- Ravitch, Diane.
The Language Police.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
ISBN 0-375-41482-7.
-
One thing which strikes me, having been outside the United States
for fifteen years, is just how dumb people in the U.S.
are, particularly those 35 years and younger. By “dumb”
I don't mean unintelligent: although there is a genetic component to
intelligence, evolution doesn't work quickly enough to make much
difference in a generation or two, and there's no evidence
for selective breeding for stupidity in any case. No, they are
dumb in the sense of being almost entirely ignorant of the
literary and cultural heritage upon which their society is founded,
and know next to nothing about the history of their own country and
the world. Further, and even more disturbing, they don't seem to
know how to think. Rational thinking is a skill one learns
by practise, and these people never seem to have worked through
the intellectual exercises to acquire it, and hence have never
discovered the quiet joy of solving problems and figuring things
out. (Of course, I am talking in broad generalisations here.
In a country as large and diverse as the U.S. there are many,
many exceptions, to be sure. But the overall impression of the
younger population, exceptions apart, comes across to me as
dumb.)
You may choose to attribute this estimation to the jaundiced disdain
for young'uns so common among balding geezers like me. But the
funny thing is, I observe this only in people who grew up the
U.S. I don't perceive anything similar in those raised in continental
Europe or Asia. (I'm not so sure about the U.K., and my experience
with people from South America and Africa is insufficient to form any
conclusions.) Further, this seems to be a relatively new phenomenon;
I don't recall perceiving anything like the present level of dumbness
among contemporaries when I was in the 20–35 age bracket. If
you doubt my estimation of the knowledge and reasoning skills of
younger people in the U.S., just cast a glance at the highest
moderated comments on one of the online discussion boards such as
Slashdot, and bear in mind when doing so that these are the
technological élite, not the fat middle of the bell curve.
Here is an independent
view of younger people in the U.S. which comes to much the same
conclusion as I.
What could possibly account for this? Well, it may not be the entire
answer, but an important clue is provided by this stunning book by an
historian and professor of education at New York University, which
documents the exclusion of essentially the entire body of Western
culture from the primary and secondary school curriculum starting in
around 1970, and the rewriting of history to exclude anything
perceived as controversial by any pressure group motivated to involve
itself in the textbook and curriculum adoption process, which is
described in detail. Apart from a few egregious cases which have come
to the attention of the media, this process has happened almost
entirely out of the public eye, and an entire generation has now been
educated, if you can call it that, with content-free material chosen
to meet bizarre criteria of “diversity” and avoid
offending anybody. How bad is it? So bad that the president of a
textbook company, when asked in 1998 by members of the committee
charged with developing a national reading test proposed by President
Clinton, why the reading passages chosen contained nothing drawn from classic
literature or myth, replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in
the world, “everything written before 1970 was either gender
biased or racially biased.” So long, Shakespeare; heave-ho
Homer! It's no wonder the author of
I'm
the Teacher, You're the Student (January 2005)
discovered so many of his students at a top-tier university had
scarcely read a single book before arriving in his classroom: their
public school experience had taught them that reading is
tedious and books contain only boring, homogenised pablum
utterly disconnected from the real world they experience
through popular culture and their everyday life.
The author brings no perceptible political bias or agenda to the
topic. Indeed, she documents how the ideologues of the right and left
form a highly effective pincer movement which squeezes out the content
and intellectual stimulation from the material taught in schools, and
thus educates those who pass through them that learning is boring,
reading is dull, and history is all settled, devoid of controversy,
and that every event in the past should be interpreted according to
the fashionable beliefs of the present day. The exquisite irony is
this is said to be done in the interest of “diversity”
when, in fact, the inevitable consequence is the bowdlerisation of the
common intellectual heritage into mediocre, boring, and
indistinguishable pap. It is also interesting to observe that the
fundamental principles upon which the champions of this
“diversity” base their arguments—that one's ethnic
group identity determines how an individual thinks and learns; that
one cannot and should not try to transcend that group identity; that a
member of a group can learn only from material featuring members of
their own group, ideally written by a group member—are, in fact,
identical to those believed by the most vicious of racists. Both
reject individualism and the belief that any person, if blessed with
the requisite talent and fired by ambition and the willingness to work
assiduously toward the goal, can achieve anything at all in a free
society.
Instead, we see things like
this
document, promulgated by the public school system of Seattle,
Washington (whose motto is “Academic Achievement for Every
Student in Every School”), which provides “Definitions of
Racism” in six different categories. (Interesting—the
Seattle Public Schools seem to have taken this document
down—wonder why? However, you can still
view
a copy I cached just in case that might happen.) Under “Cultural
Racism” we learn that “having a future time orientation,
emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology,
[and] defining one form of English as standard” constitutes
“cultural racism”. Some formula for “Academic Achievement for Every
Student”, don't you think? (Reading The Language Police
is quite enlightening in parsing details such as those in the drawing
which appears to the right of the first paragraph of this document. It shows
a group of people running a foot race [exercise: good]. Of the four
people whose heads are shown, one is a Caucasian female [check],
another is an African American male [check], a third is an
Hispanic man [check—although the bias and sensitivity
guidelines of two major textbook companies (p. 191) would
fault this picture because, stereotypically, the man has a
moustache], and an older [check] Caucasian male [older people
must always be shown as active; never sitting on the porch in a
rocking chair]. Two additional figures are shown with their
heads lopped off: one an African American woman and the other what
appears to be a light-skinned male. Where's the Asian?)
Now, this may seem ridiculous, but every major U.S. textbook publisher
these days compiles rigorous statistics on the racial and gender
mix of both text and illustrations in their books, and adjusts them
to precisely conform to percentages from the U.S. census.
Intellectual content appears to receive no such scrutiny.
A thirty page appendix provides a list of words, phrases, and
concepts banned from U.S. textbooks, including the delightful
list (p. 196) of Foods which May Not Be Mentioned in California,
including pickles and tea. A second appendix of the
same length provides a wonderful list of recommendations of classic
literature for study from grades three through ten. Home schoolers
will find this a bounty of worthwhile literature to enrich
their kids' education and inculcate the love of reading, and it's
not a bad place to start for adults who have been deprived of this
common literary heritage in their own schooling.
A paperback edition is now available.
May 2006 