ENG 101 READING

ANTHOLOGY Fall 2014

Northern Essex Community College

Thomas Greene ENG 101 Fall 2014

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CONTENTS

From The Prince .............................................................................................................................. 2

From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, Written by Himself ............ 4

From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work................................................................... 8

From The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley .................................................... 22

Why We Crave Horror Movies ...................................................................................................... 24

How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently .......................................................... 26

Does Truth Matter? Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization ...................................................... 33

Science as a Source of Spirituality ......................................................................................... 34

Notes ......................................................................................................................................... 43

Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions’ .............................................................. 43

A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on

their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick (1729) ......................... 46

From The Republic (The Allegory of the Cave) .............................................................................. 52

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FROM THE PRINCE NICOLO MACHIAVELLI Translated W.K. Marriott

CHAPTER XVII -- CONCERNING CRUELTY AND CLEMENCY, AND WHETHER IT IS

BETTER TO BE LOVED THAN FEARED

Coming now to the other qualities mentioned above, I say that every

prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel.

Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare

Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled

the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if

this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more

merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for

cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed. Therefore a prince, so long

as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the

reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more

merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to

arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to

injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a

prince offend the individual only.

And of all princes, it is impossible for the new prince to avoid the

imputation of cruelty, owing to new states being full of dangers. Hence

Virgil, through the mouth of Dido, excuses the inhumanity of her reign

owing to its being new, saying:

"Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt

Moliri, et late fines custode tueri."

[Against my will, my fate

A throne unsettled, and an infant state,

Bid me defend my realms with all my pow'rs,

And guard with these severities my shores.]

Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he

himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and

humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and

too much distrust render him intolerable.

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Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than

feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to

be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it

is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be

dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that

they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as

you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood,

property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far

distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince

who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other

precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by

payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be

earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied

upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than

one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation

which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for

their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which

never fails.

Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he

does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well

being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he

abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their

women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of

someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause,

but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others,

because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss

of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are

never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always

find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for

taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner

lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a

multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard

the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army

united or disposed to its duties.

Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that

having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to

fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or

against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This

arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his

boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his

soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not

sufficient to produce this effect. And short-sighted writers admire his

deeds from one point of view and from another condemn the principal

cause of them. That it is true his other virtues would not have been

sufficient for him may be proved by the case of Scipio, that most

excellent man, not only of his own times but within the memory of man,

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against whom, nevertheless, his army rebelled in Spain; this arose from

nothing but his too great forbearance, which gave his soldiers more

license than is consistent with military discipline. For this he was

upbraided in the Senate by Fabius Maximus, and called the corrupter of

the Roman soldiery. The Locrians were laid waste by a legate of Scipio,

yet they were not avenged by him, nor was the insolence of the legate

punished, owing entirely to his easy nature. Insomuch that someone in

the Senate, wishing to excuse him, said there were many men who knew

much better how not to err than to correct the errors of others. This

disposition, if he had been continued in the command, would have

destroyed in time the fame and glory of Scipio; but, he being under the

control of the Senate, this injurious characteristic not only concealed

itself, but contributed to his glory.

Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the

conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing

according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself

on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must

endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.

FROM NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS CHAPTER VII

I lived in Master Hugh's family about seven years. During this time, I

succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was

compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My

mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance

with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to

instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one

else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did

not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the

depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at

least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of

irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as

though I were a brute.

My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and

in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live

with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat

another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem

to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and

that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but

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dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me.

When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman.

There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had

bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every

mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to

divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender

heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of

tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her

ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's

precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than

her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as

he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to

make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to

think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face

made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that

fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little

experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and

slavery were incompatible with each other.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room

any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a

book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this,

however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in

teaching me the alphabet, had given me the _inch,_ and no precaution

could prevent me from taking the _ell._

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful,

was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in

the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers.

With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different

places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of

errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my

errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used

also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house,

and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this

regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This

bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return,

would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly

tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a

testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence

forbids;--not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for

it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this

Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that

they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard.

I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes

say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got

to be men. "You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, _but I am a

slave for life!_ Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?"

These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the

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liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would

occur by which I might be

free.

I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being _a slave for

life_ began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got

hold of a book entitled "The Columbian Orator." Every opportunity I

got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter,

I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was

represented as having run away from his master three times. The

dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them,

when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole

argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of

which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very

smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master--things which

had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted

in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.

In the same book, I met with one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and

in behalf of Catholic emancipation. These were choice documents to me.

I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave

tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently

flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral

which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the

conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold

denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.

The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to

meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they

relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more

painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more

I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no

other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their

homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a

strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest

as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the

subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had

predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment

and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I

would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than

a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without

the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder

upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves

for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred

the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter

what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my

condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was

pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or

inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal

wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was

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heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to

torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without

seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without

feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm,

breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself

dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I

should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have

been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one

speak of slavery. I was a ready listener. Every little while, I could

hear something about the abolitionists. It was some time before I found

what the word meant. It was always used in such connections as to make

it an interesting word to me. If a slave ran away and succeeded in

getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or

did any thing very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of

as the fruit of _abolition._ Hearing the word in this connection very

often, I set about learning what it meant. The dictionary afforded me

little or no help. I found it was "the act of abolishing;" but then I

did not know what was to be abolished. Here I was perplexed. I did not

dare to ask any one about its meaning, for I was satisfied that it was

something they wanted me to know very little about. After a patient

waiting, I got one of our city papers, containing an account of the

number of petitions from the north, praying for the abolition of

slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the slave trade between the

States. From this time I understood the words _abolition_ and

_abolitionist,_ and always drew near when that word was spoken,

expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves.

The light broke in upon me by degrees. I went one day down on the wharf

of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone, I

went, unasked, and helped them. When we had finished, one of them came

to me and asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, "Are

ye a slave for life?" I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed

to be deeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it

was a pity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for

life. He said it was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run

away to the north; that I should find friends there, and that I should

be free. I pretended not to be interested in what they said, and

treated them as if I did not understand them; for I feared they might

be treacherous. White men have been known to encourage slaves to

escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to

their masters. I was afraid that these seemingly good men might use me

so; but I nevertheless remembered their advice, and from that time I

resolved to run away. I looked forward to a time at which it would be

safe for me to escape. I was too young to think of doing so

immediately; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have

occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I

should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would learn to write.

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The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being

in Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship

carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use,

write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was

intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it

would be marked thus--"L." When a piece was for the starboard side, it

would be marked thus--"S." A piece for the larboard side forward, would

be marked thus--"L. F." When a piece was for starboard side forward, it

would be marked thus--"S. F." For larboard aft, it would be marked

thus--"L. A." For starboard aft, it would be marked thus--"S. A." I

soon learned the names of these letters, and for what they were

intended when placed upon a piece of timber in the ship-yard. I

immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to

make the four letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I

knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The

next word would be, "I don't believe you. Let me see you try it." I

would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn,

and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in

writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any

other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, brick

wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump of chalk. With these, I

learned mainly how to write. I then commenced and continued copying the

Italics in Webster's Spelling Book, until I could make them all without

looking on the book. By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to

school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of

copy-books. These had been brought home, and shown to some of our near

neighbors, and then laid aside. My mistress used to go to class meeting

at the Wilk Street meetinghouse every Monday afternoon, and leave me to

take care of the house. When left thus, I used to spend the time in

writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas's copy-book, copying what

he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very

similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort

for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.

FROM SOCIAL CLASS AND THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF WORK BY JEAN ANYON

This essay first appeared in Journal of Education, Vol. 162, no. 1, Fall 1980.)

Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public

schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational

experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Gintis1

for example, have argued that students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for

classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different

occupational strata--the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for

initiative and personal assertiveness. Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael W. Apple

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focusing on school knowledge, have argued that knowledge and skills leading to social power

and regard (medical, legal, managerial) are made available to the advantaged social groups but

are withheld from the working classes to whom a more "practical" curriculum is offered (manual

skills, clerical knowledge). While there has been considerable argumentation of these points

regarding education in England, France, and North America, there has been little or no attempt

to investigate these ideas empirically in elementary or secondary schools and classrooms in this

country.3

This article offers tentative empirical support (and qualification) of the above arguments by

providing illustrative examples of differences in student work in classrooms in contrasting social

class communities. The examples were gathered as part of an ethnographical4 study of

curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary schools. The article

attempts a theoretical contribution as well and assesses student work in the light of a

theoretical approach to social-class analysis.. . It will be suggested that there is a "hidden

curriculum" in schoolwork that has profound implications for the theory - and consequence - of

everyday activity in education....

The Sample of Schools

... The social-class designation of each of the five schools will be identified, and the income,

occupation, and other relevant available social characteristics of the students and their parents

will be described. The first three schools are in a medium-sized city district in northern New

Jersey, and the other two are in a nearby New Jersey suburb.

The first two schools I will call working class schools. Most of the parents have blue-collar jobs.

Less than a third of the fathers are skilled, while the majority are in unskilled or semiskilled jobs.

During the period of the study (1978-1979), approximately 15 percent of the fathers were

unemployed. The large majority (85 percent) of the families are white. The following

occupations are typical: platform, storeroom, and stockroom workers; foundry-men, pipe

welders, and boilermakers; semiskilled and unskilled assembly-line operatives; gas station

attendants, auto mechanics, maintenance workers, and security guards. Less than 30 percent of

the women work, some part-time and some full-time, on assembly lines, in storerooms and

stockrooms, as waitresses, barmaids, or sales clerks. Of the fifth-grade parents, none of the

wives of the skilled workers had jobs. Approximately 15 percent of the families in each school

are at or below the federal "poverty" level;5 most of the rest of the family incomes are at or

below $12,000, except some of the skilled workers whose incomes are higher. The incomes of

the majority of the families in these two schools (at or below $12,000) are typical of 38.6

percent of the families in the United States.6

The third school is called the middle-class school, although because of 5 neighborhood residence

patterns, the population is a mixture of several social classes. The parents' occupations can he

divided into three groups: a small group of blue-collar "rich," who are skilled, well-paid workers

such as printers, carpenters, plumbers, and construction workers. The second group is

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composed of parents in working-class and middle-class white-collar jobs: women in office jobs,

technicians, supervisors in industry, and parents employed by the city (such as firemen,

policemen, and several of the school's teachers). The third group is composed of occupations

such as personnel directors in local firms, accountants, "middle management," and a few small

capitalists (owners of shops in the area). The children of several local doctors attend this school.

Most family incomes are between $13,000 and $25,000, with a few higher. This income range is

typical of 38.9 percent of the families in the United States.7

The fourth school has a parent population that is at the upper income level of the upper middle

class and is predominantly professional. This school will be called the affluent professional

school. Typical jobs are: cardiologist, interior designer, corporate lawyer or engineer, executive

in advertising or television. There are some families who are not as affluent as the majority (the

family of the superintendent of the district's schools, and the one or two families in which the

fathers are skilled workers). In addition, a few of the families are more affluent than the

majority and can be classified in the capitalist class (a partner in a prestigious Wall Street stock

brokerage firm). Approximately 90 percent of the children in this school are white. Most family

incomes are between $40,000 and $80,000. This income span represents approximately 7

percent of the families in the United States.8

In the fifth school the majority of the families belong to the capitalist class. This school will be

called the executive elite school because most of the fathers are top executives (for example,

presidents and vice-presidents) in major United States-based multinational corporations - for

example, AT&T, RCA, Citibank, American Express, U.S. Steel. A sizable group of fathers are top

executives in financial firms in Wall Street. There are also a number of fathers who list their

occupations as "general counsel" to a particular corporation, and these corporations are also

among the large multi-nationals. Many of the mothers do volunteer work in the Junior League,

Junior Fortnightly, or other service groups; some are intricately involved in town politics; and

some are themselves in well-paid occupations. There are no minority children in the school.

Almost all the family incomes are over $100,000 with some in the $500,000 range. The incomes

in this school represent less than 1 percent of the families in the United States.9

Since each of the five schools is only one instance of elementary education in a particular social

class context, I will not generalize beyond the sample. However, the examples of schoolwork

which follow will suggest characteristics of education in each social setting that appear to have

theoretical and social significance and to be worth investigation in a larger number of schools.

The Working Class Schools

In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is

usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The

teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other

assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and

perhaps meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers

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often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding

work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow. These steps

are told to the children by the teachers and are often written on the board. The children are

usually told to copy the steps as notes. These notes are to be studied. Work is often evaluated

not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the

right steps.

The following examples illustrate these points. In math, when two-digit division was introduced,

the teacher in one school gave a four-minute lecture on what the terms are called (which

number is the divisor, dividend, quotient, and remainder). The children were told to copy these

names in their notebooks. Then the teacher told them the steps to follow to do the problems,

saying, "This is how you do them." The teacher listed the steps on the board, and they appeared

several days later as a chart hung in the middle of the front wall: "Divide, Multiply, Subtract,

Bring Down." The children often did examples of two-digit division. When the teacher went over

the examples with them, he told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking

them to conceptualize or explain it themselves: "Three into twenty-two is seven; do your

subtraction and one is left over." During the week that two-digit division was introduced (or at

any other time), the investigator did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved

in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate two-digit division to any other

mathematical process. Nor was there any attempt to relate the steps to an actual or possible

thought process of the children. The observer did not hear the terms dividend, quotient, and so

on, used again. The math teacher in the other working-class school followed similar procedures

regarding two-digit division and at one point her class seemed confused. She said, "You're

confusing yourselves. You're tensing up. Remember, when you do this, it's the same steps over

and over again--and that's the way division always is." Several weeks later, after a test, a group

of her children "still didn't get it," and she made no attempt to explain the concept of dividing

things into groups or to give them manipulables for their own investigation. Rather, she went

over the steps with them again and told them that they "needed more practice."

In other areas of math, work is also carrying out often unexplained fragmented procedures. For

example, one of the teachers led the children through a series of steps to make a 1-inch grid on

their paper without telling them that they were making a 1-inch grid or that it would be used to

study scale. She said, "Take your ruler. Put it across the top. Make a mark at every number. Then

move your ruler down to the bottom. No, put it across the bottom. Now make a mark on top of

every number. Now draw a line from..." At this point a girl said that she had a faster way to do it

and the teacher said, "No, you don't; you don't even know what I'm making yet. Do it this way or

it's wrong." After they had made the lines up and down and across, the teacher told them she

wanted them to make a figure by connecting some dots and to measure that, using the scale of

1 inch equals 1 mile. Then they were to cut it out. She said, "Don't cut it until I check it."

In both working-class schools, work in language arts is mechanics of punctuation (commas,

periods, question marks, exclamation points), capitalization, and the four kinds of sentences.

One teacher explained to me, "Simple punctuation is all they'll ever use." Regarding

punctuation, either a teacher or a ditto stated the rules for where, for example, to put commas.

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The investigator heard no classroom discussion of the aural context of punctuation (which, of

course, is what gives each mark its meaning). Nor did the investigator hear any statement or

inference that placing a punctuation mark could be a decision-making process, depending, for

example, on one's intended meaning. Rather, the children were told to follow the rules.

Language arts did not involve creative writing. There were several writing assignments

throughout the year but in each instance the children were given a ditto, and they wrote

answers to questions on the sheet. For example, they wrote their "autobiography" by answering

such questions as "Where were you born?" "What is your favorite animal?" on a sheet entitled

"All About Me."

In one of the working-class schools, the class had a science period several times a week. On the

three occasions observed, the children were not called upon to set up experiments or to give

explanations for facts or concepts. Rather, on each occasion the teacher told them in his own

words what the book said. The children copied the teacher's sentences from the board. Each

day that preceded the day they were to do a science experiment, the teacher told them to copy

the directions from the book for the procedure they would carry out the next day and to study

the list at home that night. The day after each experiment, the teacher went over what they had

"found" (they did the experiments as a class, and each was actually a class demonstration led by

the teacher). Then the teacher wrote what they "found" on the board, and the children copied

that in their notebooks. Once or twice a year there are science projects. The project is chosen

and assigned by the teacher from a box of 3-by-5-inch cards. On the card the teacher has

written the question to he answered, the books to use, and how much to write. Explaining the

cards to the observer, the teacher said, "It tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn't do it."

Social studies in the working-class schools is also largely mechanical, rote work that was given

little explanation or connection to larger contexts. In one school, for example, although there

was a book available, social studies work was to copy the teacher's notes from the board.

Several times a week for a period of several months the children copied these notes. The fifth

grades in the district were to study United States history. The teacher used a booklet she had

purchased called "The Fabulous Fifty States." Each day she put information from the booklet in

outline form on the board and the children copied it. The type of information did not vary: the

name of the state, its abbreviation, state capital, nickname of the state, its main products, main

business, and a "Fabulous Fact" ("Idaho grew twenty-seven billion potatoes in one year. That's

enough potatoes for each man, woman, and...") As the children finished copying the sentences,

the teacher erased them and wrote more. Children would occasionally go to the front to pull

down the wall map in order to locate the states they were copying, and the teacher did not

dissuade them. But the observer never saw her refer to the map; nor did the observer ever hear

her make other than perfunctory remarks concerning the information the children were

copying. Occasionally the children colored in a ditto and cut it out to make a stand-up figure

(representing, for example, a man roping a cow in the Southwest). These were referred to by

the teacher as their social studies "projects."

Rote behavior was often called for in classroom work. When going over 15 math and language

art skills sheets, for example, as the teacher asked for the answer to each problem, he fired the

13

questions rapidly, staccato, and the scene reminded the observer of a sergeant drilling recruits:

above all, the questions demanded that you stay at attention: "The next one? What do I put

here?. . . Here? Give us the next." Or "How many commas in this sentence? Where do I put

them . . . The next one?"

The four fifth grade teachers observed in the working-class schools attempted to control

classroom time and space by making decisions without consulting the children and without

explaining the basis for their decisions. The teacher's control thus often seemed capricious.

Teachers, for instance, very often ignored the bells to switch classes - deciding among

themselves to keep the children after the period was officially over to continue with the work or

for disciplinary reasons or so they (the teachers) could stand in the hall and talk. There were no

clocks in the rooms in either school, and the children often asked, "What period is this?" "When

do we go to gym?" The children had no access to materials. These were handed out by teachers

and closely guarded. Things in the room "belonged" to the teacher: "Bob, bring me my garbage

can." The teachers continually gave the children orders. Only three times did the investigator

hear a teacher in either working-class school preface a directive with an unsarcastic "please," or

"let's" or "would you." Instead, the teachers said, "Shut up," "Shut your mouth," "Open your

books," "Throw your gum away-if you want to rot your teeth, do it on your own time." Teachers

made every effort to control the movement of the children, and often shouted, "'Why are you

out of your seat??!!" If the children got permission to leave the room, they had to take a written

pass with the date and time....

Middle-Class School

In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If one accumulates enough right

answers, one gets a good grade. One must follow the directions in order to get the right

answers, but the directions often call for some figuring, some choice, some decision making. For

example, the children must often figure out by themselves what the directions ask them to do

and how to get the answer: what do you do first, second, and perhaps third? Answers are

usually found in books or by listening to the teacher. Answers are usually words, sentences,

numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and one should be neat. Answers must

be given in the right order, and one cannot make them up.

The following activities are illustrative. Math involves some choice: one may do two-digit

division the long way or the short way, and there are some math problems that can be done "in

your head." When the teacher explains how to do two-digit division, there is recognition that a

cognitive process is involved; she gives you several ways and says, "I want to make sure you

understand what you're doing-so you get it right"; and, when they go over the homework, she

asks the children to tell how they did the problem and what answer they got.

In social studies the daily work is to read the assigned pages in the textbook and to answer the

teacher's questions. The questions are almost always designed to check on whether the

students have read the assignment and understood it: who did so-and-so; what happened after

14

that; when did it happen, where, and sometimes, why did it happen? The answers are in the

book and in one's understanding of the book; the teacher's hints when one doesn't know the

answers are to "read it again" or to look at the picture or at the rest of the paragraph. One is to

search for the answer in the "context," in what is given.

Language arts is "simple grammar, what they need for everyday life." The language arts teacher

says, "They should learn to speak properly, to write business letters and thank-you letters, and

to understand what nouns and verbs and simple subjects are." Here, as well, actual work is to

choose the right answers, to understand what is given. The teacher often says, "Please read the

next sentence and then I'll question you about it." One teacher said in some exasperation to a

boy who was fooling around in class, "If you don't know the answers to the questions I ask, then

you can't stay in this class! [pause] You never know the answers to the questions I ask, and it's

not fair to me-and certainly not to you!"

Most lessons are based on the textbook. This does not involve a critical perspective on what is

given there. For example, a critical perspective in social studies is perceived as dangerous by

these teachers because it may lead to controversial topics; the parents might complain. The

children, however, are often curious especially in social studies. Their questions are tolerated

and usually answered perfunctorily. But after a few minutes the teacher will say, "All right, we're

not going any farther. Please open your social studies workbook." While the teachers spend a lot

of time explaining and expanding on what the textbooks say, there is little attempt to analyze

how or why things happen, or to give thought to how pieces of a culture, or, say, a system of

numbers or elements of a language fit together or can be analyzed. What has happened in the

past and what exists now may not be equitable or fair, but (shrug) that is the way things are and

one does not confront such matters in school. For example, in social studies after a child is

called on to read a passage about the pilgrims, the teacher summarizes the paragraph and then

says, "So you can see how strict they were about everything." A child asks, "Why?" "Well,

because they felt that if you weren't busy you'd get into trouble." Another child asks, "Is it true

that they burned women at the stake?" The teacher says, "Yes, if a woman did anything strange,

they hanged them. [sic] What would a woman do, do you think, to make them burn them? [sic]

See if you can come up with better answers than my other [social studies] class." Several

children offer suggestions, to which the teacher nods but does not comment. Then she says,

"Okay, good," and calls on the next child to read.

Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on

how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either linguistically or in

graphic form. On the occasions when creativity or self-expression is requested, it is peripheral to

the main activity or it is "enriched" or "for fun." During a lesson on what similes are, for

example, the teacher explains what they are, puts several on the board, gives some other

examples herself, and then asks the children if they can "make some up." She calls on three

children who give similes, two of which are actually in the book they have open before them.

The teacher does not comment on this and then asks several others to choose similes from the

list of phrases in the book. Several do so correctly, and she says, "Oh good! You're picking them

out! See how good we are?" Their homework is to pick out the rest of the similes from the list.

15

Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects, either. Social studies

projects, for example, are given with directions to "find information on your topic" and write it

up. The children are not supposed to copy but to "put it in your own words." Although a number

of the projects subsequently went beyond the teacher's direction to find information and had

quite expressive covers and inside illustrations, the teacher's evaluative comments had to do

with the amount of information, whether they had "copied," and if their work was neat.

The style of control of the three fifth-grade teachers observed in this school varied from

somewhat easygoing to strict, but in contrast to the working-class schools, the teachers'

decisions were usually based on external rules and regulations--for example, on criteria that

were known or available to the children. Thus, the teachers always honor the bells for changing

classes, and they usually evaluate children's work by what is in the textbooks and answer

booklets.

There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children, and the assignments are perceived as

having little to do with their interests and feelings. As one child said, what you do is "store facts

up in your head like cold storage - until you need it later for a test or your job." Thus, doing well

is important because there are thought to be other likely rewards: a good job or college.10

Affluent Professional School

In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. The

students are continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involves

individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas, and choice of

appropriate method and material. (The class is not considered an open classroom, and the

principal explained that because of the large number of discipline problems in the fifth grade

this year they did not departmentalize. The teacher who agreed to take part in the study said

she is "more structured this year than she usually is.) The products of work in this class are often

written stories, editorials and essays, or representations of ideas in mural, graph, or craft form.

The products of work should not be like anybody else's and should show individuality. They

should exhibit good design, and (this is important) they must also fit empirical reality. The

relatively few rules to be followed regarding work are usually criteria for, or limits on, individual

activity. One's product is usually evaluated for the quality of its expression and for the

appropriateness of its conception to the task. In many cases, one's own satisfaction with the

product is an important criterion for its evaluation. When right answers are called for, as in

commercial materials like SRA (Science Research Associates) and math, it is important that the

children decide on an answer as a result of thinking about the idea involved in what they're

being asked to do. Teacher's hints are to "think about it some more."

The following activities are illustrative. The class takes home a sheet requesting each child's

parents to fill in the number of cars they have, the number of television sets, refrigerators,

games, or rooms in the house, and so on. Each child is to figure the average number of a type of

possession owned by the fifth grade. Each child must compile the "data" from all the sheets. A

16

calculator is available in the classroom to do the mechanics of finding the average. Some

children decide to send sheets to the fourth-grade families for comparison. Their work should be

"verified" by a classmate before it is handed in.

Each child and his or her family has made a geoboard. The teacher asks the class to get their

geoboards from the side cabinet, to take a handful of rubber bands, and then to listen to what

she would like them to do. She says, "I would like you to design a figure and then find the

perimeter and area. When you have it, check with your neighbor. After you've done that, please

transfer it to graph paper and tomorrow I'll ask you to make up a question about it for someone.

When you hand it in, please let me know whose it is and who verified it. Then I have something

else for you to do that's really fun. [pause] Find the average number of chocolate chips in three

cookies. I'll give you three cookies, and you'll have to eat your way through, I'm afraid!" Then

she goes around the room and gives help, suggestions, praise, and admonitions that they are

getting noisy. They work sitting, or standing up at their desks, at benches in the back, or on the

floor. A child hands the teacher his paper and she comments, "I'm not accepting this paper. Do a

better design." To another child she says, "That's fantastic! But you'll never find the area. Why

don't you draw a figure inside [the big one] and subtract to get the area?"

The school district requires the fifth grade to study ancient civilization (in particular, Egypt,

Athens, and Sumer). In this classroom, the emphasis is on illustrating and re-creating the culture

of the people of ancient times. The following are typical activities: the children made an 8mm

film on Egypt, which one of the parents edited. A girl in the class wrote the script, and the class

acted it out. They put the sound on themselves. They read stories of those days. They wrote

essays and stories depicting the lives of the people and the societal and occupational divisions.

They chose from a list of projects, all of which involved graphical presentations of ideas: for

example. "Make a mural depicting the division of labor in Egyptian society."

Each wrote and exchanged a letter in hieroglyphics with a fifth grader in another class, and they

also exchanged stories they wrote in cuneiform. They made a scroll and singed the edges so it

looked authentic. They each chose an occupation and made an Egyptian plaque representing

that occupation, simulating the appropriate Egyptian design. They carved their design on a

cylinder of wax, pressed the wax into clay, and then baked the clay. Although one girl did not

choose an occupation but carved instead a series of gods and slaves, the teacher said, "That's all

right, Amber, it's beautiful." As they were working the teacher said, "Don't cut into your clay

until you're satisfied with your design."

Social studies also involves almost daily presentation by the children of some event from the

news. The teacher's questions ask the children to expand what they say, to give more details,

and to be more specific. Occasionally she adds some remarks to help them see connections

between events.

The emphasis on expressing and illustrating ideas in social studies is accompanied in language

arts by an emphasis on creative writing. Each child wrote a rebus story for a first grader whom

they had interviewed to see what kind of story the child liked best. They wrote editorials on

17

pending decisions by the school board and radio plays, some of which were read over the school

intercom from the office and one of which was performed in the auditorium. There is no

language arts textbook because, the teacher said, "The principal wants us to be creative." There

is not much grammar, but there is punctuation. One morning when the observer arrived, the

class was doing a punctuation ditto. The teacher later apologized for using the ditto. "It's just for

review," she said. "I don't teach punctuation that way. We use their language." The ditto had

three unambiguous rules for where to put commas in a sentence. As the teacher was going

around to help the children with the ditto, she repeated several times, "where you put commas

depends on how you say the sentence; it depends on the situation and what you want to say.

Several weeks later the observer saw another punctuation activity. The teacher had printed a

five-paragraph story on an oak tag and then cut it into phrases. She read the whole story to the

class from the book, then passed out the phrases. The group had to decide how the phrases

could best be put together again. (They arranged the phrases on the floor.) The point was not to

replicate the story, although that was not irrelevant, but to "decide what you think the best way

is." Punctuation marks on cardboard pieces were then handed out, and the children discussed

and then decided what mark was best at each place they thought one was needed. At the end of

each paragraph the teacher asked, "Are you satisfied with the way the paragraphs are now?

Read it to yourself and see how it sounds." Then she read the original story again, and they

compared the two.

Describing her goals in science to the investigator, the teacher said, "We use ESS (Elementary

Science Study). It's very good because it gives a hands-on experience--so they can make sense

out of it. It doesn't matter whether it [what they find] is right or wrong. I bring them together

and there's value in discussing their ideas."

The products of work in this class are often highly valued by the children and the teacher. In

fact, this was the only school in which the investigator was not allowed to take original pieces of

the children's work for her files. If the work was small enough, however, and was on paper, the

investigator could duplicate it on the copying machine in the office.

The teacher's attempt to control the class involves constant negotiation. She does not give

direct orders unless she is angry because the children have been too noisy. Normally, she tries

to get them to foresee the consequences of their actions and to decide accordingly. For

example, lining them up to go see a play written by the sixth graders, she says, "I presume

you're lined up by someone with whom you want to sit. I hope you're lined up by someone you

won't get in trouble with."...

One of the few rules governing the children's movement is that no more than three children

may be out of the room at once. There is a school rule that anyone can go to the library at any

time to get a book. In the fifth grade I observed, they sign their name on the chalkboard and

leave. There are no passes. Finally, the children have a fair amount of officially sanctioned say

over what happens in the class. For example, they often negotiate what work is to be done. If

the teacher wants to move on to the next subject, but the children say they are not ready, they

18

want to work on their present projects some more, she very often lets them do it.

Executive Elite School

In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. Children

are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are

both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize

rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a

problem. Schoolwork helps one to achieve, to excel, to prepare for life.

The following are illustrative. The math teacher teaches area and perimeter by having the

children derive formulas for each. First she helps them, through discussion at the board, to

arrive at A = W X L as a formula (not the formula) for area. After discussing several, she says,

"Can anyone make up a formula for perimeter? Can you figure that out yourselves? [pause]

Knowing what we know, can we think of a formula?" She works out three children's suggestions

at the board, saying to two, "Yes, that's a good one," and then asks the class if they can think of

any more. No one volunteers. To prod them, she says, "If you use rules and good reasoning, you

get many ways. Chris, can you think up a formula?"

She discusses two-digit division with the children as a decision-making process. Presenting a

new type of problem to them, she asks, "What's the first decision you'd make if presented with

this kind of example? What is the first thing you'd think? Craig?" Craig says, "To find my first

partial quotient." She responds, "Yes, that would be your first decision. How would you do

that?" Craig explains, and then the teacher says, "OK, we'll see how that works for you." The

class tries his way. Subsequently, she comments on the merits and shortcomings of several

other children's decisions. Later, she tells the investigator that her goals in math are to develop

their reasoning and mathematical thinking and that, unfortunately, "there's no time for

manipulables."

While right answers are important in math, they are not "given" by the book or by the teacher

but may be challenged by the children. Going over some problems in late September the

teacher says, "Raise your hand if you do not agree." A child says, "I don't agree with sixty-four."

The teacher responds, "OK, there's a question about sixty-four. [to class] Please check it. Owen,

they're disagreeing with you. Kristen, they're checking yours." The teacher emphasized this

repeatedly during September and October with statements like "Don't be afraid to say you

disagree. In the last [math] class, somebody disagreed, and they were right. Before you

disagree, check yours, and if you still think we're wrong, then we'll check it out." By

Thanksgiving, the children did not often speak in terms of right and wrong math problems but of

whether they agreed with the answer that had been given.

There are complicated math mimeos with many word problems. Whenever they go over the

examples, they discuss how each child has set up the problem. The children must explain it

precisely. On one occasion the teacher said, "I'm more--just as interested in how you set up the

19

problem as in what answer you find. If you set up a problem in a good way, the answer is easy to

find.

Social studies work is most often reading and discussion of concepts and independent research.

There are only occasional artistic, expressive, or illustrative projects. Ancient Athens and Sumer

are, rather, societies to analyze. The following questions are typical of those that guide the

children's independent research. "What mistakes did Pericles make after the war?" "What

mistakes did the citizens of Athens make?" "What are the elements of a civilization?" "How did

Greece build an economic empire?" "Compare the way Athens chose its leaders with the way

we choose ours." Occasionally the children are asked to make up sample questions for their

social studies tests. On an occasion when the investigator was present, the social studies

teacher rejected a child's question by saying, "That's just fact. If I asked you that question on a

test, you'd complain it was just memory! Good questions ask for concepts."

In social studies--but also in reading, science, and health--the teachers initiate classroom

discussions of current social issues and problems. These discussions occurred on every one of

the investigator's visits, and a teacher told me, "These children's opinions are important - it's

important that they learn to reason things through." The classroom discussions always struck

the observer as quite realistic and analytical, dealing with concrete social issues like the

following: "Why do workers strike?" "Is that right or wrong?" "Why do we have inflation, and

what can be done to stop it?" "Why do companies put chemicals in food when the natural

ingredients are available?" and so on. Usually the children did not have to be prodded to give

their opinions. In fact, their statements and the interchanges between them struck the observer

as quite sophisticated conceptually and verbally, and well-informed. Occasionally the teachers

would prod with statements such as, "Even if you don't know [the answers], if you think logically

about it, you can figure it out." And "I'm asking you [these] questions to help you think this

through."

Language arts emphasizes language as a complex system, one that should be mastered. The

children are asked to diagram sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize

irregular verb conjugations (he lay, he has lain, and so on ...), and to use the proper participles,

conjunctions, and interjections in their speech. The teacher (the same one who teaches social

studies) told them, "It is not enough to get these right on tests; you must use what you learn [in

grammar classes] in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that."

Most writing assignments are either research reports and essays for social studies or experiment

analyses and write-ups for science. There is only an occasional story or other "creative writing"

assignment. On the occasion observed by the investigator (the writing of a Halloween story), the

points the teacher stressed in preparing the children to write involved the structural aspects of a

story rather than the expression of feelings or other ideas. The teacher showed them a filmstrip,

"The Seven Parts of a Story," and lectured them on plot development, mood setting, character

development, consistency, and the use of a logical or appropriate ending. The stories they

subsequently wrote were, in fact, well-structured, but many were also personal and expressive.

20

The teacher's evaluative comments, however, did not refer to the expressiveness or artistry but

were all directed toward whether they had "developed" the story well.

Language arts work also involved a large amount of practice in presentation of the self and in

managing situations where the child was expected to be in charge. For example, there was a

series of assignments in which each child had to be a "student teacher." The child had to plan a

lesson in grammar, outlining, punctuation, or other language arts topic and explain the concept

to the class. Each child was to prepare a worksheet or game and a homework assignment as

well. After each presentation, the teacher and other children gave a critical appraisal of the

"student teacher's" performance. Their criteria were: whether the student spoke clearly,

whether the lesson was interesting, whether the student made any mistakes, and whether he or

she kept control of the class. On an occasion when a child did not maintain control, the teacher

said, "When you're up there, you have authority and you have to use it. I'll back you up."

The executive elite school is the only school where bells do not demarcate the periods of time.

The two fifth-grade teachers were very strict about changing classes on schedule, however, as

specific plans for each session had been made. The teachers attempted to keep tight control

over the children during lessons, and the children were sometimes flippant, boisterous, and

occasionally rude. However, the children may be brought into line by reminding them that "It is

up to you." "You must control yourself," "you are responsible for your work," you must "set your

own priorities." One teacher told a child, "You are the only driver of your car-and only you can

regulate your speed." A new teacher complained to the observer that she had thought "these

children" would have more control.

While strict attention to the lesson at hand is required, the teachers make relatively little

attempt to regulate the movement of the children at other times. For example, except for the

kindergartners the children in this school do not have to wait for the bell to ring in the morning;

they may go to their classroom when they arrive at school. Fifth graders often came early to

read, to finish work, or to catch up. After the first two months of school, the fifth-grade teachers

did not line the children up to change classes or to go to gym, and so on, but, when the children

were ready and quiet, they were told they could go--sometimes without the teachers.

In the classroom, the children could get materials when they needed them and took what they

needed from closets and from the teacher's desk. They were in charge of the office at

lunchtime. During class they did not have to sign out or ask permission to leave the room; they

just got up and left. Because of the pressure to get work done, however, they did not leave the

room very often. The teachers were very polite to the children, and the investigator heard no

sarcasm, no nasty remarks, and few direct orders. The teachers never called the children

"honey" or "dear" but always called them by name. The teachers were expected to be available

before school, after school, and for part of their lunchtime to provide extra help if needed.

The foregoing analysis of differences in schoolwork in contrasting social class contexts suggests

the following conclusion: the "hidden curriculum" of schoolwork is tacit preparation for relating

21

to the process of production in a particular way. Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil

evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and

thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical

and symbolic capital,11 to authority, and to the process of work. School experience, in the

sample of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class. These differences may

not only contribute to the development in the children in each social class of certain types of

economically significant relationships and not others but would thereby help to reproduce this

system of relations in society. In the contribution to the reproduction of unequal social relations

lies a theoretical meaning and social consequence of classroom practice.

The identification of different emphases in classrooms in a sample of contrasting social class

contexts implies that further research should be conducted in a large number of schools to

investigate the types of work tasks and interactions in each to see if they differ in the ways

discussed here and to see if similar potential relationships are uncovered. Such research could

have as a product the further elucidation of complex but not readily apparent connections

between everyday activity in schools and classrooms and the unequal structure of economic

relationships in which we work and live.

NOTES

1. S. Bowles and H. Gintes, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the

Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). [Author's note]

2. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3. Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission,

2d ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); P. Bourdieu and J. Passeron, Reproduction in

Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977); M.W. Apple, Ideology and

Curriculum (Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979). [Author's note]

3. But see, in a related vein, M.W. Apple and N. King, "What Do Schools Teach?"Curriculum

Inquiry 6 (1977); 341-58; R.C. Rist, The Urban School: A Factory for Failure (Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press, 1973). [Author's note]

4. ethnographical: Based on an anthropological study of cultures or subcultures-the "cultures" in

this case being the five schools being observed.

5. The U.S. Bureau of the Census defines poverty for a nonfarm family of four as a yearly income

of $6,191 a year or less. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1978

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 465 ,table 754. [Author's note]

22

6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Money Income in 1977 of Families and Persons in the United

States," Current Population Reports Series P-60, no. 118 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government

Printing Office, 1978), p. 2 ,table A. [Author's note]

7. Ibid. [Author's note]

8. This figure is an estimate. According to the Bureau of the Census, only 2.6 percent of families

in the United States have money income of $50,000 or over. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current

Population Reports Series P-60. For figures on income at these higher levels, see J.D. Smith and

S. Franklin, "The Concentration of Personal Wealth, 1922-1969," American Economic Review 64

(1974): 162-67. [Author's note]

9. Smith and Franklin, "The Concentration of Personal Wealth." [Author's note]

10. A dominant feeling expressed directly and indirectly by teachers in this school, was boredom

with their work. They did, however, in contrast to the working-class schools, almost always carry

out lessons during class times. [Author's note]

11. physical and symbolic capital: Elsewhere Anyon defines capital as "property that is used to

produce profit, interest, or rent": she defines symbolic capital as the knowledge and skills that

"may yield social and cultural power."

FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X: AS TOLD TO ALEX HALEY BY MALCOLM X

I've never been one for inaction. Everything I've ever felt strongly about, I've done something

about. I guess that's why, unable to do anything else, I soon began writing to people I had

known in the hustling world, such as Sammy the Pimp, John Hughes, the gambling house owner,

the thief Jumpsteady, and several dope peddlers. I wrote them all about Allah and Islam and Mr.

Elijah Muhammad. I had no idea where most of them lived. I addressed their letters in care of

the Harlem or Roxbury bars and clubs where I'd known them.

I never got a single reply. The average hustler and criminal was too uneducated to write a letter.

I have known many slick, sharp-looking hustlers, who would have you think they had an interest

in Wall Street; privately, they would get someone else to read a letter if they received one.

Besides, neither would I have replied to anyone writing me something as wild as “the white man

is the devil.”

23

What certainly went on the Harlem and Roxbury wires was that Detroit Red was going crazy in

stir, or else he was trying some hype to shake up the warden's office.

During the years that I stayed in the Norfolk Prison Colony, never did any official directly say

anything to me about those letters, although, of course, they all passed through the prison

censorship. I'm sure, however, they monitored what I wrote to add to the files which every state

and federal prison keeps on the conversion of Negro inmates by the teachings of Mr. Elijah

Muhammad.

But at that time, I felt that the real reason was that the white man knew that he was the devil.

Later on, I even wrote to the Mayor of Boston, to the Governor of Massachusetts, and to Harry

S. Truman. They never answered; they probably never even saw my letters. I handscratched to

them how the white man's society was responsible for the black man's condition in this

wilderness of North America.

It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of a

homemade education.

I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters

that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most

articulate hustler out there—I had commanded attention when I said something. But now,

trying to write simple English, I not only wasn't articulate, I wasn't even functional. How would I

sound writing in slang, the way I would say it, something such as, “Look, daddy, let me pull your

coat about a cat. Elijah Muhammad—”

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something

I've said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely

to my prison studies.

It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his

stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in, and I had

tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn't contain

anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I

just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I

had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions. Pretty

soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary— to study, to learn some words.

I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I

couldn't even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a

dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riming uncertainly through the dictionary's pages. I'd never realized so

many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind

of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that

first page, down to the punctuation marks.

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I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the

tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not

only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words that I never knew were in the

world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I

reviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first

page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-

tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its

tongue as an anteater does for ants.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary's next page. And the same experience

came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and

events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the

dictionary's A section had filled a whole tablet —and I went on into the B's. That was the way I

started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much

practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and

writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a

book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a

great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I

left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on

my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad's

teachings, my correspondence, my visitors… and my reading of books, months passed without

my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in

my life.

WHY WE CRAVE HORROR MOVIES BY STEPHEN KING

I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and

maybe not all that much better, after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves,

people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is

watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight place, the long

drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are waiting so patiently underground.

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing

a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

25

Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid,

that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not

surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster

twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And horror

movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of the young; by the time one

turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or 360-degree loops may be considerably

depleted.

We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately

conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster,

Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert

Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.

And we go to have fun.

Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t it? Because this is a very peculiar sort

of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced – sometimes killed. One critic has

suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film

has become the modern version of the public lynching.

It is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It

urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children

again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic

relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright

madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein

at all.

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve

up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny

farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh- heh-heh); if, on

the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to

pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business . . .

though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.

The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present; but then, most

saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to

scream and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we

recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of these

emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society; they are, of course, the

emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty,

kindness -- these are all the emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized

in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.

When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement; we learn this

even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister

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and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little

thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow. But if we

deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the door, sanctions follow – angry

remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a

spanking.

But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand periodic exercise. We have such

“sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of

dead babies?” (You can’t unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the

way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out

of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man,

then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick

joke or insanity but merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy

tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all

that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest

fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good

liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them –

Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a

basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river

beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me

up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree

with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

HOW MALE AND FEMALE STUDENTS USE LANGUAGE DIFFERENTLY

DEBORAH TANNEN

Chronicle of Higher Education (June 1991).

When I researched and wrote my latest book, You Just Don't Understand: Women

and Men in Conversation, the furthest thing from my mind was reevaluating my

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teaching strategies. But that has been one of the direct benefits of having written

the book.

The primary focus of my linguistic research always has been the language of

everyday conversation. One facet of this is conversational style: how different

regional, ethnic, and class backgrounds, as well as age and gender, result in

different ways of using language to communicate. You Just Don't Understand is

about the conversational styles of women and men. As I gained more insight into

typically male and female ways of using language, I began to suspect some of the

causes of the troubling facts that women who go to single-sex schools do better in

later life, and that when young women sit next to young men in classrooms, the

males talk more. This is not to say that all men talk in class, nor that no women do.

It is simply that a greater percentage of discussion time is taken by men's voices.

The research of sociologists and anthropologists such as Janet Lever, Marjorie

Harness Goodwin, and Donna Eder has shown that girls and boys learn to use

language differently in their sex-separate peer groups. Typically, a girl has a best

friend with whom she sits and talks, frequently telling secrets. It's the telling of

secrets, the fact and the way that they talk to each other, that makes them best

friends. For boys, activities are central: their best friends are the ones they do things

with. Boys also tend to play in larger groups that are hierarchical. High-status boys

give orders and push low-status boys around. So boys are expected to use language

to seize center stage: by exhibiting their skill, display their knowledge, and

challenging and resisting challenges.

These patterns have stunning implications for classroom interaction. Most faculty

members assume that participating in class discussion is a necessary part of

successful performance. Yet speaking in a classroom is more congenial to boys’

language experience than to girls', since it entails putting oneself forward in front of

a large group of people, many of whom are strangers and at least one of whom is

sure to judge speakers’ knowledge and intelligence by their verbal display.

Another aspect of many classrooms that makes them more hospitable to most men

than to most women is the use of debate-like formats as a learning tool. Our

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educational system, as Walter Ong argues persuasively in his book Fighting for Life

(Cornell University Press, 1981) is fundamentally male in that the pursuit of

knowledge is believed to be achieved by ritual opposition: public display followed by

argument and challenge. Father Ong demonstrates that ritual opposition – what he

calls "adversativeness" or "agonism” - is fundamental to the way most males

approach almost any activity. (Consider, for example, the little boy who shows he

likes a little girl by pulling her braids and shoving her.) But ritual opposition is

antithetical to the way most females learn and like to interact. It is not that females

don't fight, but that they don't fight for fun. They don't ritualize opposition.

Anthropologists working in widely disparate parts of the world have found

contrasting verbal rituals for women and men. Women in completely unrelated

cultures (for example, Greece and Bali) engage in ritual laments: spontaneously

produced rhyming couplets that express their pain, for example, over the loss of

loved ones. Men do not take part in laments. They have their own, very different

verbal ritual: a contest, a war of words in which they vie with each other to devise

clever insults.

When discussing these phenomena with a colleague, I commented that I see these

two styles in American conversation: many women bond by talking about troubles,

and many men bond by exchanging playful insults and put-downs, and other sorts of

verbal sparring. He exclaimed: "I never thought of this, but that's the way I teach: I

have students read an article, and then I invite them to tear it apart. After we've

torn it to shreds, we talk about how to build a better model."

This contrasts sharply with the way I teach: I open the discussion of readings by

asking, "What did you find useful in this? What can we use in our own theory

building and our own methods?" I note what I see as weaknesses in the author's

approach, but I also point out that the writer’s discipline and purposes might be

different from ours. Finally, I offer personal anecdotes illustrating the phenomena

under discussion and praise students’ anecdotes as well as their critical acumen.

These different teaching styles must make our classrooms wildly different places

and hospitable to different students. Male students are more likely to be comfortable

29

attacking the readings and might find the inclusion of personal anecdotes irrelevant

and "soft." Women are more likely to resist discussion they perceive as hostile, and,

indeed, it is women in my classes who are most likely to offer personal anecdotes.

A colleague who read my book commented that he had always taken for granted

that the best way to deal with students' comments is to challenge them; this, he felt

it was self-evident, sharpens their minds and helps them develop debating skills.

But he had noticed that women were relatively silent in his classes, so he decided to

try beginning discussion with relatively open-ended questions and letting comments

go unchallenged. He found, to his amazement and satisfaction, that more women

began to speak up.

Though some of the women in his class clearly liked this better, perhaps some of the

men liked it less. One young man in my class wrote in a questionnaire about a

history professor who gave students questions to think about and called on people to

answer them: "He would then play devil's advocate. ..i.e., he debated us. ...That class

really sharpened me intellectually…We as students do need to know how to defend

ourselves." This young man valued the experience of being attacked and challenged

publicly. Many, if not most, women would shrink from such "challenge,"

experiencing it as public humiliation.

A professor at Hamilton College told me of a young man who was upset because he

felt his class presentation had been a failure. The professor was puzzled because he

had observed that class members had listened attentively and agreed with the

student's observations. It turned out that it was this very agreement that the

student interpreted as failure: since no one had engaged his ideas by arguing with

him, he felt they had found them unworthy of attention.

So one reason men speak in class more than women is that many of them find the

"public" classroom setting more conducive to speaking, whereas most women are

more comfortable speaking in private to a small group of people they know well. A

second reason is that men are more likely to be comfortable with the debate-like

form that discussion may take. Yet another reason is the different attitudes toward

speaking in class that typify women and men.

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Students who speak frequently in class, many of whom are men, assume that it is

their job to think of contributions and try to get the floor to express them. But many

women monitor their participation not only to get the floor but to avoid getting it.

Women students in my class tell me that if they have spoken up once or twice, they

hold back for the rest of the class because they don't want to dominate. If they have

spoken a lot one week, they will remain silent the next. These different ethics of

participation are, of course, unstated, so those who speak freely assume that those

who remain silent have nothing to say, and those who are reining themselves in

assume that the big talkers are selfish and hoggish.

When I looked around my classes, I could see these differing ethics and habits at

work. For example, my graduate class in analyzing conversation had twenty

students, eleven women and nine men. Of the men, four were foreign students: two

Japanese, one Chinese, and one Syrian. With the exception of the three Asian men,

all the men spoke in class at least occasionally. The biggest talker in the class was a

woman, but there were also five women who never spoke at all, only one of whom

was Japanese. I decided to try something different.

I broke the class into small groups to discuss the issues raised in the readings and

to analyze their own conversational transcripts. I devised three ways of dividing the

students into groups: one by the degree program they were in, one by gender, and

one by conversational style, as closely as I could guess it. This meant that when the

class was grouped according to conversational style, I put Asian students together,

fast talkers together, and quiet students together. The class split into groups of six

times during the semester, so they met in each grouping twice. I told students to

regard the groups as examples of interactional data, and to note the different ways

they participated in the different groups. Toward the end of the term, I gave them a

questionnaire asking about their class and group participation.

I could see plainly from my observation of the groups at work that women who

never opened their mouths in class were talking away in the small groups. In fact,

the Japanese woman commented that she found it particularly hard to contribute to

the all-woman group she was in because "I was overwhelmed by how talkative the

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female students were in the female-only group." This is particularly revealing

because it highlights that the same person who can be "oppressed" into silence in

one context can become the talkative" oppressor" in another. No one’s conversational

style is absolute; everyone's style changes in response to the context and others'

styles.

Some of the students (seven) said they preferred the same-gender groups; others

preferred the same-style groups. In answer to the question "Would you have liked to

speak in class more than you did?” six of the seven who said yes were women; the

one man was Japanese. Most startlingly, this response did not come only from quiet

women; it came from women who had indicated they had spoken in class never,

rarely, sometimes, and often. Of the eleven students who said the amount they had

spoken was fine, seven were men. Of the four women who checked "fine," two added

qualifications indicating it wasn't completely fine: One wrote in "maybe more," and

one wrote, “I have an urge to participate but often feel I should have something more

interesting / relevant / wonderful / intelligent to say!!"

I counted my experiment a success. Everyone in the class found the small groups

interesting, and no one indicated he or she would have preferred that the class not

break into groups. Perhaps most instructive, however, was the fact that the

experience of breaking into groups, and of talking about participation in class, raised

everyone's awareness about classroom participation. After we had talked about it,

some of the quietest women in the class made a few voluntary contributions, though

sometimes I had to ensure their participation by interrupting the students who were

exuberantly speaking out.

Americans are often proud that they discount the significance of cultural

differences: "We are all individuals," many people boast. Ignoring such issues as

gender and ethnicity becomes a source of pride: “I treat everyone the same." But

treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same

The classroom is a different environment for those who feel comfortable putting

themselves forward in a group than it is for those who find the prospect of doing so

chastening or even terrifying. When a professor asks, "Are there any questions?"

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students who can formulate statements the fastest have the greatest opportunity to

respond. Those who need significant time to do so have not really been given a

chance at all, since by the time they are ready to speak, someone else has the floor.

In a class where some students speak out without raising hands, those who feel

they must raise their hands and wait to be recognized do not have equal opportunity

to speak. Telling them to feel free to jump in will not make them feel free; one's

sense of timing, of one's rights and obligations in a classroom, are automatic, learned

over years of interaction. They may be changed over time, with motivation and

effort, but they cannot be changed on the spot. And everyone assumes his or her own

way is best. When I asked my students how the class could be changed to make it

easier for them to speak more, the most talkative woman said she would prefer it if

no one had to raise hands, and a foreign student said he wished people would raise

their hands and wait to be recognized.

My experience in this class has convinced me that small-group interaction should be

part of any class that is not a small seminar. I also am convinced that having the

students become observers of their own interaction is a crucial part of their

education. Talking about ways of talking in class makes students aware that their

ways of talking affect other students, that the motivations they impute to others

may not truly reflect others' motives, and that the behaviors they assume to be self-

evidently right are not universal norms.

The goal of complete equal opportunity in class may not be attainable, but realizing

that one monolithic classroom-participation structure is not equal opportunity is

itself a powerful motivation to find more-diverse methods to serve diverse students-

and every classroom is diverse.

Reference

From Jon Ford & Elaine Hughes (1997) (eds.), Responding Voices: a Reader for

Emerging Writers. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Ins.

33

DOES TRUTH MATTER? SCIENCE, PSEUDOSCIENCE, AND CIVILIZATION BY CARL SAGAN

Science has beauty, power, and majesty that can provide spiritual as well as practical fulfillment.

But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way providing easy answers, casually

pressing our awe buttons, and cheapening the experience.

Do we care what's true? Does it matter?

… where ignorance is bliss,

'Tis folly to be wise

wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it? Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons

understood the dilemma better:

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good,

as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but is it

better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say,

hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote?

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe,

does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many before and after, decries the

“unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man” brought about by the scientific revolution.

Nietzsche mourns the loss of “man's belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceability in

the scheme of existence.” For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to

persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which attitude is better geared for our

long-term survival? Which gives us more leverage on our future? And if our naive self-

confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause

to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience?

To discover that the universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old1

improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a

particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least

enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as now seems probable, that our planet is one of

billions of other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of billions more,

majestically expands the arena of what is possible; to find that our ancestors were also the

ancestors of apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important—if occasionally

rueful—reflections on human nature.

34

Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the

best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we

will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our

favor. But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting us, providing easy

answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the

experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes,

the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off

Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and

write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets

rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be

explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.

SCIENCE AS A SOURCE OF SPIRITUALITY

In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very

act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the

magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide buildup of knowledge over time

converts science into something only a little short of a transnational, transgenerational

metamind.

[sidebar] “Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is

certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication

in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of

which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free

to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of

spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of

ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that

sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence

of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of

Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are

somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. [/sidebar]

These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of

science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature—often because they are based on

insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with

gullibility. With the uninformed cooperation (and often the cynical connivance) of newspapers,

magazines, book publishers, radio, television, movie producers, and the like, such ideas are

easily and widely available. Far more difficult to come upon are the alternative, more

challenging, and even more dazzling findings of science.

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science because distracting confrontations with

reality—where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided.

The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for these

35

same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But

this isn't enough to explain its popularity.

Naturally people try various belief systems on for size, to see if they help. And if we're desperate

enough, we become all too willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden of

skepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves

unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for (like those

attributed to comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the gods). In some of its

manifestations, it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death

is not the end. It reassures us of our cosmic centrality and importance. It vouchsafes that we are

hooked up with, tied to, the universe.2 Sometimes it's a kind of halfway house between old

religion and new science, mistrusted by both.

At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also, New Age and Old) is the idea that

wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to fulfill our

heart's desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the

hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. The enchanted fish or the genie

from the lamp will grant us three wishes—anything we want except more wishes. Who has not

pondered—just to be on the safe side, just in case we ever come upon and accidentally rub an

old, squat brass oil lamp—what to ask for?

I remember, from childhood comic strips and books, a top-hatted, mustachioed magician who

brandished an ebony walking stick. His name was Zatara. He could make anything happen,

anything at all. How did he do it? Easy. He uttered his commands backwards. So if he wanted a

million dollars, he would say “srallod noillim a em evig.” That's all there was to it. It was

something like prayer, but much surer of results.

I spent a lot of time at age eight experimenting in this vein, commanding stones to levitate:

“esir, enots.” It never worked. I blamed my pronunciation.

[sidebar] The Metaphysicist Has No Laboratory

The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment

is how we get a handle on it. At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was

asked to respond to the toast, “To physics and metaphysics.” By “metaphysics,” people then

meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them.

They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines:

The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He

consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus

prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is

painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error

bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment

36

teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be

worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to

something else.3

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is

not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference

is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. [/sidebar]

Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is

misunderstood—except that the language breaks down here. If you've never heard of science

(to say nothing of how it works), you can hardly be aware you're embracing pseudoscience.

You're simply thinking in one of the ways that humans always have. Religions are often the

state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to

play that role. In a way, it's an artifact from times long gone. In some countries nearly everyone

believes in astrology and precognition, including government leaders. But this is not simply

drummed into them by religion; it is drawn out of the enveloping culture in which everyone is

comfortable with these practices, and affirming testimonials are everywhere.

Most of the case histories I will relate are American—because these are the cases I know best,

not because pseudoscience and mysticism are more prominent in the United States than

elsewhere. But the psychic spoonbender and extraterrestrial channeler Uri Geller hails from

Israel. As tensions rise between Algerian secularists and Moslem fundamentalists, more and

more people are discreetly consulting the country's 10,000 soothsayers and clairvoyants (about

half of whom operate with a license from the government). High French officials, including a

former president of France, arranged for millions of dollars to be invested in a scam (the Elf-

Aquitaine scandal) to find new petroleum reserves from the air. In Germany, there is concern

about carcinogenic “Earth rays” undetectable by science; they can be sensed only by

experienced dowsers brandishing forked sticks. “Psychic surgery” flourishes in the Philippines.

Ghosts are something of a national obsession in Britain. Since World War II, Japan has spawned

enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural. An estimated 100,000

fortunetellers flourish in Japan; the clientele are mainly young women. Aum Shinrikyo, a sect

thought to be involved in the release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system in

March 1995, features levitation, faith healing, and ESP among its main tenets. Followers, at a

high price, drank the “miracle pond” water—from the bath of Asaraha, their leader. In Thailand,

diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. “Witches” are

today being burned in South Africa. Australian peace-keeping forces in Haiti rescue a woman

tied to a tree; she is accused of flying from rooftop to rooftop, and sucking the blood of children.

Astrology is rife in India, geomancy widespread in China.

Perhaps the most successful recent global pseudoscience—by many criteria, already a religion—

is the Hindu doctrine of transcendental meditation (TM). The soporific homilies of its founder

and spiritual leader, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, can be seen on television. Seated in the yogi

position, his white hair here and there flecked with black, surrounded by garlands and floral

offerings, he has a look. One day while channel surfing we came upon this visage. “You know

37

who that is?” asked our four-year-old son. “God.” The worldwide TM organization has an

estimated valuation of 3 billion. For a fee they promise through meditation to be able to walk

you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison they have,

they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington, D.C., and caused the collapse of the Soviet

Union, among other secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been offered for

any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs trading companies, medical clinics and “research”

universities, and has unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic leader, its promise

of community, and the offer of magical powers in exchange for money and fervent belief, it is

typical of many pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export.

At each relinquishing of civil controls and scientific education another little spun in

pseudoscience occurs. Leon Trotsky described it for Germany on the eve of the Hider takeover

(but in a description that might equally have applied to the Soviet Union of 1933):

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth

century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic

powers of signs and exorcisms. . . . Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous

mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible

reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

Russia is an instructive case. Under the tsars, religious superstition was encouraged, but

scientific and skeptical thinking—except by a few tame scientists—was ruthlessly expunged.

Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except

for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far

short of this ideal as the most unself-critical mystery cult. Critical thinking—except by scientists

in hermetically sealed compartments of knowledge—was recognized as dangerous, was not

taught in the schools, and was punished where expressed. As a result, post-Communism, many

Russians view science with suspicion. When the lid was lifted, as was also true of virulent ethnic

hatreds, what had all along been bubbling subsurface was exposed to view. The region is now

awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, quack medicines, magic waters, and old-rime

superstition. A stunning decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant epidemic

disease, subminimal medical standards, and ignorance of preventative medicine all work to raise

the threshold at which skepticism is triggered in an increasingly desperate population. As I write,

the electorally most popular member of the Duma, a leading supporter of the ultranationalist

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is one Anatoly Kashpirovsky—a faith healer who remotely cures diseases

ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of your television set. His face starts stopped

clocks.

A somewhat analogous situation exists in China. After the death of Mao Zedong and the gradual

emergence of a market economy, UFOs, channeling, and other examples of Western

pseudoscience emerged, along with such ancient Chinese practices as ancestor worship,

astrology, and fortune telling—especially that version that involves throwing yarrow sticks and

working through the hoary tetragrams of the I Ching. The government newspaper lamented that

38

“the superstition of feudal ideology is reviving in our countryside.” It was (and remains) a rural,

not primarily an urban, affliction.

Individuals with “special powers” gained enormous followings. They could, they said, project Qi,

the “energy field of the universe,” out of their bodies to change the molecular structure of a

chemical 2000 kilometers away, to communicate with aliens, to cure diseases. Some patients

died under the ministrations of one of these “masters of Qi Gong” who was arrested and

convicted in 1993. Wang Hongcheng, an amateur chemist, claimed to have synthesized a liquid,

small amounts of which, when added to water, would convert it to gasoline or the equivalent.

For a time he was funded by the army and the secret police, but when his invention was found

to be a scam he was arrested and imprisoned. Naturally the story spread that his misfortune

resulted not from fraud, but from his unwillingness to reveal his “secret formula” to the

government. (Similar stories have circulated in America for decades, usually with the

government role replaced by a major oil or auto company.) Asian rhinos are being driven to

extinction because their horns, when pulverized, are said to prevent impotence; the market

encompasses all of East Asia.

The government of China and the Chinese Communist Party were alarmed by certain of these

developments. On December 5, 1994, they issued a joint proclamation that read in part:

[P]ublic education in science has been withering in recent years. At the same time, activities of

superstition and ignorance have been growing, and anti-science and pseudoscience cases have

become frequent. Therefore, effective measures must be applied as soon as possible to

strengthen public education in science. The level of public education in science and technology

is an important sign of the national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall

importance in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of society. We must

be attentive and implement such public education as part of the strategy to modernize our

socialist country and to make our nation powerful and prosperous. Ignorance is never socialist,

nor is poverty.

So pseudoscience in America is part of a global trend. Its causes, dangers, diagnosis, and

treatment are likely to be similar everywhere. Here, psychics ply their wares on extended

television commercials, personally endorsed by entertainers. They have their own channel, the

“Psychic Friends Network”; a million people a year sign on and use such guidance in their

everyday lives. For the CEOs of major corporations, for financial analysts, for lawyers and

bankers there is a species of astrologer/soothsayer/ psychic ready to advise on any matter. “If

people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics,

their jaws would drop through the floor,” says a psychic from Cleveland, Ohio. Royalty has

traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrology was the

exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of this potent art was considered a capital

offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald

Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters—unknown to the voting public.

Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the

39

hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in America; its venue is

worldwide.

As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident as we may be that we would

never be so gullible as to be swept up by such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us.

Transcendental Meditation and Aum Shinrikyo seem to have attracted a large number of

accomplished people, some with advanced degrees in physics or engineering. These are not

doctrines for nitwits. Something else is going on.

What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how they begin can ignore them.

While vast barriers may seem to stretch between a local, single-focus contention of

pseudoscience and something like a world religion, the partitions are very thin. The world

presents us with nearly insurmountable problems. A wide variety of solutions are offered, some

of very limited worldview, some of portentous sweep. In the usual Darwinian natural selection

of doctrines, some thrive for a time, while most quickly vanish. But a few—sometimes, as

history has shown, the most scruffy and least prepossessing among them—may have the power

to profoundly change the history of the world.

The continuum stretching from ill-practiced science, pseudoscience, and superstition (New Age

or Old), all the way to respectable mystery religion, based on revelation, is indistinct. I try not to

use the word “cult” in its usual meaning of a religion the speaker dislikes, but try to reach for the

headstone of knowledge—do they really know what they claim to know? Everyone, it turns out,

has relevant expertise.

I am critical of the excesses of theology, because at the extremes it is difficult to distinguish

pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge at the

outset the prodigious diversity and complexity of religious thought and practice over the

millennia; the growth of liberal religion and ecumenical fellowship during the last century, and

the fact that—as in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Reform Judaism, Vatican II, and the

so-called higher criticism of the Bible—religion has fought (with varying degrees of success) its

own excesses. But in parallel to the many scientists who seem reluctant to debate or even

publicly discuss pseudoscience, many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to take

on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend continues, eventually the field is

theirs; they can win the debate by default.

One religious leader writes to me of his longing for “disciplined integrity” in religion:

We have grown far too sentimental. . . . Devotionalism and cheap psychology on one side, and

arrogance and dogmatic intolerance on the other distort authentic religious life almost beyond

recognition. Sometimes I come close to despair, but then I live tenaciously and always with

hope. . . . Honest religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and absurdities

perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own

purposes. . . . There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a potent partnership

40

against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-

religion.

[sidebar] The Siren Song of Unreason

A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based book by Thomas Ady,

published in London in 1656, attacking the witchhunts then in progress as a scam “to delude the

people.” Any illness or storm, anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to

witchcraft. Witches must exist, Ady quoted the “witchmongers” as arguing—“else how should

these things be, or come to pass?” For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside

world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to

soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the

world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and

meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn

women to death.

Ady also warned of the danger that “the Nations [will] perish for lack of knowledge.” Avoidable

human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our

ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer,

pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of

unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic

or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem

or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism

is bubbling up around us—men, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to

stir. [/sidebar]

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one

by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are

framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is

confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved

understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is

disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are

invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they

cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When

the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are

deduced.

Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely stumble and fall, except in young

and old age. We can learn tasks such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping rope or

driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our lives. Even if we've gone a decade

without doing it, it comes back to us effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor skills

41

may, however, give us a false sense of confidence in our other talents. Our perceptions are

fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we

hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn’t So:

The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people

systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being

influenced by the opinions of others. We're good in some things, but not in everything. Wisdom

lies in understanding our limitations. “For Man is a giddy thing,” teaches William Shakespeare.

That's where the stuffy skeptical rigor of science comes in.

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far

keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or

“inerrant” revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into

error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will

be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment,

whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.

If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring

they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly

distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In

Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The

distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be

muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought

were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims—especially those that told us what we

wanted to hear—gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became

authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history

of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its

practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists

tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled

from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy

distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more

important than the findings of science.

[sidebar] An Absence of Alien Artifacts

Some [alleged UFO] abductees say that tiny implants, perhaps metallic, were inserted into their

bodies—high up their nostrils, for example. These implants, alien abduction therapists tell us,

sometimes accidentally fall out, but “in all but a few of the cases the artifact has been lost or

discarded.” These abductees seem stupefyingly incurious. A strange object—possibly a

transmitter sending telemetered data about the state of your body to an alien spaceship

somewhere above the Earth—drops out of your nose; you idly examine it and then throw it in

the garbage. Something like this is true, we are told, of the majority of abduction cases.

42

A few such “implants” have been produced and examined by experts. None has been confirmed

as of unearthly manufacture. No components are made of unusual isotopes, despite the fact

that other stars and other worlds are known to be constituted of different isotopic proportions

than the Earth. There are no metals from the transuranic “island of stability,” where physicists

think there should be a new family of nonradioactive chemical elements unknown on Earth.

What abduction enthusiasts considered the best case was that of Richard Price, who claims that

aliens abducted him when he was eight years old and implanted a small artifact in his penis. A

quarter century later a physician confirmed a “foreign body” embedded there. After eight more

years, it fell out. Roughly a millimeter in diameter and 4 millimeters long, it was carefully

examined by scientists from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. Their conclusion?

Collagen formed by the body at sites of inflammation plus cotton fibers from Price's underpants.

On August 28, 1995, television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch ran what was purported to

be an autopsy of a dead alien, shot on 16-millimeter film. Masked pathologists in vintage

radiation-protection suits (with rectangular glass windows to see out of) cut up a large-eyed 12-

flngered figure and examined the internal organs. While the film was sometimes out of focus,

and the view of the cadaver often blocked by the humans crowding around it, some viewers

found the effect chilling. The Times of London, also owned by Murdoch, didn't know what to

make of it, although it did quote one pathologist who thought the autopsy performed with

unseemly and unrealistic haste (ideal, though, for television viewing). It was said to have been

shot in New Mexico in 1947 by a participant, now in his eighties, who wished to remain

anonymous. What appeared to be the clincher was the announcement that the leader of the

film (its first few feet) contained coded information that Kodak, the manufacturer, dated to

1947. However, it turns out that the full film magazine was not presented to Kodak, but at most

the cut leader. For all we know, the leader could have been cut from a 1947 newsreel,

abundantly archived in America, and the “autopsy” staged and filmed separately and recently.

There's a dragon footprint all right—but a fakable one. If this is a hoax, it requires not much

more cleverness than crop circles and the MJ-12 document.

In none of these stories is there anything strongly suggestive of extraterrestrial origin. There is

certainly no retrieval of cunning machinery far beyond current technology. No abductee has

filched a page from the captain's logbook, or an examining instrument, or taken an authentic

photograph of the interior of the ship, or come back with detailed and verifiable scientific

information not hitherto available on Earth. Why not? These failures must tell us something.

[/sidebar]

Since the middle of the twentieth century, we've been assured by proponents of the

extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence—not star maps remembered from years ago,

not scars, not disturbed soil, but real alien technology—was in hand. The analysis would be

released momentarily. These claims go back to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and

GeBauer. Now it's decades later and we're still waiting. Where are the articles published in the

refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?

43

Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artifacts, physicists and chemists

would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us—who use, say,

unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The

practical implications of such a finding—never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion—

would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us

something.

NOTES

1. "No thinking religious person believes this. Old hat," writes one of the referees of this

book. But many "scientific creationists" not only believe it, but are making increasingly

aggressive and successful efforts to have it taught in the schools, museums, zoos, and

textbooks. Why? Because adding up die "begars." the ages of patriarchs and others in

the Bible, gives such a figure, and the Bible is "inerrant."

2. Although it's hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection than die

astonishing findings of modem nuclear astrophysics: Except for hydrogen, all the atoms

that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in

our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space

and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starsruff.

3. As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, "In going on with these

experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves

obliged to destroy?" At the very least, he thought, the experience sufficed to "help to

make a vain Man humble."

STUDENTS SEE MANY SLIGHTS AS RACIAL ‘MICROAGGRESSIONS’ BY TANZINA VEGA, NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 21, 2014

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-

inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s

ability to speak English without an accent.

This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student

discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social

justice word du jour — microaggressions — used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic,

gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.

On a Facebook page called “Brown University Micro/Aggressions” a “dark-skinned black person”

describes feeling alienated from conversations about racism on campus. A digital photo project

run by a Fordham University student about “racial microaggressions” features minority students

holding up signs with comments like “You’re really pretty ... for a dark-skin girl.” The “St. Olaf

44

Microaggressions” blog includes a letter asking David R. Anderson, the college’s president, to

address “all of the incidents and microaggressions that go unreported on a daily basis.”

What is less clear is how much is truly aggressive and how much is pretty micro — whether the

issues raised are a useful way of bringing to light often elusive slights in a world where overt

prejudice is seldom tolerated, or a new form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks

are blown out of proportion.

The word itself is not new — it was first used by Dr. Chester M. Pierce, a professor of education

and psychiatry at Harvard University, in the 1970s. Until recently it was considered academic

talk for race theorists and sociologists.

The recent surge in popularity for the term can be attributed, in part, to an academic article

Derald W. Sue, a psychology professor at Columbia University, published in 2007 in which he

broke down microaggressions into microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations. Dr. Sue,

who has literally written the book on the subject, called “Microaggressions in Everyday Life:

Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation,” attributed the increased use of the term to the rapidly

changing demographics in which minorities are expected to outnumber whites in the United

States by 2042. “As more and more of us are around, we talk to each other and we know we’re

not crazy,” Dr. Sue said. Once, he said, minorities kept silent about perceived slights. “I feel like

people of color are less inclined to do that now,” he said.

Some say challenges to affirmative action in recent years have worked to stir racial tensions and

resentments on college campuses. At least in part as a result of a blog started by two Columbia

University students four years ago called The Microaggressions Project, the word made the leap

from the academic world to the free-for-all on the web. Vivian Lu, the co-creator of the site, said

she has received more than 15,000 submissions since she began the project.

To date, the site has had 2.5 million page views from 40 countries. Ms. Lu attributed the growing

popularity of the term to its value in helping to give people a way to name something that may

not be so obvious. “It gives people the vocabulary to talk about these everyday incidents that

are quite difficult to put your finger on,” she said.

To Serena Rabie, 22, a paralegal who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2013, “This is

racism 2.0.” She added: “It comes with undertones, it comes with preconceived notions. You

hire the Asian computer programmer because you think he’s going to be a good programmer

because he’s Asian.” Drawing attention to microaggressions, whether they are intentional or

not, is part of eliminating such stereotypes, Ms. Rabie said.

On the other hand, John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, said many of

his students casually use the word when they talk about race, but he cautioned against lumping

all types of off-key language together. Assuming a black student was accepted to an elite

university purely because of affirmative action? “That’s abuse,” Dr. McWhorter said. “That’s a

slur.” Being offended when a white person claims to be colorblind — a claim often derided by

minorities who say it willfully ignores the reality of race? Not so fast.

45

“I think that’s taking it too far,” he said. Whites do not have the same freedom to talk about

race that nonwhites do, Dr. McWhorter said. If it is socially unacceptable for whites to consider

blacks as “different in any way” then it is unfair to force whites to acknowledge racial

differences, he said.

Even when young people do not use the term overtly, examples of perceived microaggressions

abound.

When students at Harvard performed a play this month based on a multimedia project, “I, Too,

Am Harvard,” that grew out of interviews with minority students, an entire segment highlighted

microaggressions.

In one scene, students recite phrases they have been told, presumably by nonblack students,

including “You only got in because you’re black” and “The government feels bad for you.” In

another scene, a black student dressed in a tuxedo and a red bow tie describes being at a formal

university function and being confused for a waiter.

Tsega Tamene, 20, a history and science major, and a producer for the play, said

microaggressions were an everyday part of student life. “It’s almost scary the way that this

disguised racism can affect you, hindering your success and the very psyche of going to class,”

she said.

Outside of college campuses, microaggressions have been picked apart in popular Web videos

including a two-part video poking fun at things white girls say to black girls (“It’s almost like

you’re not black”) and another video called “What Kind of Asian Are You?” (“Where are you

from? Your English is perfect”).

But the trend has its critics. A skeptical article in the conservative National Review carried the

arch headline “You Could Be a Racist and Not Even Know It.”

Harry Stein, a contributing editor to City Journal, said in an email that while most people feel

unjustly treated at times, “most such supposed insults are slight or inadvertent, and even most

of those that aren’t might be readily shrugged off.” Mr. Stein took issue with the term

“microaggressions,” saying that its use “suggests a more serious problem: the impulse to

exaggerate the meaning of such encounters in the interest of perpetually seeing oneself as a

victim.”

The comments on recent articles about microaggressions have been a mix of empathetic and

critical. One commenter on a BuzzFeed article on the “I, Too, Am Harvard” project wrote: “Make

up your mind, do you want to be seen the same as everyone because you’re a human being, or

do you want to be seen as a ‘colored’ girl, since not being seen as a ‘colored’ person is obviously

offensive?” Another wrote, “I don’t get bent out of shape if a white person asks me are you, like,

Hindu or something? I just correct them.”

46

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and author, said the public airing of racial

microaggressions should not be limited to minorities, but should be open to whites as well.

“That’s the only way that you can produce a multicultural, ethnically diverse environment,” he

said.

“We’re talking about people in close contact who are experiencing the painful intersections of

intimacy,” he said. “The next part of that is communication, and this is a new form of

communication.”

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR PREVENTING THE CHILDREN OF POOR PEOPLE IN IRELAND, FROM BEING A BURDEN ON THEIR PARENTS OR COUNTRY, AND FOR MAKING THEM BENEFICIAL TO THE PUBLICK (1729) BY JONATHAN SWIFT

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country,

when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex,

followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.

These mothers instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all

their time in stroling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants who, as they grow up, either

turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in

Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.

I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the

backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present

deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could

find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of

the common-wealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have his statue set up for a

preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed

beggars: it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain

age, who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand our

charity in the streets.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years, upon this important subject, and

maturely weighed the several schemes of our projectors, I have always found them grossly

mistaken in their computation. It is true, a child just dropt from its dam, may be supported by

her milk, for a solar year, with little other nourishment: at most not above the value of two

shillings, which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of

begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner, as,

instead of being a charge upon their parents, or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the

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rest of their lives, they shall, on the contrary, contribute to the feeding, and partly to the

cloathing of many thousands.

There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary

abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too

frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expence

than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I

calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from

which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children,

(although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom)

but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again

subtract fifty thousand, for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or

disease within the year. There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor

parents annually born. The question therefore is, How this number shall be reared, and provided

for? which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by

all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture;

we neither build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up

a livelihood by stealing till they arrive at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts,

although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during which time they can however

be properly looked upon only as probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman

in the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew above one or two instances

under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in

that art.

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old, is no saleable

commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or

three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to

the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that

value.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the

least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young

healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,

whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a

fricasie, or a ragoust.

I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the hundred and twenty

thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof

only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine,

and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not

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much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That

the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality

and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the

last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at

an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will

make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on

the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year,

if tolerably nursed, encreaseth to 28 pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they

have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Infant's flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little

before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being

a prolifick dyet, there are more children born in Roman Catholick countries about nine months

after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of Popish infants, is

at least three to one in this kingdom, and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage,

by lessening the number of Papists among us.

I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all

cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags

included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good

fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath

only some particular friend, or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a

good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants, the mother will have eight shillings neat

profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.

Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flea the carcass; the skin

of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine

gentlemen.

As to our City of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose, in the most convenient

parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend

buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.

A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately

pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said, that

many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the

want of venison might be well supply'd by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding

fourteen years of age, nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being

now ready to starve for want of work and service: And these to be disposed of by their parents if

alive, or otherwise by their nearest relations. But with due deference to so excellent a friend,

and so deserving a patriot, I cannot be altogether in his sentiments; for as to the males, my

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American acquaintance assured me from frequent experience, that their flesh was generally

tough and lean, like that of our school-boys, by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable,

and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the females, it would, I think, with

humble submission, be a loss to the publick, because they soon would become breeders

themselves: And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to

censure such a practice, (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which,

I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, how well

soever intended.

But in order to justify my friend, he confessed, that this expedient was put into his head by the

famous Salmanaazor, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London, above

twenty years ago, and in conversation told my friend, that in his country, when any young

person happened to be put to death, the executioner sold the carcass to persons of quality, as a

prime dainty; and that, in his time, the body of a plump girl of fifteen, who was crucified for an

attempt to poison the Emperor, was sold to his imperial majesty's prime minister of state, and

other great mandarins of the court in joints from the gibbet, at four hundred crowns. Neither

indeed can I deny, that if the same use were made of several plump young girls in this town,

who without one single groat to their fortunes, cannot stir abroad without a chair, and appear at

a play-house and assemblies in foreign fineries which they never will pay for; the kingdom would

not be the worse.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor

people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed; and I have been desired to employ my thoughts

what course may be taken, to ease the nation of so grievous an incumbrance. But I am not in the

least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known, that they are every day dying, and

rotting, by cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as

to the young labourers, they are now in almost as hopeful a condition. They cannot get work,

and consequently pine away from want of nourishment, to a degree, that if at any time they are

accidentally hired to common labour, they have not strength to perform it, and thus the country

and themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.

I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my subject. I think the advantages by the

proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.

For first, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom

we are yearly over-run, being the principal breeders of the nation, as well as our most

dangerous enemies, and who stay at home on purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to

the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by the absence of so many good Protestants, who

have chosen rather to leave their country, than stay at home and pay tithes against their

conscience to an episcopal curate.

Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be

made liable to a distress, and help to pay their landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being

already seized, and money a thing unknown.

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Thirdly, Whereas the maintainance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old, and

upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation's stock

will be thereby encreased fifty thousand pounds per annum, besides the profit of a new dish,

introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom, who have any refinement in

taste. And the money will circulate among our selves, the goods being entirely of our own

growth and manufacture.

Fourthly, The constant breeders, besides the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the

sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year.

Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great custom to taverns, where the vintners will certainly

be so prudent as to procure the best receipts for dressing it to perfection; and consequently

have their houses frequented by all the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves upon their

knowledge in good eating; and a skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his guests, will

contrive to make it as expensive as they please.

Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to marriage, which all wise nations have either

encouraged by rewards, or enforced by laws and penalties. It would encrease the care and

tenderness of mothers towards their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to

the poor babes, provided in some sort by the publick, to their annual profit instead of expence.

We should soon see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring

the fattest child to the market. Men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of

their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, or sow when they are

ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a

miscarriage.

Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the addition of some thousand

carcasses in our exportation of barrel'd beef: the propagation of swine's flesh, and improvement

in the art of making good bacon, so much wanted among us by the great destruction of pigs, too

frequent at our tables; which are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown,

fat yearly child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a Lord Mayor's feast, or

any other publick entertainment. But this, and many others, I omit, being studious of brevity.

Supposing that one thousand families in this city, would be constant customers for infants flesh,

besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly at weddings and christenings, I

compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses; and the rest of

the kingdom (where probably they will be sold somewhat cheaper) the remaining eighty

thousand.

I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should

be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the kingdom. This I freely

own, and 'twas indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. I desire the reader will

observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual Kingdom of Ireland, and for no other

that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon Earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other

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expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither cloaths, nor

houshold furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the

materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: Of curing the expensiveness of pride,

vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: Of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and

temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the

inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our animosities and factions, nor acting any longer like

the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: Of being a

little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have

at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty,

industry, and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our

native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure,

and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing,

though often and earnestly invited to it.

Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least

some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them

into practice.

But, as to my self, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary

thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which,

as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expence and little trouble, full in

our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging England. For this kind of

commodity will not bear exportation, and flesh being of too tender a consistence, to admit a

long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country, which would be glad to eat

up our whole nation without it.

After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to reject any offer, proposed by

wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But before

something of that kind shall be advanced in contradiction to my scheme, and offering a better, I

desire the author or authors will be pleased maturely to consider two points. First, As things

now stand, how they will be able to find food and raiment for a hundred thousand useless

mouths and backs. And secondly, There being a round million of creatures in humane figure

throughout this kingdom, whose whole subsistence put into a common stock, would leave them

in debt two million of pounds sterling, adding those who are beggars by profession, to the bulk

of farmers, cottagers and labourers, with their wives and children, who are beggars in effect; I

desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold to attempt an

answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day

think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and

thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have since gone through,

by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the

want of common sustenance, with neither house nor cloaths to cover them from the

inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of intailing the like, or greater

miseries, upon their breed for ever.

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I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring

to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country, by

advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the

rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine

years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

FROM THE REPUBLIC (THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE) BY PLATO

Translated by B. Jowett

BOOK VII.

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is

enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a

underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching

all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have

their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see

before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their

heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and

between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will

see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which

marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the

puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts

of

vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and

various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are

talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the

shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of

the cave?

53

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were

never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would

only see the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not

suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the

other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by

spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows

of the images.

That is certain.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners

are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them

is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round

and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the

glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of

which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive

some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but

that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned

towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his

reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to

the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not

be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw

are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

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And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have

a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the

objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in

reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True, he said.

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and

rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of

the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he

approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able

to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

Not all in a moment, he said.

He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And

first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and

other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he

will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled

heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the

sun or the light of the sun by day?

Certainly.

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of

him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not

in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.

Certainly.

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and

the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and

in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have

been accustomed to behold?

Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.

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And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den

and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate

himself on the change, and pity them?

Certainly, he would.

And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on

those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark

which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were

together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to

the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and

glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

'Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,'

and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after

their manner?

Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than

entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.

Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun

to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have

his eyes full of darkness?

To be sure, he said.

And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the

shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while

his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and

the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might

be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him

that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was

better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose

another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender,

and they would put him to death.

No question, he said.

56

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the

previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of

the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret

the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual

world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have

expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or

false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good

appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen,

is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and

right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world,

and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and

that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in

public or private life must have his eye fixed.

I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.

Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this

beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their

souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to

dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be

trusted.

Yes, very natural.

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine

contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a

ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has

become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight

in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows

of images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of

those who have never yet seen absolute justice?

Anything but surprising, he replied.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of

theeyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming

out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the

mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers

this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not

be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has

come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because

unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is

dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his

condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he

have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light,

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there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him

who returns from above out of the light into the den.

That, he said, is a very just distinction.