Supergrow by Benjamin DeMott

Author:Benjamin DeMott [DeMott, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781351306102
Google: vJtYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-27T04:43:39+00:00

* A version of this now turns up in Love Generation mystic-union gabble (You-am-I and I-am-you, etc.).

Supergrow

At first glance they look downright insignificant—the kid fixers, the Supergrow brainfood crowd. Their product says what it is on the package, witness such hard-selling titles as these: How to Double Your Child’s Grades in School, How to Raise a Brighter Child, Give Your Child a Superior Mind, College Begins at Two, etc. None of the authors is famous. (The big sellers are Eugene M. Schwartz, Isabelle P. Buckley, Siegfried and Therese Engelmann, and Joan Beck.) None holds a top establishment job. (Mrs. Beck’s perch is the Chicago Trib, Schwartz is “in” Executive Training Techniques, Mrs. Buckley taught school in Hollywood and has some stars for fans, and Mr. and Mrs. Engelmann, the comers of the lot, fill a “research associates” slot in education at a making-it midwestern state U.) And as for the group’s moral as opposed to pedagogical assumptions, they’re as old as the Protestant Ethic—no ties with tricky New Thought—and rouse smiles as well as pain.

Humor doesn’t, to be sure, get a conscious play in Supergrow books. A typical page of this writing—see Mrs. Buckley’s College Begins at Two—quotes J. Edgar Hoover as a “spiritual authority,” plumps, stiff-lipped, for a school-as-war metaphor (“the more disciplined the troops the fewer the casualties”), and cries up infant heroes like “Peter,” whose “first college courses commenced” when he was two (“No wonder he was an enthusiastic little boy, for he knew where he was going”)—all without a trace of a grin.

But here as elsewhere the straighter the face, the funnier the turn. Supergrow texts often favor sock-it-to-‘em chapter heads (“How to Power Read,” “How to Burn Facts into Your Mind”), and other belt-em and butt-em ploys:

Teach [your child] to read aggressively. Actively. Tearing the ideas out of the pages with the techniques we are showing him in this book. [Schwartz, How to Double Your Child’s Grades]

They print pinpoint schedules of development suitable for nurseries in sci-fi-flicks:

By the time the child is 34 months old, he should know his capital letters perfectly. . . . The child should learn to count to ten by the time he is 30 months. ... By the time the child is 3, he should know all the position words. . . . Point at these [geometric] shapes when the child is 38 months old. . . . [Engelmann and Engelmann, Give Your Child a Superior Mind]

They offer countless “Shut up, he explained” situations:

Go over the [planet] chart at least once a week, beginning when the child is about 3 and %. Tell him what these balls on the chart are. “These are the planets in the solar system.” Then explain what that means. [Engelmann and Engelmann, A Superior Mind]

And everywhere in their pages you run into the playpen polymaths of the future, characters it’ll be criminal to deprive of the vote:

Before the child enters kindergarten he can learn the basic rules of language, learn the alphabet, learn the names

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