The Purple Pen is Limper than a Noodle
August 23, 2004
It seems that pen makers and office supply stores are making and stocking more and more purple pens, and fewer and fewer red ones. And they are moving off of the shelves at an increasing rate.
The reason? Purple isn’t as scary as red. According to the Globe report, “color psychologists” like Leatrice Eiseman say that “the color purple embodies red’s sense of authority but also blue’s association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student papers … . Purple calls attention to itself without being too aggressive.” On the other hand, according to Eiseman, “Red is a bit over-the-top in its aggression.”
This is only the latest in long procession of signs and symptoms of the educational disaster we have sown in the fields of institutional schooling. I have seen the harvest first-hand, and its fruits are rotten enough to be worthy only of disgust. What clearer symbol than teachers’ abandonment of the traditional corrective red can there be that the logic of choice has triumphed, even in what might have been the last bastion of tradition and heredity?
The color purple is an apt symbol–the color, not coincidentally, of that vomit-inducing man-puppet Barney–of the liberalization of learning. Under its sing-song tones it carries with it the threat of excommunication. Modify your style and attitude, or else! Purple’s gentle call for serenity and creativity and non-aggression can mean only one thing: that every act and relationship–even the most hierarchical ones–must always be expressed with the pantomime of egalitarian uncertainty, opinion, and doubt. In other words, such acts and relationships must be thoroughly qualified by the acknowledgment of the other’s choice. This is especially true when it comes to expressing convictions that are essentially uncomfortable and “judgmental.” If Johnny habitually writes in sentence fragments, one is to say that is his chosen “style,” and the purple pen does not “correct” him for being “wrong” so much as it gently suggests conformity to another set of “choices.” Behind this is also a desire for “bonds” and “unity” based on a false familial egalitarianism between students and teachers.
Naturally, this is complete excrement.
I daresay purple represents a complete rejection of Socratic/classical learning in which there were only two rules: 1) accept that you are not the master and not even close; and 2) take your beatings and work harder. In the classical setting, one does not so much learn from the teacher, as he is guided through the thickets of the masters by one who has gone before. Red marks the trail. This is not indoctrination, or brainwashing. It is a mutual search. The possibility of and openness to error remains, but instead of being used as a buttress to the liberal “right to choose,” it is merely the baseline: I am most likely wrong and most likely damned because of it.
Purple, by enforcing false doubt as dogma, sends the signal that our schooling system does not take rightness and wrongness seriously. And it creates adult Barneys inhabiting an order threatened by anyone who dares to take rightness and wrongness seriously; as if beliefs really mattered to one’s eternal soul. The order responds with its army of purple, attempting to manipulate that person to “moderate” his views, and if that becomes impossible, then it will attempt to silence him–by one means or another.
This is The Purple Pen is Limper than a Noodle in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Mass Hysteria | Next: Academic Standards | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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