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Thanks.

Read The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell, formerly professor at Glassboro State Teacher’s College, available in its entirety in the Underground Grammarian section at www.sourcetext.com, along with his other books, the first being the very excellent, Less than Words Can Say, which I first read, I believe, in the early 1980s.

He had a long series of newsletters called The Underground Grammarian which were dedicated to striking terror in the hearts of those who darken understanding by use of jargon and deliberately obfuscatory speech or what I call seemingly meaningful language and what Francis Schaefer referred to as “semantic mysticism.” People from around the country from all sorts of walks of life would send in examples that he would feature and comment on. It appeared that a significantly large number were from the fields of education and government.

I used this in a story when two kids wanted to butter up a teacher to get him to spring them from study hall so they could go to the library and hash out a plot:

Frank was waiting for him.
“Okay, look, after the bell we go to Mr. Filsinger and ask him for a pass to the library.”
The bell rang.
“Just play along.”
Mr. Filsinger took roll, issued instructions, and settled back with a book. Frank raised his hand and coughed. Mr. Filsinger glanced up and waved him forward. Frank nodded in Arnold's direction. Arnold followed him to the front.
“Mr. Filsinger,” Frank began. “Arnold and I are working on a research project and—oh hey, that's a great book.”
Mr. Filsinger closed it and looked at the cover.
Frank continued. “I think the author does a superb job of delineating the instructional parameters of learning thresholds and their impact on the learner's self-referencing in the context of learner/facilitator-perceived importance of temporally-distributed content-related instructional modules—you've got to be working on your master's degree.”
“Uh, yes—yes, I am. . . That's, uh, a very good synopsis of this book.”
“Well, Arnold and I are working on a research project of our own and we'd like to go to the resource center.”
Mr. Filsinger filled out a hallpass and handed it to Frank.
“Just return before the end of the hour.”

The empty hall echoed with the chirps of their basketball shoes. They walked by the door to the gymnastics room where the coach was urging some poor slob to expend more strength to reach the top of the rope by telling him just how little he actually had.
“What was the name of that book?”
“Learning to Fail.”
“And what did you say to him—you know, the synopsis?”
“I don't know and he didn't, either.”
“No, come on.”
“Okay, uh. . . daily homework that makes sense helps the student to learn more and feel better about himself and the class.”
“So why didn't you just say that?”
“Because it's so much more impressive the other way. Besides, we're dealing with someone who's going for his master's in education and we did want a pass to the library, remember? We had no choice but—as he would say it—to employ procedures that would maximally impact him toward that objective.”

I believe the many examples of semantic mysticism sent to him from schools, from teacher ed programs, is what led him to write The Graves of Academe and begin to explore the origins of what had led, by his day, to the absolutely moronic state of what passed for education. He correctly identified some of the principal players but he didn’t appear to connect them or their movement to the invasion of the progressive socialists only a couple of decades earlier.

I had found a book a few years ago from the U of Chicago Press about the creators of the concept of the “juvenile delinquent” here in Chicago. I had briefly skimmed through it and noted the time, place, academic pedigree, and political orientation of its creators.

I remembered all the nutty crap I saw in my teacher ed program in what was then the highest ranked program of teacher education in decades in the 37 states accredited by the National Council of Teacher Accreditation. I remembered one of my professors telling me about one of the evaluators, who was particularly hard-assed and a NUN, saying that she believed that no private college or university should be able to have a department of teacher education, that they should all be controlled by the state. I saw all the same nutty crap whether it was Illinois or Kentucky or New York. And then I read The Graves of Academe and I knew what I had seen all had a common history.

I remembered that Chicago was a hotbed of the early labor movement, well, the part of it here taken over by progressive socialists, though their later political symbionts, the Democrat Party, had earlier in the South during Reconstruction had created labor unions for the purpose of excluding black artisans and tradesmen, now free men and mostly Republican, from competing with them.

I remembered how Chicago was a major center of Communist and far left activity in the earlier part of the 20th century with Frank Marshall Davis, and Valerie Jarrett’s father and father-in-law, as well as the parents of one of Obama’s first advisors, David Axelrod. Of course, there was later folks like Bill Ayers and his wife.

I remembered the social gospel movement and the prominent place it had in Chicago history. I seemed to recall that William Jennings Bryant’s remark about crucifying mankind on a cross of gold was made here in Chicago. I remembered how it was about that same time that many prominent Protestant seminaries had been taken over by what some referred to as “modernism,” that is, the reinterpretation of Biblical history from a naturalist viewpoint and the reinterpretation of Biblical doctrine from a political point of view.

And I thought about what the federal government was like back then and what life APART from the federal government was like at that time and how a federal government that the progressive socialists could take over and use did not then exist and that they would be forced to roll their own and thought about just what they would have to do to make it happen.

And then all those things just came together and I saw how and why they did it.