The gap between good readers and struggling readers is growing in America, leaving about 20 percent of our kids facing “grim prospects.” Why? At age 15, they haven’t mastered skills expected of 10-year olds. https://t.co/ipLnsLvxAH— Dana Goldstein (@DanaGoldstein) December 3, 2019
I taught Freshman English in college while pursuing my Master's in English, in the late '70's. In the early 21st century I took up teaching English again.
The quality of reading comprehension and composition/rhetorical skills has only gone down in the intervening decades, and it hasn't gotten better on the cusp of the second decade of this century. My only answer is an almost spiritual one (the same kind I apply to the news heard today that the life expectancy in America among the poor and working class is going down, sharply): we really don't give a shit about education in America. The stupidest, most aggressively ignorant man on the planet is our President, and seemingly 40% of the populace is just fine with that. Education is not the be-all and end-all of human existence, but we're all a darn sight better off with it than without it. But we don't care about it.
Once we did; after World War II, when we were re-building the world in our Anglo-American image (wrong from the start, but the intentions were, well, kind of good). We cared even more after Sputnik, but the emphasis on math and science began then and it never let up. What good is knowledge if you can't build things with it? Rockets, satellites, weapons, consumer goods; it was all one (how many times did I hear about the products produced for NASA that became consumer products, so it was all gravy, that massive engineering and research effort). How to read, how to write, how to think? My father was taught to value those things, and he taught me to do so, as well. He didn't have the education in philosophy and theology and literature that I acquired, but he encouraged me every bit of the way.
The culture, however, didn't. I had an English professor in the '70's tell me the best and brightest used to come to college to be English majors and study the humanities; but no longer. That decline eventually hits the schools (where do you think teachers come from?). That which we do not honor, or respect, or consider important, falls away. For all their faults, the founders of the country understood the importance of knowledge beyond that needed for science, which after all was originally a word that only meant "knowledge," and then only of a limited and specific sort. We have decided it is the only knowledge worth having; and that ignorance of the 'liberal arts' has led us to our current predicament, both as a nation and as a people dying younger and younger by the year.
Advent, indeed.
Words from a prior world:
ReplyDelete"Truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge:—he may not realize what his mouth utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself, in consequence of what he has already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual self-possession and repose,—qualities which do not come of mere acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects, is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit.
"This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University."
[Recently-canonized-Saint] John Henry Newman, from The Idea of a University