informed his constituents that instead of wasting money on the liberal arts, “I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees . . . so when they get out of school, they can get a job.” How could this also become the mantra of the Obama administration, which rarely condescends to mention its own liberal arts formation? How did such a utilitarian attitude come to replace the creative American pragmatism embodied by the educational philosophy of John Dewey? Our public schools, especially in poverty-ridden neighborhoods, have been under pressure to give up music, arts, literature and all the subjects related to the humanities. But the administration’s admirable goal has been to raise the standards in these schools and provide equal opportunities for all. How can this goal be realized if these subjects are not taught alongside science and mathematics? I begrudgingly took note that the humanities were pointedly absent from the president’s last State of the Union speech, while mathematics, science and engineering at least got an honorable mention.

  Then we have Bill Gates, the philanthropist whose money has been one of the biggest factors reshaping the educational system. In a speech to the National Governors Association emphasizing the impo
rtance of using data-based metrics to increase educational standards and bring down the costs in K-12 education, Gates noted: “The amount of subsidization is not that well correlated to the areas that actually create jobs in the state—that create income for the state. . . . Now, in the past it felt fine to just say, Okay, we’re overall going to be generous with this sector,” but now, he said, we should ask, “What are the categories that help fill jobs and drive that state’s economy in the future?” His response to this rhetorical question was perhaps self-evident, but should we really be surprised to hear this soul-crushing evaluation from a man who has argued that donating money to a new museum wing, rather than spending it on preventing an illness such as blindness, is morally equivalent to saying, “We’re going to take 1 percent of the people who visit this [museum] and blind them”?

  Of course, not all of our tech entrepreneurs think like Bill Gates. This, for me, was one of the consoling aspects of delving into the controversy surrounding the Common Core: discovering how many tech people disagree with this view and see the liberal arts as central both to who they are and to their working lives. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” said Steve Jobs. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” In a famous, much-circulated graduation speech to the Stanford graduating class in 2005, Jobs urged students to follow their passion. He told them how he had dropped out of the expensive college he was enrolled in because his parents couldn’t afford it anymore. From then on, he followed his “curiosity and intuition,” despite the fact that he was very poor, sleeping on the floor in his friends’ rooms, walking seven miles across town every Sunday night to get “one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.” None of the things he did was in conscious pursuit of money or success. He was not preparing himself to be “college- and career-ready.” Instead, after dropping out, he attended seemingly useless classes that interested him, like calligraphy, on the side. He found it fascinating—“beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.” Later, this interest resurfaced when he was designing the Mac, the first computer with a range of elegant fonts. He told Stanford students, “You’ve got to find what you love,” and ended his speech with a quote from the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”