President's Message - Spring 2010

CHIROPODY FOR FEET OF CLAY

Jean B. Crockett
University of Florida

The annual convention of the Council for Exceptional Children, held as it is each Spring in a different major north American city, offers us the chance to sample from among the best of urban independent booksellers. Sam Weller's Bookstore in Salt Lake City, for example, is famous for its "New, Used, Out-of-Print, and Rare Books,"so when the annual CEC convention was held there in 2006, I checked it out for myself. Mr. Weller's literary emporium offered numerous books on wide-ranging topics.  Having just left conference sessions sponsored by CEC-DR on the value of basing educational practice on plausible evidence, I brought a spirit of healthy skepticism with me as I combed the shelves. It wasn't long before The Natural History of Nonsense caught my eye. This aging volume with faded gold letters on its fraying spine fell into the "Used" category, and as I later discovered, remains a paean to rational thinking.

Published in 1947, The Natural History of Nonsense according to its author, Bergen Evans, is "a study in the paleontology of delusion. It is an antibody for all who are allergic to stardust" (p. vii).  Evans described the book as a handbook for young recruits in the cause of common sense. Vestiges of the post World War II era are evident in some of the 1940s rhetoric, but aside from a few dated references, there remains enough to prompt our vigilance in defending doubt in the pursuit of truth, and promoting the discernment of facts from articles of faith. In this message I would like to share some of Evan's musings about the value of inquiry and the dangers of nonsense. Although they do not address education specifically, they readily apply to a number of contemporary foolish fads that ignore realities about student performance and the world of schools.

With his penchant for vivid prose, Evans characterized his book as "a manual of chiropody for feet of clay" (p. vii) with its core message of thinking clearly and basing rational thought on empirical evidence rather than on popular or expert opinion.  For Evans, we humans are susceptible to a good story as well as a powerful storyteller; in short, we are inclined to believe the unbelievable in our personal and professional lives.  Sometimes we do so because we are genuinely hood-winked, and at other times we might be afraid to speak up. But "no error is harmless" (p. 274), he wrote, and ironically, "nothing is more vital than error. Controversies rarely if ever die. They merely sink beneath the surface" (p. 6).  Some faulty deductions, Evans cautioned, "seem inconsequential as well as inconsequent, but in their larger aspects they are not . . . and the harm that may result from forming an opinion without evidence, or from distorting evidence to support an opinion, is incalculable" (p. 274).

The last chapter of The Natural History of Nonsense could be a free standing essay with the 18 chapters that precede it being an illustrative collection of popular but nonsensical curiosities throughout history. At the conclusion of the final chapter Evans sums things up with the following thought:

The civilized man [sic] has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity. (Evans, 1947, p. 275)

As members of CEC-DR we, too, share a commitment to informing educational policies and professional practice with strong research evidence. Perhaps it was that fraying cloth cover that made The Natural History of Nonsense so appealing in Sam Weller's Bookstore, but it was the author's passionate commitment to the questioning spirit that clinched the sale. 

Evans, B. (1947). The natural history of nonsense. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.