Teaching English in a Mass Society

A Series of Reflections on Excellence in Mass Communications

The rise of the more massive media of communication has not a whit changed the traditional dual role of the English teacher: he still remains the custodian of integrity in linguistic behavior and the partisan of excellence in the realm of taste and the arts. But this new cultural democracy has radically changed the context within which he must pursue his traditional ends; if his methods change, it is not then because his ideals or objectives are diminished but rather because the new conditions suggest new ways of ensuring old values.

Paradoxically, the more massive media of communication are both better and much worse in their effects than most of our classrooms. When Robert Frost makes his annual Christmas appearance on "Meet the Press," our feeble verbal attempts to define his individuality to our students seem puny indeed; or when Maurice Evans stages a Shakespearean classic on TV, the pedagogical process of explicating the play's imagery and theme is enormously accelerated.

Yet the median level of the central medium of our time unquestionably erodes the highest values of American culture. There is nothing intrinsic to TV that is responsible for this erosion. TV's ability to erode the complex web of relationships that make a high civilization possible is a matter of concern to us primarily because of its centrality, its five-hours-a-day mortgage on the leisure of the American family. Other media before its appearance helped create the traditions of a fun culture: P. T. Barnum's ballyhooey, the canonization of Hollywood stardom, press prefabrication of sports heroes and vicarious sensation, radio's applied bathos.

Television's first decade has scared us more than these earlier manifestations of a sandbox society because it has coexisted with the global stalemate of the Cold War. We thus became painfully aware that while we had been institutionalizing a painless mediocrity for the past forty years, our chief competitor had been inculcating a Spartan rigor in its citizenry.

The first responses to our guilty realization that we had been living beyond our intellectual means have not been reassuring to the humanist: Instead of recovering our lost democratic ideal of maximum individual growth, we have resorted to a kind of intercontinental muscle-flexing. Cape Canaveral could only be considered an answer by a people whose leisure is symbolized by Miami Beach, Las Vegas and Disneyland; and whose collective emotions are exhausted by the banalities of Ralph Edwards' "This Is Your Life" and the grim joie de vivre of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand."

The problem, then, is how to avoid panic after we have brought our culture to the brink of disaster and how to persuade our fellow American prodigals who have wasted our substance to reaffirm the best in our heritage and mercilessly bait those Pied Pipers of Play who, like Mad's Alfred Neuman, naively retort, "What, Me Worry?!" It is not being unnecessarily cosmic to begin a disquisition on the special problems of teaching English in contemporary America with these reflections on how an entertainment ethos has taken over our mass democracy at the very moment in time when a fast converging outside world brings us our severest test.

For our ability to use the language for dispassionate reflection and careful expression is at the crux of any widespread recovery of mature national purpose; and what happens in the English classroom today determines the possible levels of discourse on the public interest tomorrow. Similarly, the prevalence of sub-art and pseudo-art in the American landscape is both symbol and cause of the mediocrity of our aspirations as a people. Our ability to instill an affection, indeed a zeal, for true art in our students, then, also becomes essential any recovery of excellence as an ideal in American civilization. Thus we are brought back to the basic issues: How can the English teacher best pursue the traditional goals of linguistic mastery and esthetic maturity under the changed conditions of a mass society? To answer that question, we must describe the changed conditions.

The New Milieu

More people with more money and more time to choose the qualities of their lives: that is the new milieu in digest form. And each "more" is a complicating factor in the tedious if rewarding task of English teachers introducing students to the complexities of language and art. We don't have to be reminded of the "more" people, from the front of a classroom bursting at the seams. But there are side effects of the population explosion caused by industrialization. The rapidity of the changes has left most of our cities in a shambles, their central cores rotting, the most intelligent and responsible people having fled to the temporary surcease of the polite suburbs. Yet the brutality of the uncared for city takes an esthetic toll.

Every time we tell our students that the works of art discussed in class represent the best meaning of man, we risk student cynicism. For the disparity between what we hold out for them and what their outside lives will support is often too great to bring the response of aspiration; the less difficult response is cynical acquiescence in the dehumanizing standards of the decaying city. We must convince them that the humanities are neither verbal rituals nor weakened withdrawals from reality. (If we do, we run our own risk of becoming hypocritical.) The humanities are meant to transform man and his man-made environment. We must always insist that these debasing effects of mass production and mass communication are transitory phases, at least they can be overcome if man cares enough to expunge them. Teach them to believe that slums start with sloppy sentences.

"More" money in inexperienced hands has meant the excesses of the hard sell. We should neither feel superior to advertising nor be skeptical about its ability to mature as a social institution. The $11 billion dollars spent on advertising in 1959 was only a small part of the total Gross National Product of nearly $500 billion. Yet it is a crucial part, for it acts as a gatekeeper for the contents of the mass media system. And the sponsor's penchant for avoiding controversy is as well known as the tendency of advertising messages to appeal to pride, avarice, lust, and other qualities of the human animal that don't really need formal encouragement.

And advertising's power to debase the language is clear enough to English teachers, in spite of Dr. Bergen Evans' permissiveness about "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." (The substitution of prepositions for conjunctions is less important in my judgment than advertising's constant diminution of the superlative and the weasel worded logic of some of its claims.) But English teachers are perhaps not as aware of differences within the advertising world as they should be. Under pressure from the intelligent and articulate community, enlightened businessmen are raising the standards of both form and substance in their advertising.

The graphic standards of much American advertising are truly exciting, and deserve attention for their intrinsic excellence and for rhetorical power they achieve. The New York Times ads in The Nezw Yorker, Ben Shahn's newspaper tune-in ads for CBS-TV's Hemingway productions, Bert and Harry Piel's spiel, Doyle Dane and Bernbach's campaigns for El Al airlines: these and many more show that it is economically feasible to appeal to the intelligence and sense of humor of large sectors of the public. And the decision of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey to write into its contract its refusal to control the sophisticated Broadway scripts of WNTA-TV's "The Play of the Week" promises higher levels of corporate artistic patronage from the business community. The pressure should not be a rancorous appeal for the abolition of advertising, but a steady push under the mature standards already achieved.

"More" time is at once our greatest challenge and most serious problem. For if not for culture then for mental health, it is essential that the beneficiaries of democratized leisure-everyone-be shown that the myth of "free time" is one of our greatest delusions in America. Statisticians like to reel off the figures about how much more time we have to kill than our grandfathers. The truth is that we live in so much more complex an environment than our ancestors that we need to reinvest much if not most of our so-called free time into deeper personal maturity and wider social intercourse just to keep our complicated society viable.

It is probably inevitable that as the democratic masses are first released from the bonds of unrewarding work or unremitting toil that they should go on a binge of private fun. But if our society is not to keep piling up the social deficits that we sweep swiftly under the rug of non-stop living room entertainment, then a considerable portion of the new free time must be devoted to political action and cultural participation that will only be as good as the education we gave them for using language in civilized discourse and understanding of the arts.

More people with more money and more time to choose is not necessarily an equation of despair. The English teacher is in an ideal position to change the magic word "more" into the mature standard "better," in short, to fulfill the American promise by seeing to it that our revolution in quantity, already achieved, is followed by an equally pervasive revolution in quality. Inhibiting such a development is a climate of belief in America which is going in the opposite direction.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 5 (May, 1960), pp. 354-356
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English