H. L. Mencken
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| H.L Mencken |
Mencken was a major American voice of the 20‘s as an newspaperman, man of letters, social philosopher, and arts critic. Teachers might know his annoying quip: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
Make no mistake: Mencken was full of contradictions, with disturbing episodes of misanthropy, anti-semitism, and racism. But biographer, Dr. Fred C. Hobson, demonstrates that he clearly redeemed these postures in his life and writings. You might want to download his writings (in the public domain) at Project Gutenberg for some challenging summer reading.
The Wikipedia article on Mencken is useful and lists of his quotations and aphorism are readily available.
Mencken on Education
His work yields perennial insights on education that challenge current clichés about teaching and learning. Significantly, Mencken never separated good learning from deep living. He took an iconoclastic view of schooling as something too often compromised by social conformity and second-rate thinking . Here are some of my favorite Mencken quotations:
The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
A Mencken Checklist
From such writings, I have created a checklist of the qualities which might be touchstones of enlightened teaching, learning, and living:
- clarity
- wonder
- skepticism
- tolerance
- doubt
- inquiry
- excitement
- pleasure
- common sense
- decency
- truth
- liberty
- enlightenment
- originality
- diversity
Last Thoughts
As the summer unfolds, we will watch with concern the Syrian crisis, the American election, the European debt, the London Olympics, and world leaders' neglect of the environment. Here are two last Mencken quotations that might offer perspective on the months ahead:
All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person.
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