In praise of imitation: on the sincerest form of flattery. (Miscellany).(Column)

Our President is famously ill at ease with English. The jokes proliferate; the verbal stumble-bummings (from a Yalie yet! A millionaire!) endear him to those who believe him endearing and outrage those who don't. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is Chief Executive, and that quick study who before him occupied the White House has been displaced in an eye-blink, a wink. This current spate of malapropism (state of malatropism? malappropriatism?) seems likely to continue, and to stay part of the picture; Mr. Bush will not, I mean, reveal a sudden interest in Tolstoy or a schoolboy's devotion to Proust. For better or for worse, such "Aw-shucks" analphabetic ignorance is part of his leadership profile and accruing lore.

What seems strange in this regard is the emphasis on education, the presidential insistence that a school be held accountable for the test scores of its students, the platform plank that children--as opposed to elected officials--must improve their reading skills. We worry as a nation about declining SATs and what achievements they measure; we propose their abolition or vouch for the value of vouchers or celebrate home schools instead. It's as though the tone-deaf took the podium in concert halls or the color-blind selected what hangs in a museum. This is one of the paradoxes intrinsic to democracy: the less you know about a case, the less you need recuse yourself from serving as a judge. It's the kind of perversion of justice that obtains during jury selection; we pick only those twelve who know nothing about it to settle the lawsuit at hand.

And therefore I wish to propose--not tongue-in-cheek but earnestly--a return to ancient ways. There was a time when those who led were those we wished to follow, and study was a course of emulation: Repeat, class, after me. Such a system is tradition-steeped but now may seem original; at any rate it's how our parents' parents--Tin ways we've forgotten--were taught.

These lines urge imitation, and in the spirit of praise. The habit begins in the cradle; we copy what we watch. We learn from those who learned before to walk and dress and brush our teeth and play tennis or the violin; it's how we come to spell and drive and swim. It's the way we first acquire language and, later, languages. How does the cow go? Moo-Moo! That golden codger lifting arms and clapping hands while a grandchild does the same is teaching by repeated gesture: How big is baby? So-o-o big! From the way to eat an artichoke or lobster, the way to fashion a hospital corner or bow tie, from birth to death and alpha to omega the elders of the tribe instruct us by example. And if what we study is writing, it's surely how we learn to write; all writers read all the time.

Often this process of replication is unconscious or only partly conscious. We hear a line and repeat it; we memorize the words of a joke or ceremony or play. The human race reproduces itself, as do snow leopards and snow peas; the genome project undertakes to map this landscape of transmission: how and why. What imitation helps us map is how the artist works, and why, and knowledge of that process will shape informed response.

As a writer and teacher of writing, I get textbooks in the mail with disconcerting frequency. They bulk large every term. Each year some ballyhooed version of what arrived last year arrives, and each year I unwrap it and groan. Like most of my colleagues, I imagine, I put these volumes in the hall or on the English Department's "Free" bookshelf and hope some passing someone may discover something useful and haul the pages away. There's nothing quite so sad or reeking of futility as the Used Textbook section of a Used Book store; the editions (New and Revised! New and Updated!! New and Expanded!!!) grow quickly old.

Yet few if any of those books propose a methodology familiar in most other disciplines: standard practice where standards obtain. No introductory text in math or Spanish would suggest that the student should go it alone; rather, their chapters are structured to permit sequential entry into a language others have practiced, and practice is the norm. In the Palmer method (of learning handwriting) or the Suzuki method (of learning a musical instrument) such a system of "mimicry" continues. Rote learning--the recital of verb forms or multiplication tables in class--has been discredited as a teaching technique, but it did have its points.

For imitation is deep-rooted as a mode of cultural transmission; we tell our old stories again and again. The bard-in-training had to memorize long histories verbatim, saying or …