Ninth lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 9: On Education
English 104A
UC Santa Barbara
Spring 2012
30 April 2012
Call it education
It was somewhere in between
You gave me some sound advice
But I wasn't listening.
…............................
Hardly education
All them books I didn't read
They just sat there on my shelf
Looking much smarter than me.
—Modest Mouse, “Education,” from We Were
Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (2007)

2. Education in Babbitt
● The value of education is (often) direct economic
value:
Ted: “I don’t see what’s the use of law-school—or
even finishing high school. I don’t want to go to
college ’specially. Honest, there’s a lot of fellows that
have graduated from college that don’t begin to
make as much money as fellows that went to work
early. Old Shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the
High, he’s a what-is-it from Columbia and he sits up
all night reading a lot of greasy books and he’s
always spieling about the ‘value of languages,’ and
the poor soak doesn’t make but eighteen hundred a
year, and no traveling salesman would thin of
working for that.” (64; ch. 6, sec. 3)

3. “The advertisements were truly philanthropic […]
The second announced that ‘Mr. P.R., formerly
making only eighteen a week in a barber shop,
writes to us that since taking our course, he is
now pulling down $5,000 as an Osteo-vitalic
Physician.’” (69; ch. 6, sec. 3)
Babbitt: “[…] smatter of fact, there’s a whole lot of
valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry
and French and subjects that never brought in
anybody a cent.” (71)
Ted: “I don’t see why they give us this old-
fashioned junk by Milton and Shakespeare and
Wordsworth and all these has-beens […] These
teachers—how do they get that way?” (63)

4. ● Education has direct economic value because it
opens up opportunities to increased earning
potential:
George Babbitt: “Still, that music-study stunt might
be pretty fair, though. There’s no reason why, if
efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they
have to routing products in a factory, they couldn’t
figure out some scheme so a person wouldn’t have
to monkey with all this practicing and exercises that
you get in music.” (70; ch. 6, sec. 3)
Babbitt: “I certainly do protest against any effort to
get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories
into the professions. They’re too crowded already,
and what’ll we do for workmen if all these fellows go
and get educated?” (72)

5. ● Often, this is not because of the knowledge or
critical thinking skills imparted by education, but
by the social advantages granted by school
membership:
Babbitt: “the Engineering School hasn’t got the
standing the College has.” (256; ch. 26, sec. 3)
● In many cases, this is because education
provides an opportunity to assume class
superiority:
Babbitt: “I’ve found out it’s a might nice thing to be
able to say you’re a B.A. Some client […] gets to
shooting off his mouth about economics or literature
or foreign trade conditions, and you just ease in in
something like, ‘When I was in college—course I got
my B.A. In sociology and all that junk—’ Oh, it puts an
awful crimp in their style!” (72; ch. 6, sec. 3)

6. “Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they
insist that Education should be confined to some particular
and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work,
which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if every
thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where
there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a
return in kind. This they call make Education and Instruction
‘useful,’ and ‘Utility’ becomes their watchword. With a
fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on
to ask what there is to show for the expense of a University;
what is the real worth in the market of the article called ‘a
Liberal Education,’ on the supposition that it does not teach
us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve
our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does
not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and
that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in
chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of
every kind.”
—John Henry Cardinal Newman, “The Idea of a University”

7. ● Education is threatening because it has the
potential to destabilize the existing social order:
“In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections
of Zenith, especially in the ‘young married set,’
there were many women who had nothing to do.
[…] They had but two, one, or no children; and
despite the myth that the Great War had made work
respectable, their husbands objected to their
‘wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas’ in
unpaid social work.” (102; ch. 9, sec. 1)
Ted: “Ever since somebody slipped up and let you
out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut
conversations about the what-nots and so-on-and-
so-forths.” Later: “Oh, ain’t we select since we went
to that hen college!” (15-16; ch. 2, sec. 2)

8. ● This is, in part, because the people who are educated
are trained to ask questions:
Babbitt's speech to the Zenith Real Estate Board: “The worst
menace to sound government is not the avowed socialists
but a lot of cowards who work under cover—the long-haired
gentry who call themselves ‘liberals’ and ‘radicals’ and ‘non-
partisan’ and ‘intelligentsia’ and God only knows how many
other trick names!”
● Compare these to Babbitt’s depiction of …
“a God-fearing, hustling, successful, two-fisted Regular Guy,
who belongs to some church with pep and piety to it, who
belongs to the Boosters or the Rotarians or the Kiwanis, to
the Elks or Moose or Red Men or Knights of Columbus or
any one of a score of organizations of good, jolly, kidding,
laughing, sweating, upstanding, lend-a-handing Royal Good
Fellows, who plays hard and works hard, and whose answer
to his critics is a square-toed boot that’ll teach the grouches
and smart alecks to respect the He-man and get out and
root for Uncle Samuel, U.S.A.!” (157; ch. 14, sec. 3)

9. Education in You Can’t Go Home Again
● Education, again, is often treated as something
with a direct economic value, but this is
presented as a foil to what might be called “the
real value” of education.
● It is, however, a broader concept in Wolfe’s
novel than in Lewis’s – education is often a
more holistic and less institution-directed
attribute of a person:
Mr. Marple, George Webber’s neighbor in Brooklyn:
“I’m a great student of psychology – I can read
faces the minute I look at a guy.” (343; ch. 27)

10. ● “Education proper,” in this holistic sense, is
often divorced from its academic incarnation:
Fox Edwards: “You see, Miss Allen is an – an
academic kind of person – I guess, kind of an old
maid, really, […] and that kind of person, darling,
just wouldn’t be able to understand what Whitman
and Mark Twain and Keats are like.” (389; ch. 28)
“and then, in a tone of mincing parody, he [Franz
Heilig] quoted from an article he had read: ‘If I may
say so, the transparence of ze Darstellung in
Vebber's work […] Zis bloody little fool who wrote
zat piece about you in die Dame – zis damned little
aest'ete wiz zese phrases about ‘ze transparence of
ze Darstellung’ – may I tell you somesing? […] I spit
upon zese bloody people!’” (552; ch. 39)

11. ● What represents holistic personal development is not
academic knowledge, but rather the creation of artistic
literary work.
● “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
● "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's
done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to
do it themselves." —Brendan Behan, Irish poet
● “He [George Webber] saw now that you can’t go home again
– not ever. […] Ended now for him, with the sharp and clean
finality of the closing of a door was the time when his dark
roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could be left to feed
upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-
absorbed designs. Henceforth they must spread outward –
away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that
holds man’s spirit prisoner – outward, outward toward the
rich and life-giving spirit soil of a new freedom in the wide
world of all humanity.” (600; ch. 44)

12. George Webber’s education
● Academia at Pine Rock College is a reified,
abstract, and disconnected from the “real
business of life”:
“In our interminable discussions we were forever
trying to get at the inner essence of ‘truth,’
‘goodness,’ and ‘beauty.’ We were full of notions
about all these things. And I do not laugh at them
today. We were young, we were impassioned, and
we were sincere.” (606; ch. 45)
“And still I do not laugh at it. We took philosophy
seriously in those days, and each of us had his
own.” (607)

13. “Our Philosopher […] was a great teacher, and
what he did for us, and for others before us for
fifty years, was not to give us his ‘philosophy’ –
but to communicate to us his own alertness, his
originality, his power to think. He was a vital
force because he supplied to many of us, for the
first time in our lives, the inspiration of a
questioning intelligence. He taught us not to be
afraid to think, to question; he taught us to
examine critically the most sacrosanct of our
native prejudices and superstitions. So of
course, throughout the state, the bigots hated
him; but his own students worshiped him to
idolatry.” (608; ch. 45)

14. ● George’s formal education is insufficient because
it does not connect these abstract “Concepts”
with actual questions of how he should act in his
life:
“It was recalled how five of us […] had taken our
classmate Bell out to the playing field one night,
blindfolded him, and compelled him to dance upon a
barrel. It was recalled how he stumbled and toppled
from the barrel, fell on a broken bottle neck, severed
his jugular, and bled to death within five minutes. It
was recalled, then, how the five of us […] were
expelled, brought up for trial, released in the custody
of our parents or nearest relatives, and deprived of
the rights of citizenship by legislative act.” (609; ch.
45)
“the verdict quickly became: ‘They didn’t mean to do
it. They were just damn fools.’” (610)

15. Education in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
● Formal education is still a comparatively
unusual experience, especially past secondary
school.
Biff Brannon on Jake Blount: “Therefore if this
difference was not in the body it was probably in the
mind. He was like a man who had served a term in
prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived
for a long time with foreigners in South America.”
(21; part 1, ch. 2)
– The South lagged behind other parts of the country for a
long time in implementing universal compulsory
education laws.

16. ● Many characters assume knowledge is
primarily transmitted outside the structure of
formal educational institutions.
● In part, this is because education is limited in scope
and not equally available to all citizens.
● In part, this is because many characters assume
that educational institutions provide brainwashing
rather than meaningful education.
● Jake Blount: “A conspiracy. A vast and insidious
conspiracy. Obscurantism.” (24; part 1, ch. 2)
● Dr. Copeland’s purpose: “All his life he know that
there was a reason for his working. He always knew
that he was meant to teach his people. All day he
would go with his bag from house to house and on
all things he would talk to them.” (74; part 1, ch. 5)

17. ● “He [Dr. Copeland] knew that Daisy was
teaching the children the cult of meekness.”
(81; part 1, ch. 5)
● Jake Blount: “I worked in a pecan grove near
where Miss Clara lived. I got to know her and at
night sometimes I would go to her house. She
talked to me. Understand, I didn’t begin to know
all at once. That’s not the way it happens to any
of us. It was gradual. I began to read. I would
work just so I could put aside enough money to
knock off for a while and study.” (151; part 2,
ch. 4)

18. Dr. Copeland’s speech on Karl Marx
“This man understood as did Jesus. But his
thoughts were not concerned with Heaven or the
future of the dead. His mission was for the living.
For the great masses of human beings who work
and suffer and work until they die.” (188; part 2, ch.
6)
“All that we own is our bodies. And we sell our
bodies every day we live. We sell them when we
go out in the morning to our jobs and when we
labor all day. We are forced to sell at any price, at
any time, for any purpose. We are forced to sell
our bodies so that we can eat and live.” (190)

19. “For every rich man there were a thousand poor
people who worked for this rich man to make
him richer. […] you will find that these bosses
have bosses above them and those bosses have
bosses higher up – so that the real people who
control all this work, which makes any article
worth money, are very few.” (188-9; part 2, ch. 6)
“Some of you young people here this morning
may feel the need to be teachers or nurses or
leaders of your race. But most of you will be
denied. You will have to sell yourselves for a
useless purpose in order to keep alive. You will
be thrust back and defeated. The young chemist
picks cotton. The young writer is unable to learn
to read. The teacher is held in useless slavery at
some ironing board.” (193)

20. Blount’s monologue to Singer
“But say a man does know. He sees the world as it
is and he looks back thousands of years to see
how it all come about. He watches the slow
agglutination of capital and power and he sees its
pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house.
He sees how men have to rob their brothers in
order to live. He sees children starving and women
working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a
whole damn army of unemployed and billions of
dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted.”
(152; part 2, ch. 4)
“Our motto, ‘Action,’ signified the razing of
capitalism.” (156)