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I hope none of this makes you feel badly. It is not intended to be so. I felt all this long ago, but I was a student then. I am a professional writer now. I have earned a difficult thing, the permission to think and act for myself.
A year or more ago, I stood behind Douglas Bement’s desk—so lately watching that same desk from the other side—and talked to his class about this profession of writing. The students were, many of them, attending when I was attending myself. I knew a lot of them by their first names. I talked to them about the profession of writing, not the art and I left them somewhat cold. No amount of impassioned argument could sway them aside from a foregone conclusion concerning the outside world. They were being taught—and Bement is a fair teacher—how to write, they thought. That was enough. I was there, I told them, because Bement had delivered several erroneous remarks over the radio two days before on this profession of writing. I tried to assure them that out in the world they could sell their wares and save themselves from the ugliness of desks and time clocks, that they could make a decent living with a pen if they had it in them. Nobody ever told me that. I had to find it out through hard experience. But they did not want that worldliness. They wanted crammed facts. I did not talk to them with topic sentences and outlines, I talked to them because I knew what they would soon face. It was all for nothing. I could not shake them from a mental apathy which was quite as sticky as glue. They did not really want to think, and they would not even argue even when I spurred them to it.
I suppose this is what we call mass education. Frozen, fact-laden minds. Perhaps some of us should feel grateful for it because it is our own salvation. But I could not help but feel the sorrow of it. They were not being taught to think or study, they were being taught to gorge facts, however disrelated, obtuse or useless.
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