Charitable Reading: Why Recontextualization Is Worth the Effort

To explore texts from different eras, different places, different languages, or different cultures requires a sympathetic reading: assuming that what might at first appear nonsensical or bizarre has a reasonable interpretation, and assuming that the author was expressing, or attempting to express, a rational and plausible idea.

Recontextualization is work. It requires one to find analogues and parallels in one’s own era, own place, own language, or own culture.

The reader who devotes exertion to this task is rewarded.

Two texts which merit such exploration are books authored by Mortimer Smith. The first is titled And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education, published in 1949 by Henry Regnery Company as part of “The Humanist Library” series. The second is The Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned Mediocrity in Our Public Schools, which appeared in 1954 by the same publisher.

Smith’s prose is dated, and his examples are by now obscure bits of trivia in the history of education, but the generic principles which he puts forth endure. The insights gained from these books are valuable principles which continue to explain education in the United States.