The Booker Effect

By Frederick Manuel

“The Booker Effect displays a jaunty energy and compelling forward momentum. The writing is consistently assured and the dialogue is especially well-handled. The novel is marked throughout by good humour and satire with engaging forays into philosophy, literature, mathematics, and pop music. This is an original work whose themes are explored with panache and a quirky wisdom.”
—Ed Kavanagh, Author, Musician, and Teacher

When schools become plagued by terrorism and teenage anarchy, Max Booker, a German-born educator with a no-nonsense attitude proposes a solution—a special “Educational Police” department along with a scientifically-based system of corporal punishment. When the public becomes polarized in its reactions to Educational Police operations, Booker must contend with criticism of his pain apparatus and rumours of sinister activities at his educational camps.

As a counterpoint, enter Tommy Taylor, an intelligent but rebellious teenage punk rocker. Disaffected with school, he becomes Booker’s nemesis, attempting to subvert the Education Police in his own unique way. It’s Hogan’s Heroes meets A Clockwork Orange—a new Jonathan Swift for the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426930300

Frederick Manuel

Frederick Manuel was born in Catalina in eastern Newfoundland, Canada. He earned master’s degrees in Philosophy and the History of Science and Technology. He was a teacher in a variety of educational contexts. The Booker Effect is his only novel. He passed away in April, 2009 after a short illness.

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Published by:

Graham Manuel

[e-mail]

Clarenville NL Canada

Edited by:

Graham Manuel

Manuscript typing by:

Marilyn Manuel and Amelia Manuel

Printed by:

Trafford Publishing

Front cover art by:

Melanie Smith

© Copyright 2010 Frederick Manuel.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4269-2719-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4269-2718-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4269-3030-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010902468

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Trafford rev. 08/07/2023

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Contents

1. This Beatles Thing

2. Tommy

3. Brown Study

4. The Will To Educate

5. Semi-Seminal Seminars

6. Black Hole After Rubber Soul

7. Gas Daddy

8. All Things Nice

9. A Day in The Life or, The Best Batch Yet

10. A Better Tomorrow

11. Math Molds the Mind, Words Weld the World

12. A Perfect 10

13. The Hearing

14. Professional Development Day

15. Something About A Cokecanchillum

16. Educational Atrocity Exhibition

17. Booker Children

18. A Damn Good Clubbing

19. Forensic Musicology

20. A Word About Words

21. Unclouded by Cloudberries

22. Booker in Black

23. The Fruits of Research

24. A Slow and Gentle Universe:

The Greening of Max Booker

25. The Empathy Room

26. Meet a Beatle

27. Booka

28. Words and Things

29. The Rime of the Ancient Hippie

30. Kulturkampf

31. Lifeline

32. Rock Flambé

33. Auf Wiedersehen

34. More Popular Than The Beatles

35. (Messing) With The Beatles

36. Psychic TV Dinner

37. Referendum

38. Balloon Man

TO MY WONDERFUL MOTHER

BLANCHE MANUEL

WHO, AT 90 YEARS OF AGE,

COULD STILL GET ON THE FLOOR

AND DO THE BOOKER

PREFACE

T he Booker Effect is my brother Fred’s first and only novel. He left us in April of 2009 before the book was published.

This work of satirical fiction was a long time in the making. The author worked on it over several years and much of it, to use his words, was hard won. He identified so much with its characters that there were times when he would quote lines or make jokes in the different personas accompanied by peals of laughter. The world, or rather the two worlds, that he had created were constantly intruding into his own, giving an uncanny animation to it all.

Fred was an interesting amalgam as a person. His life, immersed in academic studies, gave him an encyclopedic knowledge upon which he drew readily in the creation of his characters—from philosophy, literature, science. He was very much at home in these spheres. He was equally comfortable with a glass of rum listening to the music of punk or avant-garde musicians. He regarded such experiences as equally valid, creating a rich palette to fire his imagination.

Although very discriminating by his own definition, Fred leaves the value judgments in his writing to the reader. He would often speak of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal when referring to his work when any equivocation was suggested. He wanted to be intellectual and provocative but yet, in his own words, he would often simply say, I’m just trying to have a bit of fun with it.

So here it is. It’s come to fruition—an act accompli, a promise kept. A balance of heavy and light, of dark and bright. Two worlds that intersect in a crazy symbiosis—The Booker Effect.

Graham Manuel

Chapter 1

This Beatles Thing

A t Uncle Bob’s garage, Tommy and his band were strumming guitars, trying to hammer out riffs, and attacking the drum set. As usual Tommy was experimenting with vocal tones. After a while they took a break to smoke some marijuana and drink beer and talk about their favourite subjects: sex, substances, rock music and mass murderers.

As he passed a joint to Tommy, Dean said, You know the main reason I’d like to be a rock and roll star? It’s the sex. You can have all the sex you want. Imagine how much sex these guys get, going right back to the Beatles.

Yeah, but they’re dead now. Some of them, anyway, said Dave. None of the boys knew much about the rise and fall of the Beatles.

Dean blurted out, Paul dead?

Dave shrugged that he wasn’t sure and asked, Didn’t he die of cancer?

Licking the cigarette paper to roll another joint, Tommy joined in. John Lennon’s dead.

Killed by a Japanese guy, wasn’t he? said Dean.

His wife was Japanese, said Dave.

Everyone knows John’s wife was Japanese, added Dean.

Tommy broke in. No, the guy who shot him. His wife was Japanese, too.

They then turned their attention to George and Ringo. All knew George was dead, and the prevailing thought was that Ringo had died a long time ago, too.

Suddenly the garage door swung open and Uncle Bob, with a slight stagger, walked in. He looked at Tommy, and then at Dave and Dean. You been drinking my homebrew? You little buggers, you been drinking my beer. Since this was a typical greeting from Bob, nobody paid much attention to it. Tommy lit another joint and passed it to his uncle.

Dave sipped his beer. Imagine! All the Beatles dead. He looked at Bob. We were talking about the Beatles and what happened to them.

You don’t know nothin’ about the Beatles, grunted Bob. Stinking of lemon gin, he proceeded to enlighten these young morons about the subject. The Beatles were the greatest band there ever was, the greatest band there is, and the greatest band there’ll ever be.

In the middle of a draw, Dean asked, Paul dead? Bob fumbled through his coat pocket and pulled out a flask of gin. With a long dirty fingernail he scratched the label twice, trisecting what remained of his precious liquor.

Tommy laughed. I’ve always admired your self-control, Uncle. But is Paul dead?

Taking two small swigs from his flask Bob waxed a bit nostalgic and then smiled to himself. "Years ago I bought all their albums on vinyl but it all goes back to a song called Strawberry Fields Forever. At the end of that song Lennon says, ‘I bury Paul.’ You see, boys, at that time there was a rumour that Paul was dead, killed in a car crash. Then they put out Sergeant Pepper, in ‘67. That was my last year in school. Sergeant Pepper was all about Paul."

That’s a famous album, isn’t it? mumbled Tommy.

Bob continued. "On the cover of Sergeant Pepper there is an open hand directly above Paul’s head, the hand of death, you know. Inside there’s a photo of the band in these crazy uniforms. A patch on the arm of Paul’s uniform reads OPD—officially pronounced dead. Then later, on Abbey Road, Paul is in a black suit, barefoot, and out of step with the other Beatles. John and Ringo look like priests and George looks like a gravedigger. There was enough circumstantial evidence, like the lawyers say, to prove that Paul was dead."

What about George? Didn’t he die a little while ago? asked Dean.

Bob drank from his flask and grinned. "Yep, George was killed by a burglar. If you look at the cover of Sergeant Pepper you’ll see behind George a man wearing cheap sunglasses and holding up what looks like a crowbar. As for Ringo he was accidentally killed years ago on a set making a movie with Frank Zappa. Bob laughed. Ah, just kidding you, boys. With his last drink of gin, Bob toasted the Beatles. The Beatles are all dead and all alive. That’s my phil-osh-ophy," he slurred.

You seem all worked up about this Beatles thing, Tommy said as he picked up his guitar.

In a solemn tone Bob lectured, You should play like the Beatles, or you’ll never get anywhere, never pay the rent, never make a living. You won’t always have my garage, which don’t cost you a cent. Listen, baby boomers buy records. You got to reach them. Be like the Beatles. Be influenced by the Beatles. Be like the Beatles, be like the Beatles.

Irritated, Tommy barked, The Beatles suck. I can’t play their fancy chords, and anyway I don’t want to.

Bob threw his empty flask near the drum set. If you want to practice in my garage, you’d better get more like the Beatles. I’ll pull the plug on you. He fell against the door and then staggered out.

Tommy kept an eye on his uncle who made his way down the street. He didn’t mean it, just mouthing off, liquor talk. Who knows, maybe we can use this Beatles thing.

Chapter 2

Tommy

T all for his age which was two months shy of eighteen, his face beaming a grinning intelligence and eyes casting a mischievous glint, Tommy Taylor irritated his teachers and drew respect from his peers. Tommy was a student with marginal grades and a list of school misdemeanors as long as the lyric sheet of a rap album. His behavior had earned him numerous suspensions—in and out of school. His cynicism was convincing because it was a product of thought, unlike the peevishness of many of his friends, which was postured and artificial. Tommy had whittled down his verbal defiance to laconic outbursts that rained down on old and young alike.

In the classroom, as teachers observed his grimaces and frowns—his rolling eyes, dilated as often as not—they knew that Tommy would rather be almost anywhere than in school. The main reason he didn’t add to the drop-out numbers and become subjected to additional bureaucratic scrutiny was that his grandmother insisted that if he were to continue to be the beneficiary of her monetary kindness—the kind of kindness kids like Tommy like best—he would have to stay in school with passing grades, sit at his desk and, as Grandmother Taylor, a feisty woman with a sharp tongue undulled by her age, put it, make his brain work more than his butt.

Tommy accepted her offer grudgingly. Her support was of no small consideration. It was her money that paid for his guitar and amplifier, rock albums, (and although Mrs. Taylor never knew it) for a goodly portion of his beer and marijuana. She could have put away some of the allowance bestowed on Tommy to help him get a post-secondary education, but this seemed like a cold, abstract way of showing her grandson affection, and since she wasn’t that unselfish, she chose to dote and attend to his more immediate gratifications, as a woman nearing eighty frequently does.

At school Tommy was artfully lazy, prone to faking or exaggerating injuries and illnesses, and given to educational malingering. On any given day, he might appear with a bandaged hand, a gimpy leg, or even a patch over an eye, if it helped him to shirk work or justify his languor. Tommy told teachers tales about sports injuries (although he didn’t play sports) or outdoor mishaps. He once reported that during a hunting trip with his uncle Bob, a bullet meant for a moose grazed his eye. At first, Tommy was a constant topic of discussion in teachers’ meetings—was this or that injury or condition legit? Self-inflicted? Psychosomatic? Feigned? Eventually, Tommy fooled no one and teachers gave up trying to assess his claims and became amused, oftentimes joking about his complaints. One teacher told his colleagues that he saw Tommy playing with a pitchfork and that almost certainly the boy would be reporting gas gangrene later in the week. Tommy’s peers used to bet cigarettes and dollar coins on what might be his next malady.

Another reason why Tommy stayed in school was that many of his friends were there. But when boredom became hyper-boredom, he simply took a week off—by being suspended, by having sickness, by disappearing—and under these arrangements, he could tolerate school. Like others in his peer cluster, he spoke of school as doing time. So he sat day after day, month after week, in a torpor daydreaming song ideas, riffs, and chord sequences, lyrics of anger and disgust swirling and dashing in his brain, with gut feelings he was beginning to voice about authority. He knew that there wasn’t much more that a poor boy could do except be in a rock and roll band.

Tommy’s parents had divorced when he was 12 years old. His father, an alcoholic, was often away and his mother, a marijuanic, had a fondness for Grand Marnier and Cointreau. Tommy lived with his mother, younger sister, maternal Uncle Bob, and whatever boyfriend his mother happened to be dating. Their small two-story house had been neglected over recent years, and it was badly in need of paint, new windows, and eaves. The canvas floor in the kitchen was pocked with scuffmarks from boots. There were cigarette burns and small cracks and rips. The large wooden table bore the marks of cigarettes having fallen out of ashtrays and of broken glass, telling of drunken card games and angry arguments, the results of which nobody could remember.

The basement had been converted into a one-bedroom apartment where Uncle Bob lived. Bob had built a garage in the back of the Taylor property out of used lumber, with a stove made out of a rusty oil drum. He had put up a dartboard and added an old armchair for his comfort. On both sides of the garage were piles of warped, rotting lumber, some old appliances, a broken television, and an abandoned stereo complete with tape deck and turntable.

While working on the Great Lakes as a deck hand, Bob had suffered a permanent partial disability according to the doctors, having lost two of the fingers on his right hand. Luckily he was a southpaw and was able to supplement the funds from Worker’s Compensation by using his skills to fix small engines and appliances and do occasional taxidermy. As he stuffed animals and tinkered with machinery, Bob drank whiskey and home-brewed beer, and told tales about American cities he had visited—Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Gary.

Chapter 3

Brown Study

I t was the best of electronic times. It was the worst of educational times. It was a time of the global electronic bath when educational failures were being whitewashed as everyone bowed at the altar of information technology. In an age of the shrinking attention span, school children had acquired only the most rudimentary literacy skills. School graduates could not spell words of one or two syllables. Teenagers could not even understand the spare lyrics of their favourite rock bands and were light years from grasping the dialogue in the science fiction programming offered on nightly television. As they viewed Star Trek episodes they might marvel at Mr. Spock, Captain Picard and the Q entity but comprehended hardly a line they spoke. The fluency and eloquence of alien ambassadors and negotiators went for naught as fans watched for visual gimmicks, special effects and soap opera themes. Graffiti, in danger of disappearing altogether, had a uniformly poor quality and one graffitist who studied the downtown of mid-sized cities found the only long word that wasn’t misspelled was Metallica as every metalhead boy knew he had to get this one right.

In everyday speech the whatever replaced the whoop-de-do and the oh yeah of previous decades, the demands of dialogue being too daunting for anything more. Literacy conferences and projects, for all age groups, were popular among government officials. Unschooled folk attended more for a bit of glorious socializing than for educational betterment. Fishermen and farmers in Eastern and Western Canada, tormented with literacy classes, rebelled and smashed computers. In higher educational circles, universities and colleges created departments of forensic academics to reduce the alarming number of students engaged in plagiarism and buying essays.

Mathematical understanding fared no better. Students could not perform basic arithmetic operations. Newspaper delivery routes went unfilled, as children could not make change. On the streets fistfights among teenagers erupted during the buying and selling of drugs, in large part because of their poor mathematics skills. A most vexing problem was converting Roman-English weights and measures into the metric system in order to figure out the arithmetic of ounces and grams of marijuana, hashish and cocaine. Visual familiarity with the drugs might suffice when large quantities were involved, but it did not permit accuracy when nearly penniless youth requested what amounted to only one or two decigrams. When drug counts were considered too small or inconsistent, customers were lost and business suffered. Many a fledgling young drug-trafficking entrepreneur was simply too intimidated by the mathematics of weighing, pricing, and making the deal. However, for every group of teenagers involved in street corner commerce there was a boy or girl who knew alleymath, the basic back street binomials, and who practiced the arithmetic of drug exchange, so that interactions were sped up and smoothed, and the bloody noses, black eyes and fractured jaws resulting from anger and suspicion were prevented. A good rith boy might not be worth his weight in Acapulco gold or even in low-grade, homegrown marijuana, but he was always given small quantities of the drug at no charge. One talented lad, dubbed Al Gebra, rolled round, well-proportioned hashish spliffs and, eager to keep his free smoke ticket, never taught his skills to anyone else.

Mathematical ignorance was manifested in other aspects of daily living. For decades Canadian children’s inability to convert Celsius temperatures into Fahrenheit led to over-and-under-dressing which earned them teacherly ridicule. Alert parents knew that their children benefited little from the TV weather channels and were dumbfounded about terms like percentage of precipitation, humidex, visibility, and wind chill. They also knew that highs and lows and dry spells carried more personal meanings for their sons and daughters. When they punished their children by sentencing them to viewing only the weather channel for a period of time, math and science teachers thought this was the apogee of progressive parenting.

The school was a wild environment. Teenage arsonists threatened to raze schools, bullies roamed school grounds wringing money and valuables from their prey, and students kept knives and nunchakus in their lockers. Male teachers carried claw hammers, tire irons, and small crowbars in their briefcases, while females preferred Mace, scissors, and box cutters. Enrolment in martial arts programs increased. Because renegade groups of lysergic youth spiked food and drink with LSD, teachers in public eateries dared not leave their meals unattended, especially those with bad nerves or a reputation for strictness. Bearing the brunt of the wrath, frustrations, and disaffection of school youth, teachers who once dreamed of peaceful schools suffered mental breakdowns, took early retirement, and grew cynical, speaking about the good old days when the strap lay in the desk drawer. They received hardly any support from other professionals. Lawyers, doctors, business people, scientists, and academics, for which teaching was the impossible occupation, were only marginally aware of the teachers’ plight since they dealt mainly with adults. Dealing with pupils, parents, and the public, teachers were somehow the pariahs of professionalism.

School officials had determined that school attendance was at a nadir and they considered granting stipends to increase it. Government spent enormous sums to pay at-risk students to stay in school. Law enforcement officers, teachers and counselors worked together at temporary truancy research and assessment centers to address pupil absence. One of the most revealing findings—a serendipitous discovery—was that teenagers used to consult a calendar of holidays to honour and mourn the loss of rock music stars, a calendar whose origin was traced to a teenaged, guitar-playing, substance-abusing rebel named Tommy Taylor. Youth justified their absence from school or their toking up while they were there, by referring to the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the morning Ian Curtis hanged himself, the day John Lennon was shot… Commemoration ranged from the solemn to the puerile: the night Jim Morrison masturbated in Miami, the day Syd Barrett took one tab too many, the concert where Frank Zappa ate shit, the interview in which some guitarist announced that he had trained his dog to give him oral sex…

Some of the most academic pupils—and even teachers—were drawn into peculiar arts of subversion. Unhappy with a stodgy teacher’s course on ethics and world religions, a small group of gregarious eggheads made fun of the debating process. After musing about what kind of athletic training was required to contort the body into the posture for sucking one’s own penis, they proposed a metaphysical question: Does the fact that a guy can’t suck his own dick indicate the existence or non-existence of God? When teachers heard about these smart-ass boys’ verbal shenanigans, a few could not resist their own debate and decided to refine the teenage inchoate utterances. Representing one viewpoint a teacher stated:

This state of affairs—the fact that a man cannot pleasure himself in this manner—demonstrates that there is a God. God designed the male body that way because it would inspire men to seek women, get married and create families. Furthermore, the opportunity for auto-fellatio would constitute an ever-present distraction interfering with the performance of labour. God wanted stability of family and work.

The other side countered:

The matter illustrates that there is no God. The inability of a man to auto-fellate reveals a symmetrical flaw in the universe of living beings which is unworthy of God. And the ability to masturbate does little to mollify the flaw, despite Elvis Presley’s thought to the contrary.

The debate continued. A principal who overheard the discussion remarked that it was unprofessional for teachers to opine on the relationship between fellatio, marriage, and work, and he reprimanded them. Although he was secretly heartened by the teachers’ interest in theology, he thought that the topic was too gender-specific.

The direst undertaking of bad-assed boys was excremental terrorism. At first this kind of assault was sporadic and episodes were isolated—interpreted as the actions of the odd deranged student. Once in a while a teacher, usually a vice-principal in charge of discipline, was mailed a hardened piece of excrement. Known (or suspected) snitches and narcs at school might find their lockers defiled. More serious was the use of excrement in the classroom. Using a spatula, perforated spoon or even a set of compasses, a dung-heaving miscreant would collect his droppings, put them in a plastic bag or condom, and then beset a classmate, besmirch the board, or desecrate the drawers of the teacher’s desk.

The most frightful form of excremental terrorism was what culprits called the shit shindies, coordinated bowel movements by designated shitters, synchronized defecation, which allowed for a massive attack. Instigators gathered between ten and twenty pounds of dung and thoroughly sullied and defiled classrooms, gymnasiums, libraries, and school entrances. The suffocating stench made even the most inured janitors gag, and the poisoned air made staff and students vomit, which contributed further to the foulest of putrid stenches. The feces and filth were tracked over rooms, corridors, and steps and beyond. Some schools became so soiled during a brown day that they had to be closed for prolonged periods in order to eliminate the defoulment and ventilate the air. The perpetrators laughed gleefully that a useful byproduct of the shit shindies was that the stink masked the odour of hashish, which smelled like dried horse manure anyway. Excremental terrorism was also conducted against school staff automobiles and school bus shelters. Taped-on dog turds were accompanied by messages written on loose-leaf paper: I am a piece of shit… I’m a bigger piece of shit… Tired of the same old shit?… Shit happens… Neil Young flung dung… Shittimwood." Offenders received long suspensions, extensive counseling, and psychiatric observation.

Among the most disturbing psychological effects of the shit shindies was that they dampened teachers’ morale. Some astute teacher speculated that excremental terrorism, if left unbound, would subvert not only education but also the main accomplishments of modern society. At a conference one of them argued that a subtle characteristic of true civilization has to do with a person sitting on the toilet while reading. He meant that one of the most relaxing, peaceful events in a teacher’s day was squatting on the toilet, letting the buttocks meld into the seat and reading a newspaper, magazine, or book, sitting without interruption by a nagging spouse or petulant children. The smell of one’s own feces, he pointed out, was not offensive, and during the reading process it barely impacted one’s consciousness. Indeed, research on teachers’ reading practices indicated their prowess while in the bathroom. Teachers often boasted about their literacy accomplishments in this context and kept a small library of books and periodicals in arm’s reach. And teachers attested to the value of reading as a natural purgative and diuretic. For these civilized beings, a private, enjoyable event became tarnished by haunting images of a possible brown day at their school. Brown-out escalated burn-out.

Such student nihilism, educators felt, should be kept under wraps and not publicized, as no purpose would be served by terrifying an already alarmed citizenry and scaring away parents and other stakeholders from visits to schools. When a young teacher named Eva Martin published a newspaper article entitled Demonic and Scatalogical Aspects of Student Excremental Terrorism and Its Roots in Frank Zappa, Butthole Surfers, and G.G. Allin, the public was mystified, part of it in denial. Surely their children could not descend into this depth of depravity. Some thought the piece contained a key typographical error—that incremental or detrimental, not excremental, was the intended word.

There were rumours about the formation of a clandestine group of vigilante teachers who selected and temporarily kidnapped bad boys, took them for a ride outside town, and dispensed educational justice summarily. Two boys claimed that they were strapped mercilessly and that they had the blisters on their hands to prove it. When asked if they could identify who struck them, they replied that they could not because their abductors wore balaclavas and trench coats. Another boy reported that he had been taken and kicked in the nuts. There was a brief period of parental and pedagogical panic. But soon it was evident that these boys had lied. Two of them had fashioned a strap from strips of an old leather jacket and hit each other for laughs. And the boy with the sore genitals had been struck with a puck while playing hockey.

Controversy over discipline and punishment raged but solutions were rare. Social critics and historians stressed how parental discipline of children had changed over the last generation or two, with fatherly butt-kicking and motherly whopping having less support and even falling out of favour altogether. As the great spanking and paddling debates continued, healthcare professionals advised parents to use psychology, artifice and bribe rather than brute force. Clergymen and elderly teachers wondered why corporal punishment was abandoned in favour of therapeutic approaches. Why were bullies now called chronic hypo-pedosadists and excremental teens labeled with temporary scatological psycho-sexual disorder? Why were children, intent on burning down schools, described as having anti-Promethean psychosis? Discipline was discussed over and over in teacher staff rooms, government offices, and national conferences. Some advocated a return to the strap, that venerable English instrument of punitive instruction. Finger pointing was inevitable. Citizens cried, The children are ruling the teachers. Exasperated teachers rejoined, The children are ruling their parents. Academic canvassers of popular culture lamented, TV, rock music, and street drugs rule the children.

As school-weary teachers joked in both utopian and dystopian tones about having devices implanted in the bodies of chronically disruptive, intractable students—to be activated by an electronic pad—experiments with one apparatus, an educational yo-yo, were carried out and plans were made for the introduction of the technology. The basic physics of the yo-yo had been understood since the days of Huygens but the route from principles to the production of a yo-yo effective in an educational context was complex. Designed and created by a group of mechanical engineers and other consultants, the educational yo-yo represented an enormous investment of research funds.

Much money was wasted because some of the investigating scientists, who were conducting their experiments in October when the World Series of Baseball was being played, became inordinately interested in the physics propositions of television commentators. Falling victim to this on-the-job distraction, they pondered such questions as: How does a slugged ball pick up speed after bouncing from artificial turf? In what sense can an outfielder outrun a line drive? How does the bottom drop out when a split-finger pitch is thrown? What is the calculus of the knuckleball? That of a screwball?…In this way mental exertion went for naught. To make matters worse, one engineer became obsessed with the curvature of the flight of the boomerang, which was regrettable because educational boomerang research was not part of the investigatory mandate. When he spoke about the beneficial aspects of this line of inquiry, his words came back to haunt him. After all, the use of a boomerang to get students’ attention or scare them required much more space than that available in a school and was limited to outdoor sporting events, field trips and the like.

There was a further delay. It took a small army of government lawyers to review educational law and rewrite the teachers’ code of conduct. Finally, the new authority to inflict corporal punishment was integrated into existing texts.

While the educational yo-yo was structurally similar to the regular yo-yo, it did take several forms. The double disks were made from wood and metal of various densities, and the strings from fibers with different tensile strengths. Yet, implementation was fraught with difficulty. Communication between scientists and educators had gone poorly. Although teachers were given a package of four yo-yos, each with a different size, mass and range, and an instruction manual, the device was not as user-friendly as the engineers promised and boasted. Lacking the required hand and finger dexterity, many teachers could not master its operation.

Classroom seating arrangements were adapted to the new technology. Disruptive students, those with short attention spans, and those prone to falling asleep were all placed near the front. Hit repeatedly, they bore welts on their foreheads. One masterful teacher, fond of the new instrument, used to sing the lyrics of Captain Beefheart’s Low Yo Yo Stuff and then he struck quickly. But drawbacks were numerous. Wily, athletic boys sometimes caught the yo-yo or blocked it. Occasionally eyeglasses were broken and noses fractured. Good students were accidentally bopped. Parental outrage led to a petition to recall the yo-yo.

At its peak in popularity the educational yo-yo was exhibited at educational fairs and conferences, some of them international. Yo-yos for yobbos became a buzz expression, especially in England. But its reign was quite brief. Teachers and scientists blamed each other in cold bureaucratic tones for the failure. Teachers and parents were upset that discipline was semi-public, in full view of all those in the classroom. So the yo-yo fell into disfavour and became, according to one educator the most embarrassing instance of poor educational innovation in years. For a while it represented a compromise between the advocates and opponents of using corporal punishment, a hurried response to a worsening educational culture. In its wake a moratorium on new punitive educational technology was declared. Meanwhile, disciplinary issues remained pressing.

Chapter 4

The Will To Educate

T ry as they might, educators and politicians could not develop forms of management to alleviate the educational crisis and promote healthy school cultures. When Deputy Minister of Education John Broadbent heard about a short, fifty-page book entitled The Will To Educate he was intrigued. The book was written and published by a German educator named Maximilian Friedrich Bucher. Broadbent was delighted that the work was available in English because the only German words he knew were for hello, goodbye, and thank you.

Leading scholars, some of whom had read papers at the Canadian Learned Societies, were suspicious of the professionalism of Bucher’s work because German writers’ prefaces and introductions alone often exceeded fifty pages. One aide to the Deputy Minister begged him not to read the book, claiming that he had taken a philosophy course once full of terrible articles by Germans who wrote about ‘things-in-themselves’.

Broadbent was not deterred. To his chagrin, he had not found a single useful idea in any of the masters and doctoral dissertations he perused. By contrast, he discovered that Bucher’s The Will To Educate contained compelling reflections on many educational issues. The book was divided into sections written in essay form, on student discipline and punishment, educational leadership, and the philosophy of curriculum, followed by a list of aphorisms on education and learning. Impressed particularly by the ideas on punishment, Broadbent contacted Bucher and an exchange of letters, faxes and telephone calls began. Bucher sent him a videotape entitled Burial (Begrabnis): Last Rites for Education, accompanied by a two-page letter.

Bucher explained that the videotape was a document on the burial of education which had died from an intractable illness no existing forms of therapy could cure. He apologized that parts of the video were unfocused and jumpy and suggested that he wished to impress upon viewers the apathy-riddled, anarchy-driven state of current education and schooling. He added that it was not necessary for him to answer questions about who made the video, or when and where it was filmed, because the deteriorating state of education was accepted by informed people as a given.

The Deputy Minister read the letter to an assembly of prominent officials and then played the video. In the video one could see a somber procession headed by a horse-drawn cart down the street of a middle-sized city. The cart contained a black coffin whose lid was marked by precise dabs of white paint, each a centimeter apart. The inscription EJUKASHUN was written on one side. Letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks, numbers, and formulas were added. One third of the coffin, near the center, was draped in a graduation gown tied down by light brown leather straps. At the cemetery the pallbearers—two teachers, two politicians, a female parent, and an adolescent boy—carried the casket to the gravesite. They accidentally dropped it along the way. Feeling responsible, the boy looked petrified and then bowed his head. A thin androgynous manikin wearing a white shirt, grey flannel trousers, a red bow tie and a scholar’s cap fell out as did the other contents—faded plastic protractors, rusted geometry compasses, yellowed and tattered dictionaries, time tables, booklets, sharpened pencils with erasers that had never been used, brochures advertising school events, mission statements. The objects were quickly returned to the coffin.

A few hundred people huddled to pay their last respects. A pastor gave a brief eulogy about the deceased’s best virtues and said: We now commit education to the ground… may the dearly departed rest in peace…classes to ashes, trust to dust. The most visibly shaken were