Customer Reviews

The Learning Tower of Babel

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I remember perusing shelves at the University of New Orleans' library and finding a book with this intriguing title. I leafed through it idly until I came upon an essay with the title, "To be to Some chewed Books Tasted Are Swallowed to Digested, and Others be, and Some be Few." In it he was describing a workbook exercise in which children were to un-garble garbled sentences. Mitchell pointed out, "Even the dullest students should be able, as instructed, to 'rewrite each group of words to make a clear and sensible sentence.' But *why*, dammit? *Why*?" I laughed out loud-- this was the first time my objections about undemanding schoolwork had ever been vindicated, and by a professor at that! He then went on to point out the inherent (and multiple levels of) absurdity of several examples of time-wasting foolishness in virtually every single essay in the book. I was, and am, hooked. URLs are forbidden from reviews, but website names aren't. If you've enjoyed any of Professor Mitchell's work, got to the Sourcetext website and you will be pleasantly surprised.

In this collection of scathing essays from _The Underground Grammarian_, Richard Mitchell took on the educational establishment and tore it to bits.

Though his ostensible target was the slipshod use of language, he did not limit himself to the niceties of grammar; far from it. He shredded the popular theories of "education" that threatened (and still threaten) to turn children's minds to mush; he defended children's literature that didn't talk down to kids, didn't emasculate their stories into plotless little sessions of feelgood warmfuzziness, and didn't treat young readers as subjects for indoctrination into the latest forms of political mumbo-jumbo; and in e.g. his attacks on "bilingual" education, he decimated "political correctness" before it was called that.

This collection includes what I think is the absolute cream of Mitchell's _UG_ essays, among them some that deserve to become classics. For example, his profound love of intellectual liberty, and his corresponding loathing for any obfuscation that threatened it, make his "Politics and the Eglinsh [sic] Language" a worthy successor to Orwell's famous essay.

For my money, this is Mitchell's best book. I bought and read it when it was new -- and now that a reprint is available, I'm about to buy and read it again.