DUMBED DOWN

by Leigh Lundin

According to an article from a few years ago, the American vocabulary is about two-thirds that of an educated citizen in the mid-1800s. A glance at a school primer (pronounced with a short i rather than long) shows the readers of the time to be considerably more difficult. Even compared with the first half of the twentieth century, vocabularies show a marked decline today.

A recent news correspondent expressed a belief that Americans are "hostile" to education, that we know what we want to know and not anything more. A few years ago, the Secretary of Education was found to have engineered a scheme in Texas to disguise a dropout rate of 50%, which is not unusual in many districts around the nation. Among Western nations, the US typically ranks in the lower third in education and slips lower each year. As one commentator said, "We’ve become so ignorant, we don’t realize how ignorant we’ve become." For years "Poor but Proud" bumper stickers have been around, but I was astonished to recently see "Ignorant and Proud of It". It sounded almost like a presidential campaign sticker from a few years ago, a far cry from the erudite William F Buckley, Jr of recent vintage. We’ve proven ourselves woefully ignorant of both history and economics.

Returning to vocabulary, I’ve become increasingly concerned that we Americans blur our terminology. I already complained about the Oxford Dictionary reshaping the American definition of ‘nonplussed’ to "more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning." (Oxford’s words, not mine) Talk radio hosts treat left and liberal, right and conservative, capitalist and free market as synonymous. These paired words are not the same. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin may have been liberals; they were not leftists.

I’ve wondered if part of our educational crisis is fallout from Gloria Allred’s Title IX lawsuits, which might be interpreted as "If girls don’t want it, boys can’t have it." Cash-strapped schools are even more loath to take on more than the blandest of programs, educational or otherwise. How many classrooms teach to satisfy their state’s benchmark tests rather than educate the children?

I peeked in on Florida Virtual School, an on-line study course. In the English literature section, if your child doesn’t want to read Romeo and Juliet, he doesn’t have to. She can simply watch a movie.

After astonishment, I felt dismay, and then I began to wonder. Wasn’t Romeo and Juliet a play intended to be watched and not read? In Shakespeare’s time, how many enthusiasts read the play as opposed to watching it?

My friend Deborah (‘cootie’), mentioned in earlier columns, is an English lit teacher who loves Shakespeare. Along with reading assignments, she shows parts of the 1968 Zeffirelli film and the 1996 Luhrmann version (not including the naked bits). She uses the films to supplement study, not replace it.

Returning full circle to the opening of this article, vocabulary between generations might not be the best way of measuring education. While modern children might have trouble passing tests that included nimrod and farrier, how many kids from Tom Sawyer’s era would know the meaning of retrorocket and byte? Also what’s not considered isn’t merely quality of literacy but quantity– The percentage of citizens who can read today is far larger than that a century or a century and a half ago.

The quarterly Intelligent Life, a subsidiary of The Economist, recently featured a poll that might show signs of hope for readers and writers, if not the religious. The poll asked, What was the most pivotal moment of all time?

To the surprise of many, 5BC, the estimated year of the birth of Jesus, came in second.

First place was 1439, standing out among such years as 1204, 1492, several dates in the 18^th and 20^th centuries, and 2009. As some readers commented, the current year is the only year we have the power to change. Entries included:

• 5 BC: birth of Jesus
• 570 : birth of Muhammad
• 1204: Christianity split by Crusades
• 1439: Gutenberg's press invented
• 1492: Columbus discovers Americas
• 1693: Newton invents calculus
• 1712: invention of steam engine
• 1776: United States is born
• 1789: French Revolution
• 1791: telegraph and Morse code invented
• 1944: modern ideological warfare developed
• 1945: Nazism falls, atomic bomb dropped
• 1953: DNA is discovered
• 1989: Berlin wall falls
• 1990: Nelson Mandela released
• 2009: Copenhagen climate summit

The current magazine has a great article on the same theme as this article, Is Google Killing General Knowledge? Read on!

If you’re feeling discouraged, the illustrator Seymour Chwast has a different perspective in his Kama Sutra of Reading from Design Humor: The Art of Graphic Wit by Steve Heller: