Pastoral Landscape, 1861, Asher B. Durand
If there is to be an American revolution in quality as pervasive as that in quantity which we have nearly achieved, we shall have to give our dreams and ideals a going over. A powerful motive for bringing us as far as we have come has been our belief that we were God's chosen people. To the Puritans, it was the concept of a new Zion; to Jefferson, the notion of a natural aristocracy fulfilling the promises of a fresh start for man; to Lincoln, the idea of America as the last, best hope on earth; to the first Roosevelt, a New Nationalism; to Wilson, a New Freedom; to Franklin Roosevelt, a New Deal.
This has been the history of American idealism, a constant renewal. R.W.B. Lewis in his brilliant book, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), examines the ironies and ambiguities of what Hector De Crevecoeur called "this new man, the American." Freed from the burden of time, the new man could flourish without the frustrations of established church, aristocratic class barriers, the "useless" baggage of history.
We know now that although this was a myth, it was still a powerful ideal that spurred our development, just as the myth of the Great Garden of the West described by Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Vintage, 1957) was a mixture of illusion and truth that greatly accelerated the conquest of a great continent. Professor Smith has shown too that the myth of agrarian innocence, enduring inappropriately into an urban milieu, has tended to inhibit our understanding of, and adjustment to, an industrial society. We have come to know now that a culture cannot deny history with impunity. And the first step in any renaissance in American idealism is an honest facing of the disparity between our innocence of history and what we have actually done with the unique stewardship the past offered our nation.
If we look with honesty at our record, we cannot be complacent about how well we stand before the bar of history. Improvident of our future, we squandered irreplaceable assets: denuded virgin stands of timber, created dust bowls, piled up the huge moral and intellectual deficits symbolized by the inhumanity of our great cities; these are all tokens reminding us that a country which lives immaturely in its immediate present has too little to leave the future, almost too much to forget or make reparation for. To recover from our innocence, then, we must first of all achieve a real contact with our past, not the near hysteria of some patriotic societies, nor the obsessions of covered bridge addicts and Civil War buffs, but the sane and sober reckoning of a people proud of what they have done nobly and ashamed of what they have failed to do in spite of opportunities unparalleled in the history of man.
This is not to ask for a national melancholia, but rather for a mature reassessment of how well we have used our talents. The parable of the talents should give us humility and compassion, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," not the childish enthusiasm of an advertising executive who recently described America as "the all-time number one hit on humanity's hit parade." This I take it is the meaning of the post-Sputnik debate on the national purpose which reached an apogee in the Life magazine-New York Times series in the spring of 1960. (This series is available in paperback form from Holt-Rinehart Winston, and deserves widespread use in English classrooms.)
The crisis over excellence, to put it succinctly, is a historic one because it asks us for perhaps the last time whether or not America has been as prodigal in squandering its intellectual and moral resources as it has been in wasting its natural ones. The question that concerns us is whether or not we have left enough energy and conviction to renew our purposes to make our culture a great one as distinct from a merely good or tolerable one. No issue is more central to the major tasks of the English teacher-the pursuit of excellence in literacy and in taste. That is why it is so essential, before getting down to cases on the role of mass communication in teaching English, to consider the problem of excellence or maturity in the widest historical and cultural contexts.
John W. Gardner, president of the Carnegie Corporation, has put the matter of "creeping mediocrity" in American culture very plainly in the Life series. He believes that we should not give in to our "cult of easiness" but must prove our capacity to achieve excellence.
"Every free man, in his work and in his family life, in his public behavior and in the secret places of his heart, should see himself as a builder and maintainer of the ideals of his society. Individual Americans-truck drivers and editors, grocers and senators, beauty operators and ballplayers-can contribute to the greatness and strength of a free society, or they can help it die. How does one contribute to the greatness and strength of a free society? That is a question to which there are many true answers.
One answer is-pursue excellence! Those who are most devoted to a democratic society must be precisely the ones who insist that free men are capable of the highest standard of performance, that a free society can be a great society in the richest sense of that phrase. The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free men can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. At the simplest level, the pursuit of excellence means an increased concern for competence on the part of the individual. Keeping a free society free-and vital and strong-is no job for the half-educated and the slovenly. In a society of free men competence is a primary duty. The man who does his job well tones up the whole society.
And the man who does a slovenly job-whether he is a janitor or a judge, a surgeon or a technician-lowers the tone of the society. So do the chiselers of high and low degree, the sleight-of-hand artists who know how to gain an advantage without honest work. They are the regrettable burdens of a free society. But excellence implies more than competence. It implies a striving for the highest standards in every phase of life. We need individual excellence in all its forms, in every kind of creative endeavor, in political life, in education, in industry-in short, universally."
This, Dr. Gardner contends, cannot be achieved by "aimless or listless men." Happiness is not to be found in ease, diversion, and tranquility, but in striving toward meaningful goals. The English classroom, dedicated as it is to the consideration of great art and the painful mastery of the language, is the natural arena for such a confrontation of excellence with mediocrity.
In the same important series of essays, Cornell's Clinton Rossiter claims that "we stand at one of those rare points in history when a nation must choose consciously between greatness and mediocrity," and that to make the right choice we need a "profound, inspiring, benevolent sense of mission." We can regain our youthful idealism if we honestly face up to "a tangle of four separate yet curiously related crises: the crisis in race relations, the crisis in culture, the crisis of the community, and the crisis of peace and war-all of which are growing in intensity with each passing year." Two of these crises-those of culture and community-are particularly germane to the special interests of the English teacher:
The crisis in American culture [Professor Rossiter writes] is perhaps more obvious to the schoolteacher than to the housewife, to the artist than to the salesman. . . . we lack a widespread popular respect for the fruits of art and learning and for those who produce them, and we have much too short a supply of first class artists and intellectuals. More than that, no people in history has ever had to put up with so much vulgarity, bad taste and ugliness in its surroundings. History has flung us an exciting challenge by making us the first of all nations in which men of every rank could display a measure of taste, and we have responded by displaying bad taste on a massive scale. Let us be honest about it: we have the wealth and leisure and techniques to make a great culture an essential part of our lives, an inspiration to the world and a monument for future generations-and we have not even come close to it.
The crisis of community is of more recent date, a kind of final reckoning with generations of our thoughtless prodigality. This is the widely observed and growing gap between "the richness of our private lives and the poverty of our public services, between a standard of living inside our homes that is the highest in the world and a standard of living outside them that is fast becoming a national disgrace." His litany of decay is a disheartening one: ".. . the blight of our cities, the shortage of water and power, the disappearance of open space, the inadequacy of education, the need for recreational facilities, the high incidence of crime and delinquency, the crowding of our roads, the decay of the railroads, the ugliness of the sullied landscape, the pollution of the very air we breathe."
If we do not rise to the challenge of excellence, we will, in the judgment of Walter Lippmann, "slowly deteriorate and fall part, having lost our great energies because we did not exercise them, having lost our daring because everything was so warm and so comfortable and so cozy." The great question before us is the one William Faulkner asked in the two-page ad in Life magazine that announced the series on the national purpose: "What has happened to the American Dream? We dozed, slept and it abandoned us. There no longer sounds a unifying voice speaking our mutual hope and will."
Teachers, close as they are each day to the hope and newness that are the young, can never acquiesce in such despair. But it would be foolhardy to think that, in the good old American way, everything will work itself out in the end. The new factor in the American equation is the possibility, even the imminence, of failure. In our roles as mediators between the heritage of the past and the free men of the future, in our responsibility of acting as catalysts in the chemistry of aspiration, it will not be easy for us to transform the base ore of a complacent mass society into a metal more enduring and more attractive to sensibility and mind. Our best hope, however, is simply to look carefully at our system of mass communication and see how we can make it serve the twin purposes of English teaching: esthetic sensitivity, linguistic mastery.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 6 (Sept., 1960), pp. 431-434
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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