{Writing over a century ago, Gerald Stanley Lee, a self-proclaimed ‘disagreeable character,’ denounced modern education for forcing books upon children who didn’t want them, for turning reading into drudgery rather than pleasure, and for using the printed word to intimidate rather than to inspire the imagination. Shades of 11th-grade English class, circa 1965!}
“I never read if I can help it.” (Gerald Stanley Lee)
Gerald Stanley Lee, from The Lost Art of Reading (1907):
Do you not know what it means when you, a civilized, cultivated human being, can stand face to face with a list headed “books of the week,” and when, unblinking and shameless, and without a cry of protest, you actually read it through, without seeing, or seeming to see, for a single moment that right there in that list, in the fact that there is such a list, your civilization is on trial for its life? That any society or nation or century that is shallow enough to publish as many books as that has yet to face the most awful, the most unprecedented, the most headlong-coming crisis in the history of the human race?
I was born to read. I spent all my early years, as I remember them, with books, peering softly about in them. My whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence of books, with all my thoughts lying open about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them. When I looked at a shelf of books, I felt the whole world flocking to me.
I have been civilized now, I should say, twenty, or possibly twenty-five, years, and my whole being has changed. I cannot so much as look upon a great many books in a library or any other heaped-up place, without feeling bleak and heartless. I never read if I can help it. My whole attitude toward current literature is grouchy and snappish, a kind of perpetual interrupted “What are you ringing my doorbell now for?" attitude. I am a disagreeable character.
It is a serious question whether the average American youth is ever given a chance to thirst for knowledge. He thirsts for ignorance instead. From the very first he is hemmed in by knowledge. The kindergarten with its suave relentlessness, its perfunctory cheerfulness, closes in upon the life of every child with himself. The dear old-fashioned breathing spell he used to have after getting here — whither has it gone? The rough, strong, ruthless, unseemly, grown-up world crowds to the very edge of every beginning life. It has no patience with trailing clouds of glory. Flocks of infants every year — newcomers to this planet — who can but watch them sadly, huddled closer and closer to the little strip of wonder that is left near the land from which they came? No lingering away from us. No infinite holiday. Childhood walks a precipice crowded to the brink of birth. We tabulate its moods. We register its learning inch by inch. We draw its poor little premature soul out of its body breath by breath. Infants are well informed now. The suckling has nerves. A few days more he will be like all the rest of us.
There was a time when, if a man revealed in conversation that he was familiar with poetic structure in John Keats, it meant something about the man — his temperament, his imaginative or delighting power. Now, it means that he has taken a course in poetics in college, or teaches English in a high school, and is carrying deadly information about with him wherever he goes. It does not mean that he has a spark of the Keats spirit in him, or that he could have endured being in the same room with Keats, or Keats could have endured being in the same room with him, for fifteen minutes.
The greatest inconvenience of being born in the latter half of the nineteenth century is the almost constant compulsion one is under of finding people out, of making a distinction between the worthwhile people who know a beautiful thing and the boors of culture who know all about it. One sees on every hand today persons occupying positions of importance who have been taken through all the motions of education, from the bottom to the top, but who, whatever their positions might be, are clumsy and futile with knowledge. Their culture has not been made over into themselves. They have acquired it largely under mob-influence (the Dead Level of intelligence), and all that they can do with it, not wanting it, is to be teachery with it — to force it on other people who do not want it.
Whether in the origin, processes, or results of their learning, these people have all the attributes of a mob. Their influence and force in civilization is a mob influence, and it operates in the old and classic fashion of mobs upon all who oppose it. It constitutes at present the most important and securely intrenched intimidating force that modem society presents against the actual culture of the world, whether in the schools or out of them. Its voice is in every street, and its shout of derision may be heard in almost every walk of life against all who refuse to conform to it. There are but very few who refuse. Millions of human beings, young and old, in meek and willing rows are seen on every side, standing before It, the Dead Level, anxious to do anything to be graded up to It, or to be graded down to It, offering their heads to be taken off, their necks to be stretched, or their waists, willing to live footless all their days, anything, anything whatever, bless their hearts! to know that they are on the Level, the Dead Level, the precise and exact Dead Level of Intelligence. The fact that this mob-power keeps its hold by using books instead of bricks is merely a matter of form.
If John Milton had had any idea when he wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ that it was going to be used mostly to batter children's minds with, it is doubtful if he would ever have had the heart to write it. It does not damage a book very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf little longer than it ought to. But to come crashing down into the exquisite filaments of a human brain with it, to use it to keep a brain from continuing to be a brain — that is, an organ with all its reading senses acting and reacting warm and living in it—is a very serious matter. It always ends in the same way, this modem brutality with books. Even Bibles cannot stand it. Human nature stands it least of all. That books of all things in this world, made to open men's instincts with, should be so generally used to shut them up with, is one of the saddest signs we have of the caricature of culture that is having its way in our modem world. It is getting so that the only way the average dinned-at, educated modem boy, shut in with masterpieces, can really get to read is in some still overlooked moment when people are too tired of him to do him good. Then softly, perhaps guiltily, left all by himself with a book he stumbles upon, his soul suddenly steals out and loves something.
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Gerald Stanley Lee - Wikipedia
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