Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Burt and Valley Few are too young for school. I foresee great difficulty for Burt, who now at four is in so desperate a psychological situation that he is capable of speaking any language beyond gibberish (in which he has great rhythmic and syllabic talent) only after he has been given the security of long and friendly attention, of a sort which markedly excludes his brothers.

  Pearl Woods, who is eight, may have started to school this fall (1936); more likely not, though, for it was to depend on whether the road was graveled so she would not have the long walk to the bus alone or within contamination of the Ricketts children. She is extremely sensitive, observant, critical and crafty, using her mind and her senses much more subtly than is ever indicated or ‘taught’ in school: whether her peculiar intelligence will find engagement or ruin in the squarehead cogs of public schooling is another matter.

  Thomas is three years too young for school. As a comedian and narcist dancer he has natural genius; aside from this I doubt his abilities. Natural artists, such as he is, and natural craftsmen, like Junior, should not necessarily have to struggle with reading and writing; they have other ways of learning, and of enlarging themselves, which however are not available to them.

  Clair Bell is three years young for school and it seems probable that she will not live for much if any of it, so estimates are rather irrelevant I will say, though, that I was so absorbed in her physical and spiritual beauty that I was not on the lookout for signs of ‘intelligence’ or the lack of it, and that education, so far as I know it, would either do her no good or would hurt her.

  Flora Merry Lee and Katy are in the second grade. Katy, though she is so shy that she has to write out her reading lessons, is brighter than average; Flora Merry Lee, her mother says, is brighter than Katy; she reads and writes smoothly and ‘specially delights in music’ Garvrin and Richard are in the fourth grade. Garvrin doesn’t take to schooling very easily though he tries hard; Richard is bright but can’t get interested; his mind wanders. In another year or two they will be big enough for full farm work and will be needed for it, and that will be the end of school.

  Margaret quit school when she was in the fifth grade because her eyes hurt her so badly every time she studied books. She has forgotten a good deal how to read. Paralee quit soon after Margaret did because she was lonesome. She still reads fairly easily, and quite possibly will not forget how.

  The Ricketts are spoken of disapprovingly, even so far away as the county courthouse, as ‘problem’ children. Their attendance record is extremely bad; their conduct is not at all good; they are always fighting and sassing back. Besides their long walk in bad weather, here is some more explanation. They are much too innocent to understand the profits of docility. They have to wear clothes and shoes which make them the obvious butts of most of the children. They come of a family which is marked and poor even among the poor whites, and are looked down on even by most levels of the tenant class. They are uncommonly sensitive, open, trusting, easily hurt, and amazed by meanness and by cruelty, and their ostracism is of a sort to inspire savage loyalty among them. They are indeed ‘problems’; and the ‘problem’ will not be simplified as these ‘over’sexed and anarchic children shift into adolescence. The two girls in particular seem inevitably marked out for incredibly cruel misunderstanding and mistreatment.

  Mrs. Ricketts can neither read nor write. She went to school one day in her life and her mother got sick and she never went back. Another time she told me that the children laughed at her dress and the teacher whipped her for hitting back at them, but Margaret reminded her that that was the dress she had made for Flora Merry Lee and that it was Flora Merry Lee and Katy who had been whipped, and she agreed that that was the way it was.

  Fred Ricketts learned quickly. He claims to have learned how to read music in one night (he does, in any case, read it), and he reads language a little less hesitantly than the others do and is rather smug about it—’I was readn whahl back na Pgressive Fahmuh—’ He got as far as the fifth grade and all ways was bright. When his teacher said the earth turned on a axle, he asked her was the axle set in posts, then. She said yes, she reckoned so. He said well, wasn’t hell supposed to be under the earth, and if it was wouldn’t they be all the time trying to chop the axle post out from under the earth? But here the earth still was, so what was all this talk about axles. Teacher never did bring up nothn bout no axles after that. No sir, she never did bring up nothin about no durn axles after that. No sir-ree, she shore never did brang up nufn baout no dad blame axles attah dayut.’

  Woods quit school at twelve when he ran away and went to work in the mines. He can read, write, and figure; so can his wife. Woods understands the structures and tintings of rationalization in money, sex, language, religion, law, and general social conduct in a sour way which is not on the average curriculum.

  George Gudger can spell and read and write his own name; beyond that he is helpless. He got as far as the second grade. By that time there was work for him and he was slow minded anyway. He feels it is a terrible handicap not to be educated and still wants to learn to read and write and to figure, and his wife has tried to learn him, and still wants to. He still wants to, too, but he thinks it is unlikely that he will ever manage to get the figures and letters to stick in his head.

  Mrs. Gudger can read, write, spell, and handle simple arithmetic, and grasps and is excited by such matters as the plainer facts of astronomy and geology. In fact, whereas many among the three families have crippled but very full and real intelligences, she and to a perhaps less extent her father have also intellects. But these intellects died before they were born; they hang behind their eyes like fetuses in alcohol.

  It may be that more are born ‘incapable of learning,’ in this class, or in any case ‘incapable of learning,’ or of ‘using their intelligences,’ beyond ‘rudimentary’ stages, than in economically luckier classes. If this is so, and I doubt the proportion is more than a little if at all greater, several ideas come to mind: Incapable of learning what? And capable of learning what else, which is not available either to them or, perhaps, in the whole field and idea of education? Or are they incapable through incompetent teaching, or through blind standards, or none, on the part of educators, for measuring what ‘intelligence’ is? Or incapable by what pressures of past causes in past generations? Or should the incapability be so lightly (or sorrowfully) dismissed as it is by teachers and by the middle class in general?

  But suppose a portion are born thus ‘incapable’: the others, nevertheless, the great majority, are born with ‘intelligences’ potentially as open and ‘healthful,’ and as varied in pattern and in charge, as any on earth. And by their living, and by their education, they are made into hopeless and helpless cripples, capable exactly and no more of doing what will keep them alive: by no means so well equipped as domestic and free animals: and that is what their children are being made into, more and more incurably, in every year, and in every day.

  ‘Literacy’ is to some people a pleasing word: when ‘illiteracy’ percentages drop, many are pleased who formerly were shocked, and think no more of it Disregarding the proved fact that few doctors of philosophy are literate, that is, that few of them have the remotest idea how to read, how to say what they mean, or what they mean in the first place, the word literacy means very little even as it is ordinarily used. An adult tenant writes and spells and reads painfully and hesitantly as a child does and is incapable of any save the manifest meanings of any but the simplest few hundred words, and is all but totally incapable of absorbing, far less correlating, far less critically examining, any ‘ideas’ whether true or false; or even physical facts beyond the simplest and most visible. That they are, by virtue of these limitations, among the only ‘honest’ and ‘beautiful’ users of language, is true, perhaps, but it is not enough. They are at an immeasurable disadvantage in a world which is run, and in which they are hint, and in which they might be cured, by ‘knowledge’ and by ‘ideas’: and to ‘consciousness’
or ‘knowledge’ in its usages in personal conduct and in human relationships, and to those unlimited worlds of the senses, the remembrance, the mind and the heart which, beyond that of their own existence, are the only human hope, dignity, solace, increasement and joy, they are all but totally blinded. The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one’s own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept, or the ability to try to defend one’s self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving ‘talent.’

  Or to say it in another way: I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his ‘limits,’ of fully ‘realizing’ his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself; and that the discovery and use of ‘consciousness,’ which has always been and is our deadliest enemy and deceiver, is also the source and guide of all hope and cure, and the only one.

  I am not at all trying to lay out a thesis, far less to substantiate or to solve. I do not consider myself qualified. I know only that murder is being done, against nearly every individual in the planet, and that there are dimensions and correlations of cure which not only are not being used but appear to be scarcely considered or suspected. I know there is cure, even now available, if only it were available, in science and in the fear and joy of God. This is only a brief personal statement of these convictions: and my self-disgust is less in my ignorance, and far less in my ‘failure’ to ‘defend’ or ‘support’ the statement, than in my inability to state it even so far as I see it, and in my inability to blow out the brains with it of you who take what it is talking of lightly, or not seriously enough.

  A few notes

  Most of you would never be convinced that much can be implied out of little: that everything to do with tenant education, for instance, is fully and fairly indicated in the mere list of textbooks. I have not learned how to make this clear, so I have only myself to thank. On the other hand there are plenty of people who never get anything into their heads until they are brained by twenty years’ documentation: these are the same people who so scrupulously obey, insist on, and interpret ‘the facts,’ and ‘the rules’

  I have said a good deal more here on what ought to be than on what is: but God forbid I should appear to say, ‘I know what ought to be, and this is it’ But it did and does seem better to shout a few obvious facts (they can never be ‘obvious’ enough) than to meech. The meechers will say, Yes, but do you realize all (or any) of the obstacles, presuming you are (in general) a little more right than merely raving? The answer is, I am sure I don’t realize them all, but I realize more of them, probably, than you do. Our difference is that you accept and respect them. ‘Education’ as it stands is tied in with every bondage I can conceive of, and is the chief cause of these bondages, including acceptance and respect, which are the worst bondages of all. ‘Education,’ if it is anything short of crime, is a recognition of these bondages and a discovery of more and a deadly enemy of all of them; it is the whole realm of human consciousness, action, and possibility; it has above all to try to recognize and continuously to suspect and to extend its understanding of its own nature. It is all science and all conduct; it is also all religion. By which I mean, it is all ‘good’ or ‘wise’ science, conduct, and religion. It is also all individuals; no less various. It cannot be less and be better than outrageous. Its chief task is fearfully to try to learn what is ‘good’ and ‘why’ (and when), and how to communicate, and its own dimensions, and its responsibility.

  Oh, I am very well aware how adolescent this is and how easily laughable. I will nevertheless insist that any persons milder, more obedient to or compromising* with ‘the obstacles as they are,’ more ‘realistic,’ contented with the effort for less, are dreamy and insufficiently skeptical. Those are the worst of the enemies, and always have been.

  I don’t know whether negroes or whites teach in the negro schools; I presume negroes. If they are negroes, I would presume for general reasons that many of them, or most, are far superior to the white teachers. By and large only the least capable of whites become teachers, particularly in primary schools, and more particularly in small towns and in the country: whereas with so little in the world available to them, it must be that many of the most serious and intelligent negroes become teachers. But you would have to add: They are given, insofar as they are given any, a white-traditioned education, and are liable to the solemn, meek piousness of most serious and educated negroes in the south; to a deep respect for knowledge and education as they have worked for it; to a piteous mah-people or Uncle Tom attitude towards all life. Even those who are aware of more dangerous attitudes would in the south have to be careful to the point of impotence. Moreover they would be teaching only very young children, in the earliest years of school, in overcrowded classrooms.

  Note on all grade-school teachers: that at best they are exceedingly ill-paid, and have also anxiety over their jobs: with all the nervousness of lack of money and of insecurity even in that little: not a good state of mind for a teacher of the young. Nor is the state of mind resulting of sexlessness, or of carefully spotless moral rectitude, whether it be ‘innate,’ or self-enforced for the sake of the job. Nearly all teachers and clergymen suffocate their victims through this sterility alone.

  It would be hard to make clear enough the deadliness of vacuum and of apathy which is closed over the very nature of teaching, over teachers and pupils alike: or in what different worlds words and processes leave a teacher, and reach a child. Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied. Carry it forward a few years and recognize how soft-brained an american as against a european ‘college graduate’ is. On the other side: should there be any such thing as textbooks in any young life: and how many ‘should’ learn to read at all?

  As a whole part of ‘psychological education’ it needs to be remembered that a neurosis can be valuable; also that ‘adjustment’ to a sick and insane environment is of itself not ‘health’ but sickness and insanity.

  I could not wish of any one of them that they should have had the ‘advantages’ I have had: a Harvard education is by no means an unqualified advantage.

  Adults writing to or teaching children: in nearly every word within these textbooks, for instance, there is a flagrant mistake of some kind. The commonest is this: that they simplify their own ear, without nearly enough skepticism as to the accuracy of the simplification, and with virtually no intuition for the child or children; then write or teach to satisfy that ear; discredit the child who is not satisfied, and value the child who, by docile or innocent distortions of his intelligence, is.

  In school a child is first plunged into the hot oil bath of the world at its cruelest: and children are taught far less by their teachers than by one another. Children are, or quickly become, exquisitely sensitive to social, psychologic, and physical meanings and discriminations. The war is bloody and pitiless as that war alone can be in which every combatant is his own sole army, and is astounded and terrified in proportion to the healthfulness of his consciousness. What clothes are worn, for one simple thing alone, is of tremendous influence upon the child who wears them. A child is quickly and frightfully instructed of his situation and meaning in the world; and that one stays alive only by one form or another of cowardice, or brutality, or deception, or other crime. It is all, needless to say, as harmful to the ‘winners�
� (the well-to-do, or healthful, or extraverted) as to the losers.

  The ‘esthetic’ is made hateful and is hated beyond all other kinds of ‘knowledge.’ It is false-beauty to begin with; it is taught by sick women or sicker men; it becomes identified with the worst kinds of femininity and effeminacy; it is made incomprehensible and suffocating to anyone of much natural honesty and vitality.

  The complete acquaintance of a child with ‘music’ is the nauseating little tunes you may remember from your own schooltime. His ‘art’ has equally little to do with ‘art.’ The dancing, as I have said, is taught to girls: it is the beginning of tap dancing. The spectacle of a tenant’s little daughter stepping out abysmal imitations of Eleanor Powell has a certain charm, but it is somehow decadent, to put it mildly. This is not at all to say that madrigals, finger-painting, or morris-dancing are to be recommended: I wish to indicate only that in either case the ‘teaching’ of ‘the esthetic’ or of ‘the arts’ in Cookstown leaves, or would leave, virtually everything still to be desired.

  It is hardly to Louise’s good fortune that she ‘likes’ school, school being what it is. Dressed as she is, and bright as she is, and serious and dutiful and well-thought-of as she is, she already has traces of a special sort of complacency which probably must, in time, destroy all in her nature that is magical, indefinable, and matchless: and this though she is one of the stronger persons I have ever known.