CHAPTER THREE
Eyeless in Gaza
he deeds were monstrous, but the doer [Adolf Eichmann] ....was quite ordinary,
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm
ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one
could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial... was
something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.... Might not the
problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our
faculty for thought
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
The School Edition
I always knew schoolbooks and real books were different. Most kids do. But I remained
vague on any particular grounds for my prejudice until one day, tired of the simple-
minded junior high school English curriculum, I decided to teach Moby Dick to eighth-
grade classes. A friendly assistant principal smuggled a school edition into the book
purchases and we were able to weigh anchor the next fall.
What a book! Ishmael, the young seaman who relates Melville's tale, is a half-orphan by
decree of Fate, sentenced never to know a natural home again. But Ahab is no accidental
victim. He has consciously willed his own exile from a young wife and child, from the
fruits of his wealth, and from Earth itself in order to pursue his vocation of getting even.
Revenge on the natural order is what drives him.
War against God and family. To me, it defines the essence of Americanness. It's no
accident that America's three classic novels — Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and
Huckleberry Finn — each deal with ambiguous families or that each emerges from a time
not far from either side of the Civil War. America had been an inferno for families, as
Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain all knew. Midway through our first full century as a
nation, the nearly universal American experience of homelessness found its voice.
Ishmael is a half-orphan, Ahab an absentee father and husband, the harpooners expatriate
men of color; Pearl a bastard, Hester an adulteress, the Reverend Dimmesdale a sexual
predator and runaway father; Huck Finn, de facto, an adoptee, Jim a twice-uprooted
African slave. When we think what our schools became we need to recall what a great
pile of us are homeless. We long for homes we can never have as long as we have
institutions like school, television, corporation, and government in loco parentis.
Patricia Lines of the U.S. Department of Education, in trying honorably to discuss what
the rank and file of homeschoolers actually do, finally declared it seems to be wrapped up
closely with a feeling of "intense interest in the life of the community." Above anything
else, she found loyalty in the warp and woof of family:
Homeschoolers are tremendously loyal as family members, they are suspicious of
television and other less intimate influences. They eat as a family, they socialize as a
family, they attend church as a family, they become members of an
extended. . .homeschooling community.
American great fiction is about individuals broken from family. The closest they come to
satisfying the universal yearning is a struggle for surrogates — like the strange connection
between Pearl, Hester, and the dark forest. America's most fascinating storytellers focus
on the hollowness of American public life. We have no place to go when work is done.
Our inner life long extinguished, our public work in remaking the world can never be
done because personal homework isn't available to us. There's no institutional solace for
this malady. In outrage at our lonely fate, we lay siege to the family sanctuary wherever it
survives, as Ahab lay siege to the seas for his accursed Whale.
For this and other reasons long lost, I decided to teach Moby Dick to my eighth-grade
classes. Including the dumb ones. I discovered right away the white whale was just too
big for forty-five-minute bell breaks; I couldn't divide it comfortably to fit the schedule.
Melville's book is too vast to say just what the right way to teach it really is. It speaks to
every reader privately. To grapple with it demanded elastic time, not the fixed bell breaks
of junior high. Indeed, it offered so many choices of purpose — some aesthetic, some
historical, some social, some philosophical, some theological, some dramatic, some
economic — that compelling the attention of a room full of young people to any one
aspect seemed willful and arbitrary.
Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized the school edition wasn't a real book
but a kind of disguised indoctrination providing all the questions, a scientific addition to
the original text designed to make the book teacher-proof and student-proof. If you even
read those questions (let alone answered them) there would be no chance ever again for a
private exchange between you and Melville; the invisible editor would have preempted it.
The editors of the school edition provided a package of prefabricated questions and more
than a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. Many
teachers consider this a gift — it does the thinking for them. If I didn't assign these
questions, kids wanted to know why not. Their parents wanted to know why not. Unless
everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, children used to
getting high marks became scared and angry.
The school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured; worse than useless, it was
actually dangerous. So I pitched it out and bought a set of undoctored books with my own
money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it
away. Real books don't do that. Real books demand people actively participate by asking
their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren't just stupid, they
hurt the mind under the guise of helping it — exactly the way standardized tests do. Real
books, unlike schoolbooks, can't be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits
everyone.
If you think about it, schooled people, like schoolbooks, are much alike. Some folks find
that desirable for economic reasons. The discipline organizing our economy and our
politics derives from mathematical and interpretive exercises, the accuracy of which
depends upon customers being much alike and very predictable. People who read too
many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us.
Market research depends on people behaving as //they were alike. It doesn't really
matter whether they are or not.
One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to
examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books,
from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually
comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read
instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate
readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The
librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to
follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose
of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask
my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I
feel like reading all day long, that's okay with the librarian, who doesn't compel me to
stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It
doesn't send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I should use my reading
time at home.
The library doesn't play favorites; it's a democratic place as seems proper in a
democracy. If the books I want are available, I get them, even if that decision deprives
someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library never humiliates me by posting
ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn't need
to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between
a library and a school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library.
The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits. It
tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and women are often very
eccentric. Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick. I
find in the library won't have questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically
bowdlerized. Library books are not written by collective pens. At least not yet.
Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible
curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of
solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs
can't. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines
devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular
authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy.
Intellectual Espionage
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