king Pineapple
Back in the old days, before the coronavirus, educational policy that is nowadays about how to open schools at all and what are the tradeoffs between distance learning and classroom learning, was about whether standardized testing was a good thing. Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, was against standardized testing, though for different reasons. Most teachers and administrators criticized the tests for the burden they placed on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers getting blamed if kids didn’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics had done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests. Reformers, on the other hand, criticized the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.
And it is easy to ridicule such tests simply by calling into question a particular test item that seems particularly foolish. This happened some years ago because of a reading passage called “The Hare and the Pineapple” that appeared on a standardized eighth grade reading test and that remains in my mind because it is a reminder of how even good readers can go wrong when they are blinded by pre-existent points of view. The somewhat whimsical story told of a talking pineapple who challenged the hare to a race. The surrounding crowd of animals assumed the pineapple had some secret plan to win the race, but he (if it were a he) didn’t and so the hare won and the crowd ate the pineapple. One of the questions the students was asked was whether the crowd ate the pineapple because they were annoyed, amused, hungry or excited, which is the way Gail Collins put it when she reported on the test item in a “Times” column that week. The test constructors had goofed because they have so many tests to construct and so come up with potential answers none of which made sense. How could you answer that question?
Here is what any eighth grader could easily enough deduce: the animals had outsmarted themselves. They had tried to be clever and thereby gulled themselves into thinking that something other than the obvious was true. Then, when it turned out that the pineapple was just a pineapple and so couldn’t move, they got angry about having fooled themselves and so took it out on who they thought must have been at fault, someone not themselves. And so they ate the pineapple out of annoyance, which was one of the answers offered on the exam. This little moral message is suitable for children who know that they prefer to blame others rather than themselves and is suitable for all adults who are surprised at the behavior of candidates who, when elected, act exactly as you would expect them to act. Voters get angry at the Congress for failing to arrive at a compromise rather than at themselves for having sent people to Congress who said during their campaigns that they would not compromise. Journalists couldn’t figure out the story because they were so biased against standardized testing.
The story of the talking pineapple is worth repeating, as I have to a number of people, because it still strikes me as funny. But people I know in education brought the story up to me on their own, at the time, as an example of how stupid were the test items on standardized reading tests. I was thunderstruck. How can it be that a story plot which is perfectly obvious to me, and so obvious that expert test makers might think children should be expected to understand it, isn’t also perfectly obvious to other “competent” adults? (“Competent” is a way of saying that some people have perfected their own reading skills well enough to be able to appreciate virtually anything they read, and are also fluent speakers of the language in which the story is told and discussed.)
So the story has a double irony. The first irony concerns what is obvious to the animals in the story, and the tricks animals (and people) play on themselves to see through the obvious and get to the reality beyond—in this case, that they should have trusted their first perception and so not fooled themselves into thinking there was more to what was going on than was going on. That would require a reader to do what a reader can do, which is what in a story (this story) was to be trusted because it was a convention of storytelling (that animals or pineapples could talk) and what in the story was not to be trusted because it was problematic and perhaps wise because it had been imported into the story from the “real” world: that there is a difference between the obvious and the real and that you can fool yourself about which is which. The second irony is also about what is obvious, but this time to the real people reading the real story. The talking pineapple story is there in Twain and elsewhere in world literature and so perfectly obvious as a moral story, and yet there are real people who think that the story is literally nonsense. The real question is how real people can disagree about what is in this story that is real in that it is a story out there for real people to read.
Now, sociologists have known for a long time—indeed, it is their stock in trade—that what people think or believe or sense as obvious is conditioned by social circumstances. Marx thought the capitalists and the peasants and the working class had different points of view because of where they were located in the division of labor. Weber believed that those who had imbibed the Protestant Ethic thought about work differently than those who had not. Mannheim moved the story along by saying that people had different political points of view because of general mindsets picked up for historical reasons that also suited their condition in life. Some people were utopian and some were ideologists; some people were conservative because they believed everything they cared about was beyond politics and therefore would advance politics so as to crush their political opponents, while liberals believed that everything was political and so people were cursed with being in favor of a step at a time. And Roland Wulbert pushes the story ahead with yet another twist that makes the conditions of belief ever more internal to the thinking and feeling apparatus: a person makes a presumption that allows the person to see how one sentence is coherent with regard to the sentence that has come immediately before. I expand that point to include politics. When a Republican said the Affordable Health Care Act showed Obama to be a Socialist, that requires only the assumption that any state intervention is socialistic, even if that is not the way things have unfolded historically here in the United States. Republicans nowadays say that closing down commerce in the time of a pandemic violates their liberties and that requiring companies to produce necessary goods, even if well compensated for doing so, is a Bolshevik plot. Everybody brings to bear their own history of the United States. There is a very complex picture of society in everyone’s separate head, however simplistic one or another of these histories and portraits may seem to someone else’s head.
The pineapple story asks us to contemplate how some very local conditions may lead to very disparate readings of what seems to be perfectly obvious. What is going on is more akin to what used to be called “mass delusions” than it is to long scale changes in historical points of view or even to changes in the way large scale history is invoked. I ran into mass delusions in graduate school when there was a “pitting” epidemic in Seattle. Numerous people had noticed that their windshields were pitted by stones. What was going on in the atmosphere? Nothing, social scientists concluded. People had just become sensitized because of newspaper publicity about the epidemic to notice that their own windshields were pitted, which is the normal situation with a great number of windshields. The same kind of thing occurs when a town suddenly notices that a lot (well, a few) of its young women seem to have the shakes. Maybe they do; maybe there has been the contagion of mutual suggestion or maybe girls in poverty filled towns are more likely to develop similar neurotic symptoms. But it probably isn’t something in the water.
The talking pineapple story indicates a delusion held by a small segment of readers: those who are invested in denigrating standardized testing. It is a delusion because the story is perfectly intelligible even though those suffering from this delusion have temporarily lost their ability to treat it as intelligible. It is like the pitting and the tics in that it is a delusion that will pass when it is no longer useful and does not intrude in the ability of those suffering from it to otherwise use their reading skills. The extent to which it is an adopted pose rather than the result of having concentrated on trying to make sense of the story is probably appreciated by those who suffer from the delusion, just as people who noticed their windshields were pitted may have put out of their minds the fact that their windshields always looked this way.
The talking pineapple story differs, however, from the other delusions in that it has to do with a skill—reading—that has a lot to do with higher brain functions and so is part of consciousness and so reflects how consciousness can be altered to the point of not recognizing its own powers. That is a big deal. People are abrogating what we would like to think cannot be abrogated: the ability to analyze something when that is the activity being brought forward in the mind as something to do. And the cause isn't in the water; the cause is in what people decide what they want to analyze.
All these educators and journalists fail to get the point of the talking pineapple story because the immediate political circumstances get in the way of the reading process. The cue for giving the story a serious reading is not there. You know that other people are also on the lookout for finding some failure in a test item, and so it makes more sense to see no sense than to see sense in the story. What is startling to me is how easy it is to do that, to sense whatever is the correct opinion for the moment and come to believe that one is simply stating the obvious. I have been caught out in moments like that myself. I heard Nancy Pelosi say, in 2002, that she had not heard anything in secret briefings to change her mind about the advisability of invading Iraq, but I put that aside because a few days later I heard Colin Powell announce in his United Nations speech that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even though the evidence he presented I surmised, in the back of my mind, was sketchy, but I chose, if that is the word, to believe him, to raise my opinion to being a matter of belief, because I trusted him and because this time I didn’t want to be a naysayer, as is customarily my role. Maybe this time a received opinion was correct. Convictions one comes to are that in that it takes evidence to overcome them. But resisting conviction also has its price in that one is then constantly on the fence and resisting common opinion just for the hell of it as well as because very few things are so clearly supported that one cannot resist coming to that conviction.
Now perform the following mental experiment. Let us say people came across the talking pineapple story in a children’s picture book that was purchased at Barnes and Noble for a grandchild. Grandpa would have no trouble following and explaining the story to a young one even if the young one had to be led through it. That is what goes on when you learn to read stories. You have to be awakened to what is not there in the story: the missing logic, the knowledge of the world outside the story, the clues in the story about what is going on. If the pineapple could talk, couldn’t he be expected to pick himself up and run? Well, yes, if that is the way the story had been laid out, but the story suspended only one true to life condition: that a pineapple could talk. And that was also suspended for the rest of the animals. Reading means making many decisions as one goes through even a few short paragraphs and what is amazing is how well children pick that up. And, adults included, readers need only a single major green light to decide whether to turn their reading skills onto an item presented to them. Standardized test items do not have that signal but a red light instead: Be skeptical that this makes sense.
That people apply presumptions rather quickly and on the basis of matters circumstantial to the way they claim to understand matters, as readers and thinkers who make up their own minds rather than people who respond to a cue as to how seriously something is to be taken, is a serious matter for a number of reasons. It shows how easy it is to get deluded, which means that everybody is apt to be “inauthentic” in that they come to espouse views they know in their heart of hearts they would not espouse if it were not the comfortable thing to do. We do that about political candidates and we do it about favorite grocery products and we put aside what we know is unflattering about a spouse. That is the way to get through life. Get real; come to terms with that. Another reason this is a serious matter is that it shows liberals as deluded in their thinking processes as the conservatives they rail against, but maybe a little less so because they claim at least to have a richer sense of American history, of the story that brought us to this point, than their Know Nothing opponents who thinks you should major in what will get you a job rather than in what educates you to be a responsible citizen. I sometimes think that means liberals are therefore required to be more rational than conservatives, but what I usually mean is that liberals are only true to themselves when they are fairly rational, and so willing to assess the talking pineapple story for itself alone and not just because it favors one or another side in the education wars.
The most important issue at stake, however, is the status of stories. Stories have always seemed to me the most reliable source of evidence. Declarative sentences can lie. Saying “That worm is three inches long” may be true but there is nothing in the statement that tells you that it is true. Dick Chaney may or may not be lying about weapons of mass destruction. But knowing the role Dick Chaney played in the Bush Administration and how top officials in the Bush 41 Administration noted how much he had changed when he became Vice President fills out a story where what he says becomes subject to question because of how truth telling fits into an overall narrative that intertwines motivation with character and circumstances. That is what all novels do. Because it is always a character who gives voice to philosophical opinions, you know not to take anything anyone says in a Saul Bellow novel without a grain of salt. Why would the Dean be saying this or that about Chicago politics? What is in it for him to take that point of view? Fiction or stories always carry with them their caveats and it is to the reader to pick those out and to sense what is to be trusted at least relatively speaking. You also pick out what is to be trusted in the talking pineapple story because you know how to read a story and although different people will notice different things, no one can legitimately notice, for example, that the story is not meant to be funny or to have a moral—except, that is, for all the competent readers who fail to do that for reasons very circumstantial to the story. But if you give up on stories as saying what they mean, as providing what is needed so that they can be interpreted, then what have you left as a source of reliable knowledge? It is a scary thought.