Your post reminded me of some misgivings I had about Bennett many years ago, which his new adventure seems to validate.
He has a listing in the ‘Who’s Who’ section of Shuteye Nation 2000.
William Bannitt. If the Pope were a Harvurd-educated Republian° politician°, he would probably act a lot like former cabinet secretary William Bannitt, writing and tirelessly promoting thousands of books about how we could solve all the country’s problems by reading books written by William Bannitt. (See “Fixing Education,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)
Here’s an excerpt from a Bannitt book on sale at Moon Books in Shuteye Town 1999.
FIXING EDUCATION
Chapter One
The decline of basic values in Amerian public education is no accident. It has been paced by a corresponding decline in the teaching of basic skills, history, and literature. Both trends serve the purpose of isolating children from the taproot of the Amerian moral and legal system in ways that make them powerless to defend themselves against an increasingly suffocating political correctness designed to replace enlightened democracy with a rigidly egalitarian, multicultural mobocracy.
When I was Secretary of Education, I found myself constantly engaged in confrontations with elementary and secondary school bureaucrats who were prepared at every turn to sacrifice attention to literacy problems in favor of endless proposals to foster ‘multicultural awareness,’ ‘gender sensitivity,’ and ‘racial tolerance.’ These bureaucrats were so intent on their aims that they would stoop to any ploy to change the subject. I have had elementary school principals claim they were “unable to understand the words” in my numerous New York Times essays on education. I have met with history teachers who evaded questions about deficiencies in Amerian and Modern European curricula by insisting that they themselves could not identify five important historical dates or list all 50 states of the Union. I have met with math teachers who professed an inability to do long division and English teachers who ostentatiously uttered serial atrocities of syntax, usage, and noun-verb agreement.
I am, of course, aware that there are some competency problems in the public school teacher corps, but I am not so naive as to suppose that an English teacher could have escaped learning grammar twice over in the Greek and Latin studies which used to be required in all the secondary schools I have ever known, from Choate (which I attended) all the way down the ladder to Hotchkiss (which my father’s gardener’s son attended.)
Therefore, I have no alternative but to conclude that such charades of ignorance are expressly designed to provide cover for the ongoing, systematic indoctrination of Amerian youngsters with a set of values that most citizens a generation ago would have denounced as insipid and traitorous. Today, the most successful physician or attorney will also try to change the subject by asseverating an ignorance of the dictionary definition of ‘insipid.’ I am not fooled. I knew dozens of pre-med and pre-law students at Harvard. Their views on the comparative merits of Aquinas and Savonarola might have disappointed on occasion, but they knew what ‘insipid’ meant.
How have we reached this point? How can Amerians continue to turn a blind eye to the compulsory perversion of values which is proceeding under their very noses? Here, the only answer which serves is that the program of propaganda which supports public education’s corrupt curricula is exceedingly clever, intricately organized, and ruthlessly cunning about hiding its agenda under a screen of apathy, ineptitude, and mediocrity. To put it more simply for those who will feign incomprehension, the fix is in. Hence the title of this book.
We cannot afford to let them succeed at this. The plan must be exposed and defeated. The consequences of failing to stop the hidden agenda are almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a graduating high school senior who cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution and its first ten amendments; who cannot write a cogent literary analysis of Shakespeare’s development as a writer from, say, Titus Andronicus to The Tempest; who cannot characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the ten most significant monarchs of England; who cannot explain the distinctions between Galilean and Newtonian discoveries about gravity; who cannot reel off the twelve-times-table at a moment’s notice; who cannot identify the principal organs and their functions in the viscera of a dissected frog; and who cannot name the cabinet-level departments of government and the most powerful chairmen of committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Just imagine it. Yes, I am indeed discussing the prospect of cultural immolation. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
[The standard trail-off ending of excerpts from Moon Books is my own Greeking, taken from the q first lines of Vergil’s Aeneid I’ve never forgotten since a tyrannical Latino teacher made us all memorize them well enough to reproduce them in the snap quiz we had at the start of every class. Had to get some use out of it in my life.]
Elsewhere in Shuteye Town, he is a panelist on the SBS Network’s ‘Charles God Show.’
P.S. Here’s the pdf file of my ‘Fixing Education’ entry as I repackaged it for the recovered text files of ST99. The oblique opening with a diversionary discussion of John Bunyan was a nod to the old New Yorker affectation of never starting an intellectual essay by mentioning what you’re really going to talk about.
Here’s the file. Hope you can open it…
The Dubious Legacy of John Bunyan
