Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking: More Captions to the Cartoons We Live

By H. Alan Tansson

Antidisestablishmentarianitially Speaking rises above the mess weve made of our world, a world at the end of our nose. Page after page, this glorious compendium of essays provides wholehearted laughter at our miserable condition and the uncanny ability for humanism to persevere. The plight of our ideals in this arrogant era may leave you in tears, but if that old ship is sinking, H. Alan Tansson has shown us a way to rebuild it, one plank at a time. This companion volume to We Think We Think takes four dreary subjects onto the playground. Education, religion, history, and political economics will never be the same.

Antidisestablishmentarianitially Speaking spins old Tom Paines arguments around to show the church and state united in the distant future. Open a greeting card for the Bargain Basement Apocalypse, discover the basis of boredom in practice, the underpinnings of prayer, and whats missing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There are thirty essays packed with scholarly syncretism, magic, and strange new harmonies rung from the irony of our times. Give yourself, your friends, and your family a gift, and begin to learn the new art of antidisestablishmentarianistically speaking!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450275293

H. Alan Tansson

H. Alan Tansson is also the author of The Devil’s Laugh and Other Stories (2009), We Think We Think (2010), a book on education and training, Bacon & Eggheads (2003), and a radio play on the activist, Paul Robeson, entitled Paul’s Song – The Musical. He lives in Trenton, NJ.

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Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking.

More Captions to the Cartoons We Live

H. Alan Tansson

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking

More Captions to the Cartoons We Live

Copyright © 2010 by H. Alan Tansson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-7531-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7529-3 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7530-9 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010918351

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 4/26/2011

For Fred, whose portrait and story can be found at Cheydleur Hall at The Fellowship Farm, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania; and for Stanley Frye, translator of ancient and illegible Buddhist manuscripts, who challenged me to respect the local totems of the earth.

Back where I come from we have universities; seats of learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts: and with no more brains than you have! But, they’ve got one thing you haven’t got—a diploma! Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatis Committeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD…Doctor of Thinkology.

— The Wizard to the Scarecrow.

Metro Goldwyn Meyer’s The Wizard of OZ. 1939

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Word on Captions

Preface

Edgecational Edgeneering

Beyond the Bleeding Edge

On The Front Line

Castor Oil

Practice makes Perfect

Numb, Thumb, Curriculum

The Pecking Order

The Education of Henry Adams

Of Books and Interactivity

Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking

The Little Man Behind the Curtain

Introduction on a Palm

Staying in your Body

Thoughts on Disemboweling Oneself

and what little Difference it Makes.

What a Paine (this Argument is)

When the Gypsies Find a Home

Little Miracles

Antidisestablishmentarianysticism

Untying it & Tying it

Nietzsche’s Children

Zarathustra and Mrs. Johnson

The Laundry Business

Hypothistory and Hipgnosis

How to be a Prophet

War and Longing

World Domination circa 1230, 1890, and Beyond.

An ODD Philosophy

Everything’s Connected

The Great Carbuncle and The Exquisite Corpse

The Economic Engine

Best Wishes for the Day After the Apocalypse.

Revolution and its Discontents

Postscript: Antidis’etcetera’tistically Speaking

A Guzla in Space

Glossary

Illustrations

Art with the signature JFM is from the notebooks of John Mitchell (1945-1991) and provided by the estate of John Fries Mitchell. Art identified by the name of Dan Folkus is by that artist, and drawings with a HAT are by myself. The photograph of the revolutionary is by Steven Jackendoff, circa 1970.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Sarah and Ken Miller, who have given me permission to use art from the notebooks of my late friend, John Mitchell of Maple Shade, NJ, and to Christine Restifo of Lambertville NJ, who persevered through the original manuscript of Captions, straightening out my grammar and delivery. But then I split the book into two volumes and made substantial changes to Volume Two, adding many mistakes and a new final section.

Now it so happens that I promised to submit my very first book, a pre-natal version of this same final section, to Prof. John R. Krueger back in 1969. By an odd coincidence, he ran a small publishing house in the same ZIP-code that my present publisher has. Forty-one years later, he has been kind enough to provide his editorial suggestions and proof-reading skills to this long-standing effort, and I thank God profoundly for the opportunity to keep my promise and pay him at his original rate.

Finally, author photographs for my two books to date have been by Aaron Jackendoff, whom I neglected to thank. The one with the castor-bean plant, however, is by Kay, who is my wife.

A Word on Captions

As I explained at length in my first volume of Captions to the Cartoons We Live entitled, We Think We Think, the essays in this book lie halfway between a sermon and a shaggy-dog story and are dubbed captions. You can find precise definitions differentiating a caption, sermon, and shaggy dog story in the Glossary, a few pages before the back cover.

My publisher, upon reading the draft of this volume insisted it was so full of erudite references that it also required a bibliography and an index. I told him that these were captions, and not essays for a high-brow magazine or textbook. Captions are neither sermons (which supply you chapter and verse for each sentence), nor are they shaggy dog stories (which get so caught up qualifying themselves that they never finish the first sentence). A shaggy dog sermon (which is a caption) treats authorities as old acquaintances, as mere people whose words and stories have become lodged between the ears. Where I have fallen into this state of pickle-barrel erudition, I’ve done you the service of checking the spellings of my friends’ names and the titles of their books. You can then Google them easily. One no longer needs a publisher, date, city, and pagination to find a quote and have a conversation with the author, to discuss their words between yourselves to see if they agree with my interpretation. Besides, if I had supplied a bibliography for all the mental burps that fill these two volumes, it would take years more to publish, and add many pages of unreadable 6-point font.

But don’t think I defined my own category of writing to avoid the stricter canons of textbooks and scholarly essays, to give myself the freedom to blather on as anyone’s mother can, with no concern for conciseness or the craft required of proper prose and esoteric documentation! You may think so, but this is not true. The majority of captions in this book have been cut and crafted for several decades — shifting in shape from twenty paragraphs down to twelve, then back up to eighteen or thirty-two.

The primary criterion underlying a caption is to imitate the creative processes of random association. For this is how we dream. In this way, captions are modeled on the archetype of true inspiration and meaning, helping to deconstruct your vision of the world as well as provide many billable hours to your therapist.

Preface

In the second or third grade, I considered my greatest demonstration of life’s mastery, the ability to spell the longest word in the English language. It was reputedly so, but when I found out it was an altogether useless word, my pride was called into question, and I made a little promise to myself to bring the word antidisestablishmentarianism back into currency in spite of its extreme length.

Of course, this is the only reason I wanted to make it a good word again—for the fun of it. What the word points to (or otherwise means) is a philosophical movement of the early 1800’s in England which rallied against the separation of church and state, more specifically in Ireland. Given this definition, one should hope there is little reason for the word to exist in modern society. But life plays odd jokes, and I have found that after nearly sixty years I have a new fondness for this word from my childhood.

Thus, for the fun of it, and a very deep seriousness with the emotional ideas behind that old movement, I have written a book entitled Antidisestablishmentarianistically Speaking. For, you see, I believe in extremely strange and far-fetched coincidences, which some people call miracles. What this has to do with the title of my book, is that there were once prophets in a particular Judeo-Christian tradition (that most English-speakers are familiar with), who spoke of a millennium, a human purpose that they called establishing The Kingdom of God. And I believe they were quite possibly right. This is what the title of my book addresses. This Kingdom of God is not around the corner for you and me, mind you—but a thousand years or so is, generationally-speaking, just around the corner.[1]

You laugh or grimace. We won’t make it to 3010, and if we do, it will be under circumstances so strangled by cataclysms, biological holocausts, and famine that only severe inhuman Machiavellian regimes will survive. In general, I agree with you, but this book is about another set of options through a different set of spectacles.

In the Land of Oz they passed out emerald green spectacles. This is what I would like the words of my title to represent—that to speak with optimism of the future is to put on a pair of eyeglasses that is clearly tinted with a specific assumption—that church and state will be re-united, but in a form that we can not conceive until we re-conceive both church and state.

Thus, it’s my hope that when we look with optimism to the future of humankind (an absurd idea by itself, for it’s beyond any logic, scientific or historical arguments that I know of), we shall be antidisestablishmentarianistically speaking. We will have faith, without knowing exactly what it is we have faith in, or how it is we are to get there. Not the faith of a Pollyanna, mind you, but the reasoned stance of someone wanting to consider all the options before shutting his or her mind and closing the book on the future, or the options for either of these institutions which many deplore.

My cover illustration shows someone standing on a version of the world projected down its nose. This is the image of most new generations, which tend to be know-it-all and self-righteous, otherwise looking down their collective nose at what has come before them.

I have spent much of the last fifty years trying to grasp the place of my own generation among its predecessors—its significance in the human story, and what we have done or might do to overcome all that holds us back from the good society. My own intellectual struggle has focused on what we might yet do. And so this book addresses education, religion, history, and the social sciences—a quarrelsome quartet that can’t get close harmonies straight. On them I lay much of the blame for our past failures at creating a harmonic world. Our failures are not irredeemable, however ghastly and sad the human condition has gotten in different corners of our globe. Religion, education, historical consciousness, and the lack of any real unified social science are just the subjects that skew all the consistency in our meanings, devour good will, and seem to hold us back from any bridge to a new tomorrow.

There is more learning drag on some aspects of society and culture than on others. We may still be on-schedule however, and while an extra thousand years or so may seem impossibly long to wait, we may not be able to build a better world faster than we already have. Kudos to everyone who has gotten us to where we are, for however ghastly the situation around the next block, it is incredible how much wonderful life has been afforded to so many of us so far, and how far they have brought us.

In my first book, The Devil’s Laugh and Other Stories, I used the motif of folk tales to present my thoughts on the human condition with respect to justice, truth, human arrogance and mental indolence. I hinted that we will only approach the good society, but never entirely get there.

In my second book, We Think We Think, I dealt with the phenomena of our daily world, as presented to the individual. My chapters covered cognition and emotion, creativity, story telling, sexuality, and our personalities. These subjects, too, form the background for the present book, which is essentially about the hopeful hopelessness of our situation.

The present book is being brought to you by that quarrelsome barbershop quartet—religion, education, history, and the social sciences. The chapters were written at different times in my life and have been pulled together for the purpose of this volume—and so, like an unrehearsed quartet, may not always be in harmony. Unlike Volume One of Captions to the Cartoons We Live, few of them are whimsical. I should only hope they’re sweet, like Lida Rose. They all have a thoughtful turn, a scent of philosophy, and a slight condition of halitosis caused by fermentation of the brain. But if you notice anything, it is probably the scent of an over-used brain pipe—for it was my father’s, and his father’s before him—going back a number of generations. This much said, I will put my Preface to bed.

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Beyond the Bleeding Edge

In 1915, a fellow from Chicago who might have passed for Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a book. His name was William Hawley Smith, and the book’s title was All The Children Of All The People. A Study of the Attempt to Educate Everybody[2]. In this book, he made a scathing attack on Horace Mann’s concept of the American public school system. Now it is interesting that Smith knew, and greatly admired Horace Mann, for the great educator had been to dinner several times at his parents’ home. Smith was a precocious child, and as an adult could remember conversations verbatim forty years after they took place. So in 1915 he was able to quote Horace Mann, word for word, at the dinner table in the 1850’s. It is also interesting that, almost a hundred years later, in 2010, I can read Smith’s refutation and it is still valid.

Sitting on my bookshelf, alongside Hawley Smith’s book, is a wonderful and similar study by a much better-known author named Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was trying to figure out how to build a national school system out of nothing, in Russia. His was a scathing attack on the propriety of then-modern concepts of schooling for the children of his country. The year was 1862[3], and Tolstoy—who had spent years surveying the various experimental attempts at popular education throughout Europe—presents many of the same arguments as Smith, belaboring approaches that we take for granted one hundred and fifty years later. Tolstoy had started an experimental school to verify his arguments and prove his case; unfortunately, he was not sufficiently influential with the bureaucrats of his time and the school folded.

Next to Tolstoy (on my bookshelf, at least) is Dewey—whose own experimental school in Chicago was closed down for administrative and bureaucratic (i.e. political) reasons much like Tolstoy’s demonstration school fifty years earlier. The various neighbors of these three books are nearly a hundred books on pedagogy, educational philosophy, learning theory, and curriculum planning. I am probably exaggerating—there are perhaps fifty books. Yet half of them contain an echo of Hawley Smith’s critique. Why is this, and why do the greatest minds keep saying the same things and the rest of our school boards keep ignoring them?

Our schools should not be about teaching things—nor should they be about stuffing knowledge into children—but about accustoming kids to the processes of learning, by which they shall have learned many things as a secondary bi-product of this process.

The very same is at the heart of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile; and so it has been argued by independent thinkers, back through the history of pedagogical thought to the beginnings of time. I can make this assertion because I believe I have discovered a structural and programmatic reason lodged within the human soul to ignore learned advice on the processes of education. And while you may doubt that at the actual beginnings of human social time, there were wise men arguing Tolstoy’s and Dewey’s and Rousseau’s case, I can assure you that when they did, they were ignored.

I call this inborn, structural, reason for ignoring educational philosophy the bleeding edge. For it seems that careful thought about education—back to Quintillian and before—quite often arrives at similar conclusions about human nature, and expounds a philosophy of teaching others. But the cutting edge of philosophy about human learning somehow always bleeds its subject to death…its subject being education. The reason is, of all the silly things, after the most careful surgical analysis, the common patient (that is, the teacher) immediately removes the bandages and sutures in order to demonstrate their having the situation under control. And why, you may ask, must the cutting-edge of thought become the bleeding edge of practice?

Because every capable adult in a position of authority over the schools is themselves a specialist in learning—that is, they have all done it, and they know what worked for them, and it was generally none of those new-fangled ideas that educational philosophers were jabbing over.

Education is simple, stupid. Don’t make me think. I know how I got what I got, and what’s good enough for me is a helluva lot cheaper than what these guys are suggesting we have to do.

I’m not being facetious. I have run into this phenomenon at so many levels throughout my life that I’ve simply accepted it as a given.

I spent many years as an instructional technologist in industry. The mandate of this profession, taken from the military, was to teach with zero tolerance for defects—for no student was supposed to make a mistake on the job. When one’s students are soldiers, they can’t flunk—it is the army as a whole that has flunked and the war that is lost. It is never blamed on the soldiers. When one’s students are employees, they can’t flunk, only the company flunks. Once someone is hired and met the knowledge and skill requirements of the job, mistakes are the company’s fault, not the student’s.

And yet, otherwise knowledgeable bosses and business owners have told me to dumb things down to a second grade level: 1) tell them what you’re going to tell them. 2) tell them. 3) tell them what you told them. And once we’ve told them all that, they’ve been trained and are responsible for their own mistakes! Their signature on the attendance sheet relieves the company of any responsibility. If they make a mistake, we’ll flunk’m and let’m go!

I once joined a Fortune 500 company as an analyst to find out the training director was a second grade teacher who had been hired by one of these knowledgeable bosses. She had no idea there was a literature supporting her job beyond what she’d learned in teachers’ college.

Once responsible adults are concerned, we assume everyone knows how to learn. So everyone knows how to teach. It is merely a matter of standing up and talking.

For the kids, it is somewhat different. Those who dream of being teachers are the kids who got rewarded by the game of schooling. This makes for a preponderance of teachers who believe in the status quo—that is, with education as they experienced it.

Whatever generation of education students, these soon-to-be teachers can let Dewey or Piaget or Bruner dribble in one ear and out the other. For they already have their point of reference. They were good students, and therefore intuit all things educational.

But what the educational philosophers have been trying to tell us, going on a few centuries now, is that the human sensory system is extremely facile, and will succeed at turning the merest percepts into workable, meaningful, constructs through thousands of permutations of sensory channels. Everyone perceives in a different manner, let alone processes things—e.g. learns—in their own individual fashion. The uniqueness of an individual’s learning technique can persist far into adulthood, long after they have been marginalized by society. Thus, to develop a social mechanism by which to educate everybody to the benefits of society is to come up with a way to discover and adjust these learning techniques so that the means of society can be assimilated. This is what Hawley Smith and Tolstoy were after.

The unfortunate thing is, that for all the educational technology we have developed to pump information into our children—for all the misconceived industrial metaphors we have attached to the schoolroom (as a factory turning out graduates calibrated to thus-and-such quality standards)—we have never developed any true technology for discovering and adjusting an individual’s learning toolkit over the twelve years they are in school. So the perceptual processing methods they bring to the classroom from the playground or street are generally left undetected. This is unfortunate, since our concepts of testing and metrics haven’t gotten far beyond the situation in Horace Mann’s time. And for all the charter schools that supposedly cater to student learning styles, there are blessed few testing technologies on the market to help the teacher and the aides reach for the ideal school that William Hawley Smith and Tolstoy contemplated over a century ago.

For the real challenge is to find testing technologies—ideally tools of educational play—which multiple teachers can utilize over the course of many years to identify the learning styles and strategies used by each student, to help excite them individually about the larger game of schooling.

Yet to calibrate games (tests) to be predictive of learning skills relevant to productive social environments is another story. To create such games (clearly interactive computer-based games or could these be any other type?), with truly cutting edge technologies, they must not lend themselves to the Achilles Heel of educational philosophy, i.e. the bleeding edge of educational practitioners that I’ve described. For it’s with the world of metrics, of measuring and testing, that we shall move beyond the bleeding edge. This is where the human role of teaching will meet the tactical role of technology—the cutting edge—where a real educational engineering can begin to sprout.

Notice, I did not say we need another philosophy of pedagogy. Nor did I say a new interactive educational application. We have spiraled through the same pedagogical philosophies for centuries. The critical condition for educational engineering is a theory of ordered social environments.

Beyond the obvious, that in the modern classroom of kids, 80% of the students are on prescription drugs for various attention disorders and, if you are in an old urban center, high traces of lead in their blood. Most teachers will tell you that even if we had a way to discover every child’s learning style, and psychological hook for engaging them in the learning game, it hardly matters what the child’s technique for organizing perceptions may be—the majority of our classrooms would still be bedlam. There is a truth to that, but a deeper truth—for the larger society which schoolrooms are supposed to model has also broken down. Dewey’s dream was to bring the life of the community into a continuum with life of our classrooms—only there is very little life in our communities. Adult community life has been sapped by our own attention to the tube. Our community is not a human community but a virtual one, where all my friends live in my computer or cell-phone. And so to learn to live and work in a society one must learn to live and work in a virtual society. Which is probably not something we need focus on in our schools.

As I said above, a more critical condition for educational engineering is a modern theory of ordered social environments. My hunch is we’ll do better figuring out what our future communities could look like in the classroom setting, and let these models work it outwards, to our homes and workplaces. But this will be far beyond the bleeding edge—for none of us have a clue how information and skills will move through the modern community of real kids and real people supplemented by every permutation of virtual tools—into a real social environment.

On The Front Line

Our teachers often refer to themselves as at the front line of any social change. This is true. As a group they become personally acquainted with 100% of the population as it grows