Way back. I mean waaaay baaack, 1815 it was. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth published a two-volume work entitled Practical Education.* Think about that. The War of 1812 ended, a powerful hurricane called The Great September Gale hit New England, and James Madison was President. The Handel and Haydn Society gave its first performance in Boston, and a number of influential people, like Robert Fulton, John Singleton Copley, and Archbishop John Carroll died that year, to be replaced by more significant people like Horace Wells, anesthesia pioneer, Henry Bibb, abolitionist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton the suffragist, John Banvard the painter, and George Meade, Civil War general, who were all born that year.
Modern America was shaping up, getting some of its current character. And along that road from the explorers through colonial days to the young republic and more recent times, the country developed an educational system, at first under the auspices of people imbued with devotion and then under those of more secular bent. And there were the Edgeworths, thinking about what education “should be about” and how it relates to our daily lives. You might be surprised that all the issues they address we still address today.
First, before learning a couple of things the Edgeworths had to say, let’s address the current status. Given that Americans spend billions of dollars every year on education, it seems evident that the population has an interest in the subject. Given that there is so much contention about what should be taught and how it should be taught, it also seems evident that we have not, in more than two centuries, resolved our educational problems. It also seems unlikely that a diverse population in the melting pot called America will ever, regardless of efforts to “standardize” and efforts to propagandize, ever find unity on the issues of what and how.
Second, let’s look at what the Edgeworths say. They address a wide variety of issues, one of which is applicable to those of us living in the Age of Propaganda: “On religion and politics we have been silent because we have no ambition to gain partisans, or to make proselytes, and because we do not address ourselves exclusively to any sect or to any party.”
Think of that last sentence: People in education without an agenda. How different from the unionized faculty of today!
Eventually, the Edgeworths get around to discussing the use of language. And that’s where the title of this blog comes in. In the Age of Political Correctness, we are accustomed to euphemisms—that is, to “acceptable” euphemisms. Every group seems to have those subtly described behaviors that serve to protect the mind from specific realities. “We must not only be exact in speaking truth to our pupils, but to everybody else…to friends, to enemies” (171).
And now, numbers. “Numbers keep one another in countenance: they form a society for themselves; and sometimes by peculiar phrases, and an appropriate language confound the established opinions of virtue and vice and enjoy a species of self-complacency independent of public opinion and often in direct opposition to their former conscience. Whenever any set of men [we can also say women] want to get rid of the shame annexed to particular actions they begin by changing the names and epithets which have been generally used to express them, and which they know are associated with the feelings of shame: these feelings are not awakened by the new language and by degrees they are forgotten ore they are supposed to have been merely prejudices and habits, which former methods of speaking taught people to reverence. Thus the most disgraceful combinations of men, who live by violating and evading the laws of society, have all a peculiar phraseology amongst themselves, by which jocular ideas are associated with the most disreputable actions” (217).
The next time you listen to a political debate or one on education policy, observe how groups (that is, in the Edgeworths’ terminology, “numbers”) use their special phraseology to justify their own actions with jocularity or to ridicule their opponents’ actions, language, or thought processes. The “custom” of any group “has the prescriptive right to talk nonsense.”
*Published by J. Freancis Lippitt, Providence, and T. B. Wait & Sons, Boston, T. B. Wait and Sons, Printers, 1815. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28708/28708-h/28708-h.htm#CHAPTER_I
Modern America was shaping up, getting some of its current character. And along that road from the explorers through colonial days to the young republic and more recent times, the country developed an educational system, at first under the auspices of people imbued with devotion and then under those of more secular bent. And there were the Edgeworths, thinking about what education “should be about” and how it relates to our daily lives. You might be surprised that all the issues they address we still address today.
First, before learning a couple of things the Edgeworths had to say, let’s address the current status. Given that Americans spend billions of dollars every year on education, it seems evident that the population has an interest in the subject. Given that there is so much contention about what should be taught and how it should be taught, it also seems evident that we have not, in more than two centuries, resolved our educational problems. It also seems unlikely that a diverse population in the melting pot called America will ever, regardless of efforts to “standardize” and efforts to propagandize, ever find unity on the issues of what and how.
Second, let’s look at what the Edgeworths say. They address a wide variety of issues, one of which is applicable to those of us living in the Age of Propaganda: “On religion and politics we have been silent because we have no ambition to gain partisans, or to make proselytes, and because we do not address ourselves exclusively to any sect or to any party.”
Think of that last sentence: People in education without an agenda. How different from the unionized faculty of today!
Eventually, the Edgeworths get around to discussing the use of language. And that’s where the title of this blog comes in. In the Age of Political Correctness, we are accustomed to euphemisms—that is, to “acceptable” euphemisms. Every group seems to have those subtly described behaviors that serve to protect the mind from specific realities. “We must not only be exact in speaking truth to our pupils, but to everybody else…to friends, to enemies” (171).
And now, numbers. “Numbers keep one another in countenance: they form a society for themselves; and sometimes by peculiar phrases, and an appropriate language confound the established opinions of virtue and vice and enjoy a species of self-complacency independent of public opinion and often in direct opposition to their former conscience. Whenever any set of men [we can also say women] want to get rid of the shame annexed to particular actions they begin by changing the names and epithets which have been generally used to express them, and which they know are associated with the feelings of shame: these feelings are not awakened by the new language and by degrees they are forgotten ore they are supposed to have been merely prejudices and habits, which former methods of speaking taught people to reverence. Thus the most disgraceful combinations of men, who live by violating and evading the laws of society, have all a peculiar phraseology amongst themselves, by which jocular ideas are associated with the most disreputable actions” (217).
The next time you listen to a political debate or one on education policy, observe how groups (that is, in the Edgeworths’ terminology, “numbers”) use their special phraseology to justify their own actions with jocularity or to ridicule their opponents’ actions, language, or thought processes. The “custom” of any group “has the prescriptive right to talk nonsense.”
*Published by J. Freancis Lippitt, Providence, and T. B. Wait & Sons, Boston, T. B. Wait and Sons, Printers, 1815. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28708/28708-h/28708-h.htm#CHAPTER_I
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