Tuesday
At this point in history, rightwing parent groups and legislators are tumbling all over themselves to attack teachers who get their students to engage with America’s complex and often bloody racial history. The latest is the governor of Florida pushing legislation that would prohibit the state’s public schools from making anyone “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” Meanwhile, Virginia’s governor has set up an e-mail helpline so that parents can report any teachers teaching “divisive” subjects.
What such people want instead, I suspect, are teachers like those who taught me Tennessee history in 7th grade and U.S. history in 11th. I’ve written in the past that I had segregationist instructors who failed to mention the trail of tears when they taught us about Andrew Jackson and the horrors of slavery when they taught us about the Civil War. Their job, as they saw it, was to indoctrinate us in the reigning ideology rather than to encourage us to think and explore for ourselves.
Pope designates such a teacher as one of his dunces in his mock epic masterpiece The Dunciad (1742). Richard Bentley, a noted editor, was famous for his dictatorial pronouncements and narrow readings. Pope models teachers like Bentley on one of Satan’s fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost: the figure of Moloch, a Palestinian god to whom (or so the Israelites claimed) children were sacrificed. But whereas Milton’s angel demands literal child sacrifice, the Bentleys of the world demand classroom sacrifice.
So that you can compare the two, here’s Milton’s Moloch:
Firs Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents tears…
And now Pope’s Bentley. One doesn’t literally die under such an instructor’s tutelage, but the students of Eton, Winton and Westminster are regularly flogged with a birchen rod (“dreadful wand”):
When lo! a Spectre rose, whose index-hand
Held forth the Virtue of the dreadful Wand;
His beaver’d brow a birchen garland wears,
Dropping with Infant’s blood, and Mother’s tears.
O’er ev’ry vein a shudd’ring horror runs;
Eton and Winton shake thro’ all their Sons.
All Flesh is humbled, Westminster’s bold race
Shrink, and confess the Genius of the place:
The pale Boy-Senator yet tingling stands,
And holds his breeches close with both his hands.
Bentley is concerned with literature, not history, but his literature lessons are as circumscribed as my history lessons were. Authoritarian teachers, which is what rightwing extremists want, know that there is only one truth, no matter how narrow it may seem. Here’s Bentley proclaiming his views:
Then thus. Since Man from beast by Words is known,
Words are Man’s province, Words we teach alone.
When Reason doubtful, like the Samian letter,
Points him two ways, the narrower is the better.
Plac’d at the door of Learning, youth to guide,
We never suffer it to stand too wide.
To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,
As Fancy opens the quick springs of Sense,
We ply the Memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain,
Confine the thought, to exercise the breath;
And keep them in the pale of Words till death.
Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design’d,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind…
Along with advocating narrow textual interpretations, Bentley also appears to insist that students parrot back to him his own words. Imagination and thinking outside the box (wit) are not allowed.
Revel once more in the brilliance of that final couplet:
Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design’d,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind…
Our rightwing legislators and parents want to hang that padlock.
