Hebetudinous

(from Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery)

“Spell “hebetudinous”!”

I had just fallen out of bed and, with eyes not yet fully functioning (ah, the evils of middle age), and staggered my way to the stove to put on water for my morning coffee. There was Meera, my 10-year-old, already awake (a rare event), and she didn’t even say “good morning!”

“What did you say?” I mumbled, trying to get my ears in focus.

“Spell “hebetudinous”.”

I thought I heard a percussive sound. Hepatudinous. Maybe to do with an enlarged liver. Something like “splenetic”? New one on me.

“Can you use it in a sentence?” (I really wasn’t stalling for time. Well, to be honest, maybe a little….)

“He was hebetudinous,” she replied, impatiently waiting for me to blunder.

Fat help that was. And so I went ahead and misspelled it, based on my extensive knowledge of Greek body parts.

She laughed in glee. Stumped the chump.

My wife Ellen gave me the story behind how “hebetudinous” came to be in our household. While at work, Ellen received a call from Meera.

“Ali called me stupid!” complained Meera about her 13-year-old sister.

“Put her on,” said my wife. “Aliyah, if you are going to call your sister names, at least use more interesting ones.”

There. That would put an end to that! Isn’t it great when you can end squabbling among siblings so easily?

“You’re hebetudinous,” said Aliyah, having found a literal way around the implied prohibition.

“What’s hebetudinous?” asked Meera.

“Go look it up,” replied Aliyah.

“How do you spell it?”

Aliyah spelled it for her. Meera got out her dictionary. There it was. Hebetudinous.

Adj. Lacking in intelligence; blockheaded, dense, doltish, obtuse, lethargic. Dull and stupid.

Spelling is wrapped up in a societal myth. For those of you who have forgotten your freshman sociology class (or never had one), a societal myth is a story or premise (whether it is true or false is irrelevant) that guides our attitudes and shapes how we make concrete life arrangements or enable social institutions to function.

The societal myth embodied in spelling is a simple one: “Spelling is a signifier of intelligence. Good spellers are more intelligent; bad spellers less so.” The salient feature of this particular societal myth is that we all know deep down that it is untrue. In fact, when declared as baldly as I have just done, it is downright laughable, isn’t it?

If you ever have the opportunity, take your kids to the wonderful Revolutionary War history exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. There you will find on display documents and letters from our nation’s founding fathers. Don’t be surprised, however, if, after examining two or three of the display cases, your 12-year-old turns to you with his latest discovery. “Hey, Mom,” he’ll say, in a voice loud enough that everyone in the exhibit room can hear, “These guys can’t spell.”

And you’ll look more carefully yourself and see that your son is correct. Washington and Hamilton, John Jay and Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, they all spell, well, shall we say, “differently”. It’s not only a matter of half the “s”s looking like “f”s, or noting historical changes that have occurred in spelling since the last half of the eighteenth century. No, it is evident that what was important was communication, pure and simple, and regularized spelling had nothing to do with it. It gives new meaning to the slogan, “good enough for government work,” for, indeed, it was good enough for the creation of a nation.

The whole idea of regularized spelling and “spelling” as a school subject was the creation of Noah Webster and, later, the rise of public education. (Though at least if we had adopted Noah Webster’s reforms, we could have been rid of all those ridiculous silent “e”s.) And the goal of the school people had nothing to do with communication. It had everything to do with compliance and control, pure and simple, the antithesis of the revolutionary spirit. With it came the creation of the societal myth. Since the largest portion of immigrants to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – at whom public education was largely directed -- came from countries where spelling is truly (or at least close to being) phonetic, and in which languages they may already have been literate, spelling was a simple mechanism for judging their children to be intellectually inferior, not deserving of educational opportunities, and, in the final analysis, socially unfit; in short, hebetudinous. Except the greatest fear was not that they were congenitally dull and stupid (like the images already projected onto African-Americans, who were already being denied decent education), but rather that (like the fears surrounding African-Americans), they might be untamed and, in the end, untameable. Public education quickly became the bulwark of a “civilized” society against the alien savages whose bodies, ironically, were essential to keeping the industrial combine humming. (The same people who gave us public education also brought us early twentieth-century eugenics, and you know where that ended up!¹)

If we peel away another layer, we find another societal myth at the core of American public education: while it exists ostensibly to create new opportunities (which it arguably does for the few), the major purpose of public education, at which it was spectacularly successful in the nineteenth century and remains so to this day, is to limit these opportunities (“rationalize” would probably be a better term), while training people to accept these limitations.² Spelling is just one of the many screening mechanisms. We refuse to accept the institutions’ limitations in meeting our children’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs – isn’t that ultimately why we homeschool?

As a professional writer and editor, what I want my kids to learn is that communication has power. Of course, they began to learn that as infants – the right combination of crying and smiling enables them, in most cases, to get them what they desire! Later, it becomes a bit more complicated.

The tools of written communication have their own power, and can be wielded as weapons in and of themselves, as first Aliyah and then Meera, like millions of other kids, have learned. Uninterested in spelling for the first ten years of her existence, Meera now totes around a dictionary like some people I know carry a Bible, and sleeps with it next to her pillow. She has become infatuated with soul, “n. The immaterial essence of an individual life; the spiritual principle embodied in human beings or the universe,” she reads aloud to a neighborhood playmate. “It’s quite a bit different than a flat fish or the bottom of my shoe,” she urges upon her friend Courtney, who has no idea she has wandered into Meera’s House of Homonyms. The game doesn’t last for very long, though. The problem with wielding the tools as weapons or exercises in one-up-man-ship (rather than using them for what they are intended) is that some people can get hurt, and, as we know from our own school days, all-too-often they do. Left to their own devices, the kids, if not budding sociopaths, will end their game once there is too much experience of pain; unfortunately, the school administrators, who have not been socialized properly, cannot be expected to do the same.

So how do we teach spelling? Well, we don’t. It is not because we seek to express solidarity with the organizers of the Boston Tea Party by not encouraging the kids to make the best possible use of the tools. On the contrary, we make a special effort in our family to ensure that our children understand the societal myth: if their written communications do not reflect conventional spelling practices, others are likely to take that as a sign that they are hebetudinous, even though both parties to the communication know this is not true.

In our experience, good spelling comes from lots of reading. It doesn’t matter (for this purpose) whether this reading capability came to be as a result of the sa pa fa method or from recognizing whole words. (As I’ve already indicated, I have trouble imagining kids who don’t actually use both, regardless of how we teach them!) No amount of attempted explanation will derail them from believing that “i” before “e” except after “c” makes no sense except as an educational instrument of torture.

When the kids are writing, we have a rule (which means I’m sure we’ve broken it, of course): give them that for which they ask! If they request that a word be spelled, we give it to them straight -- none of this “oh, what does it sound like?” or “do you know any words it rhymes with”?” or “use your phonics” or “look it up”. (I always thought this last was the most dimwitted suggestion, as dictionaries aren’t designed for spelling inquiries.) No, we just give it to them, like we would to any adult who wasn’t too embarrassed to ask (when was the last time you told your co-worker to use her phonics, or sounded out a word for him phonemically? And, indeed, how many of your colleagues or friends won’t even ask for spelling assistance because they remember being shamed at school when they did so as children?)

I fully understand the usefulness of teaching the kids to use their knowledge of phonics or rhyme or dictionaries in figuring out how to spell a word, but when they are writing is not the proper time. When you interpose this extra task, you are upsetting the far more critical and delicate operation, which is their finding ways to communicate by effectively transferring thoughts and feelings from brain to paper or computer screen.

We do help the kids with their spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax after the words have been committed to paper, if they ask. If writing is part of the assignment we have agreed upon, joint editing will be a piece of the process. Doing the phonics or dictionary thing at this stage might be okay – just don’t necessarily assume that it helps very much, at least for all children. But the editing, rather than the writing, stage is the time to equip the kids with new tools, which they then can decide to utilize or not as they choose.

We edit most “public” communications. This provides the perfect opportunity to talk about social conventions and societal expectations, and the differences between the public and private world. Yes, your seven- or eight-year-old can understand this (chances are she already does), but it will provide you both grounds for much future amusement.

Spelling games? It’s time for a new one. The old one -- “spell x-y-z” -- is one of those school games cruelly aimed at uncovering a deficit, with a smug pat on the back, unnecessary word of praise, or $10,000 college scholarship awaiting when the deficit does not reveal itself in a competitive situation. Don’t get me wrong: I take as much delight in homeschoolers’ recent monopoly of the National Spelling Bee as the next homeschooler! (When I wrote this essay, I was enjoying the Seattle Mariners, too, even if I think of the ballpark as a taxpayer-subsidized, corporately owned-and-operated tavern with a ridiculously high cover charge and overpriced hotdogs.) But isn’t the Spelling Bee really, as a Washington Post staff writer recently wrote, “an archaic exercise in brutality”? Viewing it on television, is the fascination much different from “Survivor II”, as hundreds of prepubescent geeks (having been one myself, I remember the feeling) reveal their fatal flaws and are banished ignominiously from the island? I mean it’s almost five hours of morbidly watching kids fail!

Try another game. Assume the kids already know how to spell it right. Ask them to figure out how many different alternate “creative” spellings they can come up with, based on analogies in sound with other words they know. Phonics. Phonix. Phanix. Phonnicks. Fanicks. Fonnix. Phaknicks. Fonicwz. (?) Educational value? Your kids will never forget how to spell the word correctly, and will have learned a little bit more about the absurdity of their mother tongue.

Need something for the car? Portmanteau words are the ticket. “Portmanteau”, originally a large suitcase that opens up into two hinged compartments, was first appropriated to signify a new word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two others by Lewis Carroll, who in this vein brought us chortle (chuckle+snort) and galumph (gallop+triumph), but failed with slithy (lithe+slimy). (Remember what Yogi Berra said about luggage? “Don’t buy expensive luggage. After all, you only use it when traveling.”) You already know plenty of portmanteaux: motel (motor+hotel), brunch (breakfast+lunch) (lupper never caught on, as it couldn’t replace High Tea); smog (smoke+fog); tangelo, dumbfounded, twirl, cockapoo, motorcade. New ones are being created all the time: simulcast, dancercise, frappuccino, netiquette, Medicare, breathalyzer, and Reaganomics (which I think has something to with running up large public debts to pay for obsolete military equipment.) Now, it’s your kids’ turn: help them create their own. You may end up with your own private language. Your kids will learn that languages are always changing, and that words take on a life of their own. Once they get the hang of it, don’t be surprised if they find it totally fantabulous. (If you need some help getting started, visit Wonky Words at: learningedge.simpatico.ca/recess/fl/ww.html)

You will be humbled in this process. It won’t be long before your child is correcting you, or at least trying to. It will keep you on your verbal toes – keep the big dictionary in hiding for your own private use for a while; it will be your secret weapon! But not for long: your kids will find it and accuse you of trying to keep them barefoot and hebetudinous, and you’ll have absolutely no defense.

At least, though, I’ll be able to say I’ve done the dirty deed, for, if this essay does its work, hebetudinous will now have made its way into homeschooling kitchens across the nation, and breakfast may never be the same.

¹There is much written on this subject, but a good place to start would be Selden, Steven, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. New York, NY: Teachers College, Press, 1999. Also see Sotskepf, Alan, “The Forgotten History of Eugenics,” Rethinking Schools, 13(3), Spring 1999. http://www.rethinkingschools.org/Archives/13_03/eugenic.htm

From 1900 to 1930, virtually every major educator in the U.S. other than John Dewey (and notably including David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University; Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University; University of Wisconsin President Glenn Frank; University of Chicago educator Charles Judd; Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History; Edward Lee Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College; and Robert M. Yerkes, Harvard professor and president of the American Psychological Association) supported a program of eugenics, or “selective breeding”, as imperative to defend and improve the quality of the national character. This was the source of much of Adolf Hitler’s thinking on this issue. In 1931, the New York Commissioner of Education asked (in the publication Eugenical News) whether since “the greatest care is exercised in the breeding of live stock, is it not vastly more important that the human race be improved?” and shouldn’t teachers do whatever is in their power to prevent the “haphazard mating of human beings?”

Often repeating the slogan popularized by Princeton University biologist E.G. Conklin that, “Wooden legs are not inherited, but wooden heads are,” a strong belief in biological determinism and eugenics (as well as the futility of environmental changes) was taught through biology textbooks in junior high and high schools well after Hitler came to power (some of them actively praised his efforts), and even as late as 1948. In the widely used textbook Animal Biology written by University of Wisconsin biologist M.F. Guyer (Fourth Edition – New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1948), we find the following gem: “The greatest danger to any democracy is that abler members and less prolific types shall be swamped by the overproduction of inferior strains. This has been the fate of past civilizations – why not America?” So much for assuming sex education in the schools is a recent development!

Such thinking was still to be found in the biology textbooks in the 1960s. I remember being taught about the inherited feeblemindedness and criminality of the Kallikak and Jukes families, and the inherited superiority of the Edwards. Growing up in New York City, I never met any Edwardses, but my 9th grade homeroom teacher was name “Kavelak”, and behind his back we used to joke about his name incessantly.

²U.S. Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris, who could be said to have overseen the birth of the modern public education system in America, wrote in 1889, “Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening…The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they’re not tempted to think about any other role.”

Beginning around 1905, a new organizational scheme for public education – the Gary Plan (named after the town in Indiana in which it was first implemented) -- was initiated. Under the Gary Plan, school subjects were departmentalized, entailing the constant movement of children from class to class – thus inhibiting any deeply engaged exploration of any subject – and requiring schoolteachers to teach the same subject and same lesson again and again, like factory workers assigned to tightening a single bolt. (There were other, more appealing elements, such as ongoing links between the schools and community life, which, however, were never integrated into other Gary-like experiments taking place throughout the rest of the country.) A 1916 analytical report by the New York educator Abraham Flexner found the Gary Plan to be a total failure, “offering insubstantial programs and a general atmosphere which habituated students to inferior performance.”

There were protests. In New York City, thousands of children and their primarily immigrant parents protested their children being given “half-rations” of education. Thousands of demonstrators shut down Public School #171, which had adopted the Gary Plan, and riots spread to schools and neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. More than 300 children were arrested, most of them Jewish. The cause of the protest was that the Gary Plan deliberately dumbed down the school, thus limiting the opportunities available to low-income children. While the Gary Plan itself disappeared, its worst aspects – a ‘platoon approach’ to scheduling designed to allow double enrollment of pupils in a single building and hence save money -- was quickly adopted by school systems throughout the nation.

Closely following on the heels of the New York School riots, the chair of the Psychology Department at Princeton University and the nation’s leading psychometrician, Henry Herbert Goddard, published his public policy opus Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (Princeton University Press, 1920). Noting that government schooling was about “the perfect organization of the hive,” Goddard argued that social and economic inequality was both good and necessary because some people are smarter (and hence more deserving) than others. Intelligence testing would be a useful tool to convince the lower classes of their inferiority, and discourage them from attempting to rise above their rightful station. Through the training of hundreds of the nation’s educational psychologists, Goddard’s thinking quickly became a guiding force in American education. Nowadays, parents, no less than teachers, school administrators, or college admissions officers, think nothing of limiting the opportunities available to children solely on the basis of test results, and based on tests employing questions that they haven’t even seen, all confirming the self-fulfilling prophecy that the kids (and the parents!) receive both the education and opportunities they deserve!