The Decline of Literate Thought
Once upon a time, when I was visiting Casablanca and strolling about the streets at all hours, I came upon a company of six or seven students in a public souk cramming for their end-of-term examinations. It was two o’clock in the morning. These kids were so poor they had to avail themselves of the electric lighting in the city squares to do their late-night studying. They were the joint owners of one used and battered book, a copy of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste, which they passed between them from hand to hand like the Gray Sisters’ single eye in the Greek myth; it was their window on the world of literary scholarship.
As I happened to be familiar with the text, having taught it several times in the past, I was invited to deliver an impromptu lecture-and-seminar on Gide and his complex relationship to North Africa. Feeling a little like Robert McCrum, as he recounts in Globish, lecturing extemporaneously before an informal klatch of Chinese students, I took what seemed at first like a rather precarious plunge. But as McCrum writes, “the mood [was] unquenchably relaxed, friendly and inspired by a common purpose.” An unprepared teaching session transacted in a second language — French — with an improvisational class in the middle of the night in a strange and remote country, it proved to be a decisive pedagogical moment, almost a conversion experience, which I have never forgotten. The colloquy lasted until sunrise after which we adjourned to a small café to continue the discussion over coffee. Finally, I was escorted back to my hotel where we exchanged well wishes and good byes, both teacher and students conscious of the fact that something extraordinary — and yet entirely natural — had just occurred.
I have rarely encountered a group of more committed students, struggling under crushing disadvantages, yet diligent in their outlook, applying themselves to mastering the same text that my own students tended to write off as just another irrelevant book, better managed under the auspices of Monarch Notes. These young people, for whom a park bench did duty as a library carrel, were, obviously, studying to pass a test. But what affected me most was the sense of conviction and desire, the disinterested (not uninterested) passion they brought to bear upon the text.
They were in love with learning, grateful for the privilege of staying up all night to listen to a teacher, trade ideas, ask questions, range far beyond the designated field of practical inquiry governed by the impending test, track connections with other books and writers (including St. Augustine, who was North African) — that is, to begin to fill up the lack they had divined in themselves. In order to pursue their education, they considered it normal to work double time and more: none had fewer than two jobs, and two had become male prostitutes to finance their studies. Several were providing for their sisters. (An Islamic culture, it is true, whose gender arrangements I can’t help but deplore, but whose people impressed me with their pluck and sophistication.) And they could believe only with difficulty my account of the indifference and torpor that vitiated perhaps a majority of my middle-class students’ academic “careers.” The contrast was, to put it mildly, instructive.
My own students enjoyed heat in the winter and plentiful electric lighting at all times, owned their own books (often sold back to the bookstore at term end, as they saw no point in keeping them), had unlimited access to libraries, and benefitted where necessary from plentiful loans and scholarships to assist them in pursuing their studies. Yet their enthusiasm for learning could not even remotely compare with what I was observing in an unfurnished, late-night public square. What I intuited then and fully apprehend now is that without a more or less equivalent degree of responsibility and determination on our part, an awareness of the value of literary studies and an ethical commitment to mastering our intellectual history and incorporating the wisdom and intelligence of the larger culture that ultimately sustains us, the world in which we live and which we take for granted will surely founder.
This caveat applies equally to that portion of the teaching profession that has eagerly surrendered to the romantic notion of student “empowerment” — another way of victualing the depressing status quo by refusing to teach ways of learning — and that is busy promoting the subversion of authority, precedence, personal independence, intellectual rigor, and the quest for determinate truth. These teachers’ pedagogical rationale operates under the general rubrics of “social justice” and “postmodern indeterminacy.” They tend to be regarded as “experts in the field,” but as Primo Levi said in The Monkey’s Wrench, “I never saw an expert who was any good.” Regrettably, we cannot rely on a scattering of Moroccan students to march to our salvation.
I bought a book on the Dieppe Raid for $.50 at Salvation Army. The noble Canadians were slaughtered in great numbers. I mention it to Canadians I meet and they do not want to hear about it. What a great country Canada must have been to produce such men. I also read about Jack Nissenthal who was wounded several times and kept going despite the odds to get the allies needed info on German radar. Jack was a jewish cockney Englishman who was an absolute stud on the battlefield.
The Canadians I do meet like to lecture me on how the US needs gun control.
In defense of todays students, if you want to make a living you need to learn something practical. I did not attend college, but that is my opinion.
Sunset, a good post.
In support of your post I offer the following tidbits- firstly, I paid a veritable fortune in tuition to educate my sons (at the best universities) because they wanted to major in engineering/hard sciences, the most practical of all studies. Secondly, their thirst for knowledge outweighed their desire to get good grades. They loved (still do, even though a few yrs out of school)to learn for the pleasure of learning. And, THAT makes one a real student, unlike others who study just to pass through a class.
Such an education is priceless.
We in Sussex remember the Canadians who took part in the Dieppe raid. They were camped out in the fields I see from my window in the weeks before the raid. My neighbours house was used as their HQ. Every year a limousine flying a maple leaf comes down to pay tribute at the memorial in Newhaven where many were embarked. If you visit Dieppe there is a beautifully maintained commonwealth cemetery.
Mr. Solway, It’s good to know that you’re out there, still teaching. I was under the impression that literary study at the university level had been pretty much obliterated by the “isms” and the various victim studies long ago.
Just want to say that IMHO, the phenomenon you describe, the decline of literate thought and of interest in our cultural heritage, is real. This isn’t just a matter of the older generation complaining about the younger as it always has. Mark Bauerlein has written about the same thing in his book The Dumbest Generation, as has Leonard Sax in Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge. Both of them point to a disconnect between the younger generation and the rest of us that is possibly greater than ever before because of the screen time factor, among other things. Bauerlein talks about “bibliophobia,” young people turning away from books in such numbers that a greater percentage than ever before do no voluntary, recreational reading at all. Sax talks about the need for boys to be taught how to be men by the men in the community, and for girls to learn from adult women, and that for many young people, those connections have broken down.
I teach advanced placement English literature and other things on the high school level, and too often it’s a hard slog. You can’t light a fire without a spark. My best success over the years has consistently been with lessons that get the students up and acting, even in the simplest, improvised plays. Ninth graders who work out a 20-minute version of Romeo and Juliet with a small group and act in the play suddenly seem to understand it. Bright but disengaged seniors who act in an abbreviated Hamlet or Macbeth are suddenly full of ideas about the play. I think in some way acting is like conversation and that it links to what must be the ancient human experience of story-telling in a small group. There’s an answer somewhere in the concept of conversation, I think, and it probably is up to us older folks to figure out how to break through to the young ones. I wish I knew how. I’m hoping to learn from the Finns at the moment, just starting to read a book on the very successful education reform in Finland.
“Bright but disengaged seniors…..”
That’s it right there. Kids are BORED with all the junk that passes for studies/knowledge these days!!!!!
Thank you for your excellent essay, Mr. Solway.
I do not often print out essays to share with my family, or to surreptitiously leave in places of congregation, but yours will be one.
You are so very correct in your assessment of the current state of affair in education – our teachers are dopes and they, in turn, are manufacturing dopes of a lesser order to follow them.
My oldest daughter remarked upon a question posed by a teacher as to what profession her students want to choose that a vast majority said that they wanted to become teachers.
This particular teacher is a dullard, a very uninteresting woman who graduated from public high school, went to an unremarkable college for four years then returned to the same public high school from which she graduated. Never held another job or lived anywhere else. And her “Honors” English class has read exactly one book, “The Scarlet Letter”. It’s April, and they’ve read exactly one book – not discussed it in class, mind you, but read it.
My middle daughter attends a superb charter high school. I don’t agree with the political leanings of the staff, but you do not hear of any indoctrination ever. She is required to take two languages (Latin and a choice between French and Spanish) for the entire four years. Her French teacher is one of those rare birds – an actual teacher. She has not spoken a word of English in class, in fact, during the open house night she spoke to the parents entirely in French. My French is limited to “oui” but I understood every word she said. What a wonderful experience. She has blossomed from a deeply sullen student who cried her way through her public junior high school days into a very happy, engaged and satisfied young woman.
Ask her about Pinkney’s Treaty or the arguments of the Anti-Federalists and you’re in for a treat.
I have a third daughter, too. I cannot wait to get her out of the public school cesspool.
Our culture is doing just fine–at least compared to the way it used to be.
Anyone who doubts that, should look at the high school dropout rates in America prior to World War II. Or go back even further. In 19th century America, half of Americans had no more than a 6th grade education. You learn a lot of practical stuff by hunting and trapping and farming–but you don’t Proust or Shakespeare that way.
There was NEVER any “Golden Age of Learning” when most citizens in North America were conversant with Proust. What we’re seeing is the flip side of democratizing education. Back in the 19th century, college was for the privileged few–those who were either truly brilliant or (much more often) those who came from wealthy families. Today, far more young Americans go to college. And some of them aren’t talented enough to make it there.
In general, I get really tired of all this handwringing about how our culture is declining. Those who claim this, never state just when our American culture was REALLY GOOD. It is they who betray an ignorance of history, implying some mythical golden age in the past when things were much better but clearly unable to identify one because it never really existed.
Here’s the historical truth:
Americans were never scholars.
Immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds were always accused by native-born Americans of being shiftless and lazy.
And Americans were never chaste nor sexually pure. (Syphilis was a virtual epidemic in the 19th century.)
You’ve read the wrong books, or more likely, listened to the wrong propagandists (i.e., academics).
“Read Without Marx or Jesus” by Jean Francois Revel, a pre-70s paean by a distinguished French philosopher on the glories of American education and literature compared to Europe. Eighth grade public school students had better preparation at the turn of the 20th century than do Bachelors of Arts graduates today.
Read “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs, a thoroughly dire treatise on the finality of consequences due to the West because of “Cultural Amnesia”, referred to in other words by Solway. Jacobs shows that Cultural Amnesia is in fact terminal and irreversible, and presages a Dark Age.
Read “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allen Bloom, written in 1987, probably before you learned to read.
You can start with a list from the Great Books Program (earlier called The Hundred Great Books), which I completed before I turned 18, reading in a storage closet between 9 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. toward the end of my shift as a bellhop.
But you sound like you already know everything, so I guess you won’t.
You sir (or Maam), with your comment, are the shining example of the articles premise.
Here I stand, proudly ignorant? Well, there’s always that. A grade six eduation back then probably exceeded today’s courses in self esteem, women’s studies and Zinn.
Read some letters home from WW2, and compare them to what any idiot teenager writes today, and tell me that again.
If youu cannot see the degradation of society that has occured, it can only be that you, yourself, are so deeply mired in cultural excrement, that you can’t see anything else.
You must be a lovely person.
Or how about the diary entries of a very young Anne Frank.
I read some recently and and realized for the first time how bright and intelligent she was.
She would put most of today’s University students to shame.
North Americans may never have been scholars in the main view but I can say that my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, even with their 8th grade educations were literate. They could read and write in a coherent manner and understand what they read. The same cannot be said for the majority of today’s youth. They don’t have the necessary cognitive skills.
Yes, the high school graduation rates are higher today than in decades past, but anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough. When my parents graduated from high school in 1948, they could find work in any number of places. Today, a college degree is required for so many jobs because a high school diploma indicates little more than time served.
Outside math and hard science, a college degree indicates nothing more than somebody had the money to keep you there and you bothered to show up ocassionally. With many employers it is merely an artificial barrier because they throw up the degree requirement rather than defend their selection methods against discrimination complaints. Since male college attendance is becoming so low, these employers are now at risk of being sued by male applicants asserting that the degree requirement has no business utility and constitutes an artificial barrier with discriminatory impact on males.
There’s thick arrogance in your assertion of some unalloyed historical truth. Here’s an essay that, among other things, considers the education of ordinary Americans just a few generations ago, and has something to say about Solway’s “Lite” joke:
http://www.literatefreedom.org/prae-4.1.htm#Pessimism
Almost right from the start of David Solway’s essay on the decline of literate thought, Tom Bertonneau’s many writings on the subject came to mind. I was pleased to see your link to Praesidium, for which I wrote several pieces some years ago, including one on John Dos Passos and Lev Razgon, whose “True Stories” about life in the Gulag Tom passed on to me, knowing of my long interest in the subject. Tom is a rare figure in his wide-ranging interests and has opened several subjects to me, among which English 20th-century classical music and science fiction. I have shared a deep concern with him over the condition of English studies but lost all desire to explore it any further after writing “The Dark Side of ‘Postmodern Moonshine,’” which Tom rightly understood has “no exit” as its central theme.
Thanks for your note. I’ve been reading Tom for years since I developed an interest in Generative Anthopoloy. The public education system of the multiculti worlds may have no exit; but in the wreckage of the debt-ridden welfare state, life will go on; it is only in the struggle for survival (from ourselves) that a need for real human self-understanding awakens. We Westerners, for the most part, still live in an age of ease.
I’m sure you’ll hear more about how wrong you are. My Part will be:
1. In 1910, an eighth grade grad could read and write decent English, and do arithmatic.
2. In 1930-50, a high school grad could do that.
3. Today there is no great likelihood an average college sophmore could do either.
Reading speed and comprehension? High school grads at the 4th grade level, maybe? Some of you copllege profs help me out on that.
I teach at a community college. Some of the students are quite capable, but most are at about the level of knowledge and writing skills that would have been considered acceptable when I was in ninth or tenth grade.
My Grandfather left school in Lancashire at the grand age of twelve to work in a cotton mill.
Needless to say he read Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens and Greek classics, all from the local library.
Add to that his piano playing, learned on a plank of wood with painted keys.
Why? What good did it do him?
I guess the answer, materially is nothing and spiritually everything.
Your post is a strong example of selective misrepresentation. For example:
“There was NEVER any “Golden Age of Learning” when most citizens in North America were conversant with Proust.” Who the heck decided that Proust waa a giant in literature? There were many great writers in the 19th century, too many to mention here. People read great literature serialized in their daily newspapers. They would read great novels while on lengthy train rides. They read in earnest by lamp light each night, rather than whiling away their hours with mindless television drivel. What the heck sorts of books do people read today? Harry Potter! John Grisham! Sheesh!
“What we’re seeing is the flip side of democratizing education. Back in the 19th century, college was for the privileged few–those who were either truly brilliant or (much more often) those who came from wealthy families. Today, far more young Americans go to college. And some of them aren’t talented enough to make it there.” I might agree with you here, but the truth is that the material covered in the primary and secondary schools in the 19th century would be difficult for many of today’s college students to handle. Colleges have become remedial programs for failed secondary school students. There is no doubt that the general educational level of education of the populace was greater in the past than today. Try reading some compilations of letters written by people of that time. They had a better command of the language by far.
“In general, I get really tired of all this handwringing about how our culture is declining. Those who claim this, never state just when our American culture was REALLY GOOD. It is they who betray an ignorance of history, implying some mythical golden age in the past when things were much better but clearly unable to identify one because it never really existed.” Really? Are you serious here? Can anyone who is supposedly the voice of the learned among us make this claim with a straight face? OF COURSE our culture is declining! We see the evidence of this each and every day!
Then you summarize with this:
“Here’s the historical truth:
Americans were never scholars.” Except the founding fathers, the northeastern philosophers and poets, and the southern writers and musicians.
“Immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds were always accused by native-born Americans of being shiftless and lazy.” Except the European immigrants who had an even higher level of educational attainment on average than native born Americans.
“And Americans were never chaste nor sexually pure. (Syphilis was a virtual epidemic in the 19th century.)” Really? Was it any more prevalent than the absolute explosion we’ve seen in STDs in our sexually liberated time of unfettered sex and abortion? Not likely!
It is biased and slanted discourse such as yours that fills the classroom experience of students each and every day in this country, presented to them as the voice of reason and experience. And always, it seems, from the leftist viewpont that paints a negative picture of an unenlightened America that needed to be uplifted by the Marxocrats of the 20th century.
David, a tip from an oldster, a writer — something you will soon enough face on your own as a writer.
Put periods every once in a while. Little more Hemingway than Faulkner. The older you get, the less Teutonic sentence structure can we stand. If they told me now to “Throw me down the stairs my hat”, I’d probably throw them down the stairs, my cache memory having suffered foreshorteninf of age — along with other things.
Also, please take on the teachers for us. They and their union commissars should replace the troops in Afghanistan.
And we should put the returning troops into the classrooms. One of the few high school teachers that made all the difference in my life was a recently retired US Army Colonel. But that was the 50s. This is now…….
Great advice, pelaut!
I like that sentence structure.
It may be due to too much reading of 18th, 19th, and early 20th century books, but I much prefer it to the clipped sentences of modern, post-modern, trans-modern, net lingo, and whatever other phase we are suffering through now.
You may have to work to actually understand what you are reading, but if the subject is worthwhile then it deserves the effort and attention.
Well, I certainly know why many of us Boomers and older adopted the Hemingway style; we went to college when everyone dreaded “Freshman English” and you had to write everything on unlined paper with a fountain pen, a comma fault or sentence fragment was an F, and a mispelled word was a letter grade. The only time I ever saw my actual Professor, he strode the stage with tweedy majesty and told us that educated people didn’t believe that college freshmen had anything to say that educated people would be interested in, so we were to be grades soley on how we said things. He’d be executed today for so damaging our self-esteem. But, it certainly taught you “how” to say things in short, simple, declarative sentences. I’m sure a good English teacher could tear much of what I write apart, but they don’t have many of those anymore and I’m sure diagramming sentences is considered child abuse. I know I had to teach my young subordinates, mostly law school grads, how to do it so you could do a proper analysis of contract language. I never was particularly good at it, but at least I understood something of sentence structure; that simply isn’t taught any more. We teach English in school the same way it would be learned in an illiterate society; they just learn what sounds “right.”
My English teachers were all of the “old school”, and I don’t believe any of them thought much of Hemingway’s style. The general rules of writing I learned from them were;
1. Each sentence should express a single thought.
2. If a sentence is more than twenty words in length, it probably should be two sentences.
3. If you think a sentence needs a colon, it probably needs a period instead.
4. A paragraph should consist of four sentences at most. Three sentences are probably better.
5. Other than conjunctions, it is best not to use the same word twice in any given sentence. Using it in successive sentences is questionable, as well. The thesaurus is your friend.
6. Never confuse the purposes of commas, colons, semicolons, and periods.
7. “Dashes” and parentheses should be used sparingly, if at all.
My senior year high school Advanced English teacher, a wonderful lady, said it best. “If you want to see examples of how not to write, read any randomly chosen volume of the Congressional Record.”
I know I don’t always succeed at following these rules when I post comments here. But I really do try.
cheers
eon
Thanks for the writing tips. I often learn something here.
Whenever I see a nut rant here on the internet, it involves long, long paragrapphs.
I get the feeling I am peering into the mind of a lunatic.
I never actually talked to any of the English professors of that day, 1967, but I suspect they had little use for Hemmingway. I wonder if any of them would have deigned to talk to a freshman, well, maybe a pretty female freshman might be of interest. The Donald Sutherland character in “Animal House” had a substantial basis in fact. I just know that many of us adopted the simple, reportial style out of self defense back then. My own later writing style became much more complex but I’ll admit my punctuation has become sloppy for this kind of stuff. I’m too lazy to reach for my trusty ’70s edition of Harcourt-Brace or “Eats, shoots, and leaves” to check my punctuation, my proofing is slipshod, and basically if MS Word doesn’t catch it, it doesn’t get caught. But then nobody’s paying me for it either.
artchance, I don’t know about your “eats, shoots and leaves”; back when I was trying to learn how to write, Stuck’s(I think that’s correct) “The Elements of Style” was my primer.
@brobro – I have a Strunk and White somewhere. I like “Eats, shoots, and leaves” a lot. It is by an Englishwoman and in addition to being a good grammar and punctuation reference is funnier’n Hell. My old standby though is a ’70s Harcourt and Brace college English text.
Brobro, Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1918. Concise and the editor’s bible.
Art Chance, As an undergrad I took E.Lit.101 taught by a legit PHD. Later I taught the same material as a grad. assist. at our major state university. In the second instance I benifited by having taken a journalism course which allowed me to prescribe the pyramid approach to writing. I never progressed any further at the university but rather proceeded to a school run by a maritime labor union which had taken a look at the membership and seeing that the average member age was approaching 60, decided to promote their industry to young men with a school which would teach you to weld, use a lathe, repair almost anything then in common use, and garantee you a job upon graduation, all the time paying you to attend their institution. I have never regretted my study of literature; indeed I reread James Joyce’s The Dead and Conrad’s Typhoon every so often just to remind myself what literary art is. I read The Closing of the American Mind while soaking in the bathtub. But that knowledge never earned me much $$$$$… though it enriched my life immmeasurably. When I approach young people these days (I am over 60) I try to provoke them with casual observations on current events, Ms. Fluke for instance, or by asking them if they have ever heard that “the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”? But I don’t dispair too much since most of what I have “learned” occurred after I left school. Recently I was led to read an essay on tennis written by; David Foster Wallace which was excellent. best regards to you.
In my former life I had a lot of dealings with our maritime unions; Alaska operates one of the larger US flag passenger ferry systems. I have a 100 Ton Master’s credential myself. The Marine Engineers and the licensed Deck Officers were generally very intelligent, well read, and well informed – and VERY demanding. I don’t know exactly how the credentialling works for Engineers, but the Master’s testing is as tough a test as I’ve ever taken in any subject. If you actually knew everything the USCG could ask you about, you could step aboard one of Nelson’s ships and so long as you had a sailing master and an gunner take command of the thing. I hope the dead reckoning navigation I did for my navigation test is the last I’ll ever do but if the World as we know it ends and we don’t have GPS anymore, I know how to do it with clock, compass, chart, and a few tools. I even have a couple of books on trig and calculus, two subjects I haven’t touched since 1966 to see if I can restore some aging brain cells and get myself a sextant and learn enough celestial navigation to get an offshore license just to say I have it. I’m too old to ship as a mate and work my way up in tonnage, so 100 Tons will be it for me, but you can run T-boats for oil rig service, lots of small passenger vessels and ferries, big whale watchers etc. Due to my wife’s job in Anchorage, we moved from Juneau and I sold my boat, but I’ll sign on as a mate for free to get sea time if I have to to keep my license. I have a line on a Master’s billet doing lighterage for Shells Arctic Ocean exploration this summer, so that will get me cured for sea time – if it works out.
Artchance, well, good luck to you pursuing seatime; as for me, I have enough. We used to hit Dutch Harbor on the SeaLand box boats on the way to the far east. I never liked the Bering Straits. Then, since I live on the east coast, I spent the last decade of my seagoing career going to the Med or Northern Europe. Melville wrote in MobyDick that going to sea was his Yale college or his Harvard college or something like that….I remember that from a paper I was writing in grad school. I always wished that the USA had a coastal trade similar to that in Holland or Japan, with small vessals making coastwize trips and then back home within a week. There is a passage in Lord Jim which sums it up for me….let me find a copy……it is near the beginning of chapter 11…”there is such a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefinateness, such a bueatiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward. What we get?…well, we won’t talk of that…but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality…in no other is the beginning all illusion-the disenchantment more swift-the subjugation more complete.” That to me is extraordinary prose…but then, he is pumping from my bilge as well as his own. I was for a long time a Faulkner finatic…since I am a Southerner….and I reread The Bear from time to time and also As I Lay Dying….I thought Thomas Wolfe was God’s gift to literature at one time….No one could discribe a scene as he could….but I return to Conrad most of all…that and Isaiah 53.
I have to admit that the sum total of my knowlege of Southern “intellectual history” after Grades 1-12 and a couple of years of college in Georgia was a little Faulkner and some Flannery O’Conner and Sidney Lanier since they were both Georgians. There is a rich canon of Southern literature, but you have to work at it; the publishers and publicists are on 5th Avenue, not Peachtree Street. I was 40 years and 4000 miles from The South before I knew of Cash, The Nashville Agrarians, Walter Percy, Mencken et al. I was writing a history for my hometown historical society of one of the Confederate regiments raised from our county. I found myself using some Sidney Lanier phrases, last exposed to these eyes in 8th Grade Georgia History in, what, ’63. So, I delved into Lanier, Georgia’s Poet Laureate, and found his one and only novel, “The Tiger Lily.” I acquired a ’41 edition from Columbia University Press and even in ’41 the editor heavily footnoted it to explain the obscure references to mid-19th Century French and German romantics. For a country boy from Georgia with a plantation and part of a Presbyterian Academy education, that guy was amazingly well read; he could also write pretty well – and was lead foutist for the Baltimore Symphone. ‘Course, Lanier can’t be very good at that “culture” stuff because he served a spell as a Confederate cavalryman. Then he served a spell as a “guest” of the Yankees at Pt. Lookout where he acquired the tuberculosis that sent him to an early grave.
Anyway, lately I’ve been re-visiting C.S. Forester’s “Hornblower” books. I must admit a guilty pleasure at being able to read all that 18th Century nautical jargon without having to look anything up. What better reason to have a Merchant Mariner’s license?
Faulkner’s internal trilogy: “The Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn” (inside of Go Down Moses, the rest of which I have never actually read) became passions of mine, ones which I inflicted on many a Senior AP student. Eventually got so I could understand most of the Sound and the Fury and As I lay Dying. I don’t read Faulkner in retirement, but helped keep teaching rich for me. Took a Faulkner and Twain course in graduate school, which probably implanted some ideas I later thought to be my own, but that’s life.
Many of my students didn’t particularly care for a lot of the literature I taught, but I knew it was demanding and they needed to be challenged. If they did not love me, or the literature, so it goes. It was good for them and helped make it all bearable, sometimes even enjoyable for me.
And the lengthy (“difficult” would be an understatement) discussion between McCaslin Edmonds and Isaac McCaslin serves as a core understanding for me of whatever I think I know about the South vis a vis slavery and the Civil War.
The best “translation” of “The Bear” is Jimmy Buffet’s “God’s Own Drunk.” Sorry, I like some of Faulkner’s descriptions; his description of some women, Snopes, I think, as “bovine” so resonates, but generally I don’t care for the pretentiously long sentences. I do like the line about standing at the bottom of that damned hill in the early afternoon of July 3, 1863, and for an old family Southerner, the past really isn’t dead, and it isn’t even past.
Faulkner was a Yankee approved Southern writer like Flannery O’Conner or Tennessee Williams, or even on the music side Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael; Southerners who fit the Yankee image of Southerners. Even Mencken is that way, Jeff Foxworthy a century earlier; if you said that crap about anyone other than Southerners, the PC police would haul you away and execute you. Hell, “Georgia on my Mind” wasn’t even about Georgia, but rather somebody’s sister. And the Chamber of Commerce fools still made it the State song. Just like under NAACP and Yankee pressure they did away with the ’56 Flag and replaced it with its predecessor,the flag based on the actual “Stars and Bars” of the Confederate States; you just can’t fix stupid.
I would write the great Southern novel, a work of faction, perhaps, and based on a couple hundred years of ghosts in the closet, but I’d have to self-publish on Kindle because no lefty agent, and they’re all lefties, would be caught dead with me and no Noooooooo Yawk publisher would have anything to do with the work.
“I would write the great Southern novel, a work of faction, perhaps, and based on a couple hundred years of ghosts in the closet,” Sure you would; just like that. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
I gave up any fantasies about being a writer of fiction some time ago, but then I am not a compulsive story-teller. You’ve got a step-up there.
I am finally getting around to reading (I have seen the movier “Gettysburg” a number of times) “Killer Angels:” and reliving Gettysburg one more time, but according to my wife and oldest step-daughter, “Dwight, it’s over.” Shelby Foot’s chapter on Gettysburg, “The Stars in Their Courses” is damned good. Ken Burns, no favorite of yours, I’m sure, got turned on to the Civil War by “Killer Angels,” which led him to Shelby Foote, permitting Shelby to become Yankee approved.
Some people think (or used to) that the South is the only truly human section of the United States, because they are the only ones to have experienced defeat, which is the defining human experience. I suppose that would make the Indians, though, damned human as well. America; land of the Free, the Exceptionalists and the Defeatists.
@Dwight – I am a fair to middlin’ writer when I work at it. It really is more perspiration than inspiration and at least for me has to be done like wage work; get up in the morning and sit down at that keyboard just like you’d gone to the office and work a goodly portion of the day. Start by reading everything you wrote the day before and see if you still like it. If not, throw it away, salvaging anything worthwhile, and start over.
I have the makings of a contemporary Alaska-themed cop novel that started life as the fact scenario for an arbitration training I was planning. It’s loosely based on an actual case that was the bane of my life for awhile. A State Trooper was arrested for four incidents of rape in a rural village. Typical media, the Anchorage Daily News had him tried, convicted, and executed on the first day and had a regular lynch mob whipped up around the state; the comments on ADN articles were extraordinarily bloodthirsty even by Alaska’s redneck cop-hating standards.
I looked at the facts as we knew them, and we knew a Helluva lot more of them than the ADN was reporting, but facts don’t normally interfere with any McClatchey paper’s narrative, and all I saw was a he said-she said and some fairly weak circumstantial evidence, most of it susceptible to another interpretation. I could see getting twelve morons with driver’s licenses to convict him, but I couldn’t by any means guarantee that I could sustain a dismissal before a labor arbitrator, at least not until we had a conviction and nobody wanted to keep him on payroll for a year or two that it might take to get a conviction. As it turned out, the State gave him the German Choice and he resigned to get access to his retirement funds for legal defense and then he negotiated a plea. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Anyway, I fictionalized it a bit and wrote it up as the fact scenario for a mock arbitration exercise. But since it was just that, a fact scenario, it only had a summary of the environment, brief bios on the actors, and a summary of applicable law and contract, and a scenario describing the Trooper’s activities that is a case study in factual and moral ambiguity, so it needs a beginning in narrative form. It ends with his arrest because because it was up to the participants to decide how or whether to suspend or dismiss him and then to defend their action against participants on the union side’s grievance and defense before a panel of arbitrators. The arbitrators would then make their decisions and explain their rationale to the participants. So, it doesn’t have a narrative end either. But it does have some good characters though some of them need new names because a lot of the names are inside jokes in Alaska government and politics as it was in the early to mid-00s. No, there’s no Sarah Palin; she was still a nobody when I wrote most of this. There is a woman governor but she’s loosely based on a couple of people in the government and actually knows something about government, unlike Palin. I take it out and tinker with it from time to time and will get it finished. So much has changed that it is really hard to stay in the mindset of the time and avoid presentism, but I’m working hard at keeping it to what the characters would have known and how they would have behaved in light of that knowlege at the time.
I have another one outlined and a few vignettes written loosely based on my gg/grandfather’s Civil War service but to actually write that one, I need to immerse myself in the era and his actions and associations to have anything like an authentic voice. He was an interesting man; a teacher in a Plantation Academy and a fairly well off farmer who owned a family of five slaves who worked it for him. He was a very reluctant soldier, only “volunteering” to avoid the Georgia Draft on March 4, 1862, just before Confederate conscription began. He was wounded in the Seven Days and made the acquaintance of doctors and hosptital administrators in Richmond. Since he was an educated man he was detailed to various hospitals for administrative duties and stayed out of combat until Chancellorsville after which he was detailed to a hospital in Tallahassee and missed Gettysburg and its aftermath. As the PACS turned to robbing both cradle and grave to face the “bloody arithmetic” of ’64 most able men on detail were called back into the combat ranks. I have many of his letters to his wife in this period and he clearly didn’t want to go and wanted to buy a substitute. I don’t have her letters, letters to a soldier are very rare, but it is clear that she was having nothing of her husband “laying abed” while others were fighting. He returned to the ranks and was in all the Overland Campaign battles but was KIA in Mahone’s counterattack at The Crater, probably by friendly fire. I have his Captain’s letter to my gg/grandmother and his literally blood-stained Testament. We have his quilt that he had used as a bedroll but don’t know anymore which of the old family quilts it is. I spent three days in the summer heat of August ’07 stomping around Richmond and Petersburg cemeteries trying to find his grave but can only conclude he’s buried in the mass grave of Georgia soldiers at Blanford Church in Petersburg. In the winter of ’64, the family was well-off enough that he was seriously considering buying a substitute at the going price of CS$10,000.00 or more. By ’68, she had lost the place and was on the Georgia Indigent Soldier’s Widows and Orphans list. There’s a good story in there, but I’d have to totally dedicate myself to writing it and I’m not there right now.
I posted something regarding publishing the Civil War letters you mention and described some of my own experiences. I did talk about the difficulty of dealing with the “n” word in our local guy’s Civil War diary and made the mistake of writing out the word. Maybe the post will eventually appear…
@Dwight – to your other point:
“Some people think (or used to) that the South is the only truly human section of the United States, because they are the only ones to have experienced defeat, which is the defining human experience.”
The South is, or was, the only truly poor section of the US, that’s the defining Southern experience. I think the only Southerners to have experienced defeat were the generation that actually participated in the Civil War. A much higher percentage of Southern men were in the ranks and, especially, in the major field armies, and a much larger percentage were killed or wounded. The 48th Georgia Infantry, in which many of my ancestors served, left Grahamsville, SC in May of ’62 with over 900 officers and men. It was one of the largest units in the surrender at Appomattox with 228 officers and men still in the ranks. The rest were dead, discharged due to wounds, captured, deserted, or just home. 10 members of my mother’s family joined what became Co. F of the 48th on 4 Mar 62. On 26 Apr 65, 3 were still alive the rest having died of illness or wounds. The clan had been freehold farmers of some substance since 1795 in Georgia. By the 1870s, they were tenant farmers and sharecroppers and stayed so for a century. The men who joined the Provisional Army of the Confederate States in ’61, the firebrands, and ’62, those bound by kin and honor, were mostly dead, maimed, and often morphine addicted if they served in the field armies. Even the antebellum “big men,” those whose slave interests were being fought over and who started the war fought and died in large numbers, and certainly many of their sons did. If one is familiar with an order of battle of the Army of Northern Virginia at its peak in, say, late April of 1863, one doesn’t even recognize that army after the withdrawal from the North after Gettysburg. The losses in, especially, field officers, Lt. up to Bg. Gen, were horrendous. The 48th GVIR with Wright’s Brigade on Cemetery Ridge late in the evening of 2 July, lost most of its officers, several flag-bearers, and its colors, and their experience was all too typical.
The men who came to the fore in the Overland Campaign and the Petersburg Siege have been referred to by some as “hard-handed men,” in contrast to their predecessors who were “gentlemen.” John Brown Gordon came from mining, Wm. Mahone from railroading, N. B. Forrest was a businessman and a slavetrader, neither were respected occumpations in The South. By the end of the War, the landed elite of the antebellum South was largely dead, dispossessed, or irrelevant. Gordon and Mahone went on to become governors and senators, of Georgia and Virginia respectively. Along the way all three were heavily involved in the restoration movements to restore voting rights to former Confederates and restore the former CS states to the union. Gordon and Forrest a bit more involved as major leaders of the Klan. And then there were the men who lay abed. Many is the big monument in an old cemetery waxing prolix about the man’s gallant service to the Confederacy, when in fact, while he wore that usually well-tailored uniform, he was in a cavalry unit under department command that never left its home county and did nothing more dangerous than patrol the roads for runaway slaves and deserters, though in places confronting deserters could be very dangerous. That part of “Cold Mountain” is pretty realistic. These men in large measure became the scalaways of the reconstruction era who preyed on the wealth and widows of the men who actually fought. Those women who lived out their days caring for a maimed or disgraced husband, as widows, or in loveless marriages to such men as were available so as to keep body and soul together became the “Steel Magnolias” of The South. The South became and in the old families remains very matriarchal.
I think the leadership cohort from the restoration onward were in the main detestable men. Between the noble Lost Cause mythology and the new ruling class trying to create a legend to cover for the fact that they slept in their own beds from ’61 – ’65, the South convinced itself that it really hadn’t lost and more insiduously convinced itself that “if it weren’t for the Yankees, we’d all still live a Tara.” Hell, almost nobody lived at anything like Tara and even such Taras as their were built on the fortunes of upland cotton were at most forty or fifty years old in ’61.
Henry Grady and the other Boosters mythologized The South and created the New South. The only thing new about the New South was that unlanded whites joined blacks at the bottom of the social and economic ladder and the ruling class was able to keep them both oppressed by having them fight each other to prevent either from reaching the first rung of the ladder for a century and more. Even into my early days in the labor market there the business and political leaders of The South viewed life as a zero sum game in which one only got ahead by taking something from someone else. To this day they’re addicted to sales taxes, income taxes, and fees for everything so that the landowning classes won’t have to pay property taxes on their damned pine trees and fields. How many times I’ve heard business and political leaders say of sales and ad valorem taxes on personal property, “well, at least you can make [Blacks] pay taxes like that.” It took New Deal labor laws and WWII to lift the Whites out of peonage and the blacks just moved to another plantation where they tenant farm and sharecrop government benefits. Even for those of us whose heritage is in the landed class, the caste system was so rigid, that “what does your Daddy do” was the whole of a job interview unless you were willing to move to the city and work for Yankee companies, and you didn’t totally escape it even in the Yankee companies as they tended to hire Southern frat boys as their middle management. Anyway, being of sound mind, I let slip the surly bonds of The South in ’74 and haven’t been back for more than short visits since. I have an attachment of heritage and romance to the land of moonlight and magnolias, but not enough to make me want to live there, and especially to have my kids live there. In Alaska, nobody has ever asked me what my Daddy did or what fraternity he or I had belonged to, and if either subject did come up, it would be idle curiosity, not a job interview.
Artchance, that was a heck of a riff you got on about the South; reminded me a little of Quinten McCallum??? on the final page of Absalom Absalom! My mom’s folks were from Georgia; Social Circle. Sent 10 men to The War; three returned. In one family document it was reported that one of the survivors had been hit in the head by a ramrod fired from the muzzel of a rifle. He was never “right” after that.
@brobro – There’s a reason they absolutely will not allow Civil Reenactors to carry ramrods! The ramrod to either an Enfield or a Springfield, the two most common CW muskets, was a heavy steel rod that was just as lethal as the .58 Minie, though not as stable nor as long-ranged. There’s lots of them in the collectors’ market compressed to a zig-zag shape from having been fired and hit something solid. Lots of muskets were recovered from the battlefields with the barrel literally stuff full of unfired rounds. Many men never fired. Lots of ramrods got launched. Even though they drilled a lot, they were still citizen soldiers and while those from a rural background, North and South, were generally good shots, they were not trained soldiers and it only got worse as the War progressed, particularly in the Eastern Theater. By ’64, the Army of Northern Virginia’s troops referred to the Army of the Potomac’s troops as “The Hessians” because they were so heavily bountied immigrants. You could avoid conscription under the US draft by paying a $300 communtation fee, a sum far out of reach of most wage earners. It was not out of reach of the business leaders of a community who would quite commonly pay the commutation fee for the draft quota of men from their community so they could stay home and engaged in the economy. That money was used to pay enlistment bonuses in Germany, Ireland, and on the docks and in the alleys of the Northern cities. “Gangs of New York” was pretty accurate about that. On the other side of the ditch the CS was robbing the cradle and the grave, rounding up deserters and those on “French Leave,” CS officers didn’t generally consider a man to have deserted unless he actually went to the Yankees and took the oath; just going home for awhile or over-staying leave might get you some rough duty but rarely got anyone punished as a deserter. Pulling men in off details and in labor deferments who while they’d technically been in the Armies since ’61 or ’62 had seen little or no combat and done little drill – my gg/grandfather KIA at The Crater falls in that category. I think on either side, but especially in The South, the very worst thing you could do for your wife and family was to fight for your Country in the field armies. Probably ought to stop this WBTS stuff, we’ve pretty well hijacked this thread.
My literary efforts since retirement have involved this sort of thing. Pvt Edward Waldo fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg among other places. He took a minie-ball in the arm at Spotsylvania Courthouse, lost the arm, and then his life a week or two later. We have his pencil-written dairies and letters and I wrote an Introduction for the collected letters and diaries when we published them a couple years ago. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Rear of Vicksburg, Miss. July 29th, 1863
Father & Mother,
… We started from Jackson the 11 of July and we had a pretty hard time coming back. We were on half rations and it was very warm and water was very scarce. There was a good many of this corps that dropped down dead in the ranks owing to the heat. Although we drew but half rations I lived pretty well. I did not draw any rations on the march. I got my living out of the Secesh on the road. We had peaches, figs, hoe cake & molasses, honey and such stuff. We would go along til we came to a good looking house and go in and tell them what we wanted and they would set their n*****s to work and cook it up. We went to one place and they had about 10 or 12 hives of bees. One of my tent mates and myself thought we should like a little to help a hard tack down so we asked the man of the house which hive was the best one and he said that he guessed that there was not much in any of them but we were not going to give it up. So we went and got a good pile of cotton (there is plenty of cotton in this state) and set it a fire and got it to smoking then went and picked out a good hive and smoked the bees out and we had a nice mess of honey.
I did not have a very heavy load when I came into camp last Thursday. Everything I had was my pants, shirt and cap, Gun & equipments. I lost everything else and my boots I had to throw away. They were all worn out and hurt my feet pretty bad. I came all the way from Jackson bare footed (about 60 miles). (I drew some shoes from the gov yesterday).
I suppose that before this they have drafted in Stoughton Henry Monk. Had a letter Sunday and it stated that there was to be 144 drafted from there. Warren Monk and John Guild of Stoughton have been drafted from Boston. I should like to have you send me a list of the drafted men of Stoughton. I suppose that they had a pretty hard fight at Gettysburg, Penn. I hear that the 12th Mass. suffered considerable. The Sergt. Major told that they were going to fill up the old regiments with the drafted men. lf so, I suppose that some of the Stoughton boys will come to this one. I am glad that I am out here now and not have to be drafted. I can have the fun of seeing some of them drill out here in this warm weather. …..
Edward
DS: “These are only a few examples, among the myriad bristling in my personal files culled from every walk and profession of life, of the intellectual eclipse that has overtaken us. The level of ignorance is stupefying and, I have come to believe, barring a miracle, verging on the irreparable.”
George Orwell understood that totalitarianism was ultimately built upon lies. In order to usher in tyranny intelligent people must be conditioned to reject self-evident truth through the insanity of doublethink, and the less intelligent are simply allowed to wallow in the sanity of stupidity.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously [the lie and the truth], and accepting both of them [Insanity]… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” George Orwell – 1984
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
There’s another excellent example of coerced stupidity in Gene Wolfe’s “Citadel of the Autarch.” He writes of a story contest in a hospital tent where one of the tellers is a captured enemy. In his nation they are not allowed to say anything that isn’t written in their holy/communist book, so his story has to be translated by a scout who understands how they use language. Despite using only the prescribed phrases, they still communicate effectively, thus illustrating the lengths to which totalitarians will go to control their people, and the utter impossibility of actually accomplishing the goal. The human spirit breaks free no matter how they try to take control. This is why I believe power is an illusion. I read this book when I was sixteen, and it had no small influence on my thinking, led me on to greater things. It’s the reason I was never a liberal/leftist even when young; Wolfe inoculated me against “we’ll fix everything” politics.
Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer since Rudyard Kipling. Thank you!
But then, you of all people would know what the alzaebo is.
Reader, “the analeptic alzaebo is a beast, that, when it eats the flesh of it’s victims, speaks then for a time in their voice”
“It’s” = “it is,” NOT the possessive.
Why should this be different from anything else? It seems like the standard for darn near everything is lower than ever.
Howard Gottlieb
http://www.easy-fundraising-ideas.com/products/cookie-dough-fundraiser/
Let us also learn some math before that part of our brains disintegrate under conditions of disuse as well.
Dr. Solway’s lament reminds us of Voegelin’s analysis of the sundry human establishments where he posits three ‘categories’. The first, is the apocalyptic. In the case of modernity, a distinct possibility. The second, gnostic, which while possible I suppose, isn’t probable due to the extirpation of the transcendent. The third is interestingly referred to by Voegelin as the “Third Way” and stands as the most likely simply because it calls for an abandonment of the ‘rational/nous’ and an embrace of the ideological demands of the state which, if you believe the propaganda, will result in the ‘perfect order for mankind.’
Sadly, the point Dr. Solway didn’t make may be the most important. As modernity obscures and obliterates the transcendent, it creates, in man a Hegelian-Marxist alienation we see daily acted out in media, academia, and government. The balance between the secular and the spiritual is destroyed because there is no ‘spiritual.’ The tension of man’s existence, wherein we may locate not only reality and truth, but participate in ‘the order of true existence’ with God, no longer functions. The purpose of modern man is to re-capture those lost and obliterated symbols so that we may, once again, have the hope of restoring the spiritual component of human existence.
“The second, gnostic, which while possible I suppose, isn’t probable due to the extirpation of the transcendent.”
A good friend of mine, who is much more knowledgeable about philosophy than I am, argues that what we are seeing in our leaders is in fact gnosticism in its purest form.
Their world, as Orwell stated in Liberty-Clinger’s quotation at 8, is one of “feelings” and “beliefs”. So much so that it is possible for a true believer in post-modernist doctrines to have two exactly opposite and mutually-exclusive beliefs at the same time. And insist that both are absolutely true, and deny that they are contradictory.
This is gnosticism in its purest form. Also known as magical thinking.
Where this form differs from the classical forms is not that it denies the transcendent. Instead, those who believe in what we may call modern gnosticism have replaced the traditional forms of that factor with their own conceptions.
Rather than worshiping (a) God, they worship “Holy Mother Gaia”. Not wanting to consider Man as an evolved being charged with the custodianship of the world, they define him as a blight upon same. And so on.
Most people see the real world as it is in their everyday lives, and interact with it on that basis. However, the modern day intellectuals who rule us live in a fantasy world of their own creation, composed of what they define as “transcendent” issues, values, and articles. Most of which cannot be proven to exist by any known method.
This is why it is essentially impossible to have a reasoned discussion with our “enlightened leaders’ on any subject. To them, their visions are the only reality. The fact that the rest of us cannot see the world they believe in is, in their minds, simply proof of our stupidity. And thus our need to be ruled by an “enlightened elite’”, i.e. themselves.
And for them to even consider our worldview as having any validity at all would be apostasy in their own minds.
If that isn’t gnosticism, I’m not sure what else it can be called.
cheers
eon
Eon, what an excellent comment, and a salute to your ‘philosophical’ friend as well. My use of the term ‘gnostic’ applied to the ancient and not modern form as explicated by Voegelin who included the movements of “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism,” as examples of modern gnosticism. In fact we might say that he wanted to place all manner of modern ideologies in that gnostic box because in one way or another they acted as a ‘gnostic immanentization’ (“..an act of self-divinization which results in the re-divinization of the world that previously had been de-divinized by the philosophers and the Judeo-Christian revelation.”)
My error, happily confessed, was in not placing sufficient import on his analysis of ‘modern’ gnosticism and in considering modernity’s rejection of the transcendent as the ground of the Judeo-Christian revelations as universal when, in fact, that rejection may not be as universal as I thought/think.
However, Voegelin in his, “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism”, indicated that in order to oppose the modern gnostic movement we would be required to restore that knowledge, predicated on a truth established by the ‘nous’, to facilitate the “reopening of the soul toward the transcendent ground…”
I am still tempted by the ‘Third Way’ in that the Obama regime, currently at the helm of the American ‘empire’, seems anxious to achieve the ‘perfect order’ for man on the Earth/Gaia by means of state coercion. However, the differentiation of modern gnosticism and the Third Way may be extremely slight?
Your description of our political, academic, and societal leadership strikes me a spot on and for the reason you’ve illuminated. Hegelian Second Realities have done their work. It is almost impossible for me to even talk to these people and it is evident that their various psycho-pathologies have filtered down to all levels of society.
I’ll grant in the past the vast majority of folks weren’t college graduates but even then those folks definitely seemed to have a better “working knowledge” of the world than most college grads today. I’ve seemed to notice that more and more folks today are “specialists” rather than the generalists we all used to be.
The fact that I can track satellites, hold conversations with folks in the south pole while fixing their internet connection at the same time is awesome, and still know how to change the oil in my car and put up a fence is mind boggling to kids today. How can I possibly be as specialized as to track satellites for a living yet still do mechanical tasks and such? Too many (in my opinion) are focused on one thing to the detriment of all else because partially the schools are designed for that now, and because we have so much information at hand we can get blinders on and focused.
Do you know a computer guy who can tear apart and put back a computer down to the smallest screw but can’t change a tire? (I know FAR too many of those)
Do you know folks who can tear apart your sink and toilet but can’t figure out how to make a playlist on iTunes? (Know one of those too)
Do you know someone who can find a 1952 copy of the New York Times on a shelf in the library but couldn’t find the New York Times website? (Or vice versa?)
Yes, most students today are complete morons in areas outside of their particular field of interest. But get them talking about glittering vampires or 20 sided dice and you’ll find out more than you’d ever want to know in those areas. As students I don’t see that as too bad IF we actually taught them the other stuff and not just threw it at them and saw what stuck. I HATED all my literary/English classes throughout school because none of them mattered in any way to me. Only ONE English teacher in my entire school career gave a damn about what he was teaching and made me care as well.
So on the one hand we have a teaching curriculum and staff that doesn’t give a damn and just throws it at kids, and kids who become hyper focused on what they want to the neglect of everything else. Those two things together really don’t work well or bode well for our collective futures.
But because I CAN, change my oil, does not mean that it is cost/time-effective for me to do so. I used to, but since I can get someone else to do it for 14.95, I cn save that time for sawing wood or rototilling the garden.
What exactly is wrong with knowing about 20 sided dice?
When RPGs began, gaming was the province of the highly intelligent and more than a bit well educated.
You had to know both probability and history, along with tactics and trigonometry, to be a competent miniatures gamer.
To design a coherent setting you had to know mythology, medieval history, sociology, ecology, economics, politics, and military science at the least.
The inspirational reading list from the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide was filled with classics from the first half of the 20th century along with masterpieces of the third quarter of the 20th century.
People with advanced degrees in literature and science were quite well represented among the early game designers and authors.
Now it is certainly true that the tabletop hobby is currently suffering from a combination of the pretensions of many designers, a severe lack of competence in probability, and an exceptionally hard left turn in political orientation. Worse though is a pandering to those more interested in the electronic versions of the games, where all of the skills required for the tabletop versions and subsumed by automation, and the designers chase a phantom of being able to replicate the number crunching power of a processor and the design ability of a program in a guidebook for the random player of Angry Birds.
In the face of that if you actually do find someone who can does want to talk about 20 sided dice they are more likely to be from the older crowd, and are likely to be more competent in a wider array of fields than you.
You could do far worse to encourage creativity and love of learning than to get a kid that interested in 20 sided dice.
The number of truly educated people is probably about the same, but what we have is a vast increase in the number of half-educated people, who claim to know what the Founders thought because of a list of quotations accumulated from the NRA or Newt Gingrich’s “history” books on the one hand, or diversity courses and Howard Zinn’s works on the other. They all capture small pieces of the picture, the piece which they want to hear.
I will also grant, though, that knowing both sides is an excuse for not doing anything and letting the rival forces which are always at play, hashing things out between them. Claudius and Laertes get things done; Hamlet (re)acts when he is forced to.
Certainly any history should show rival forces at work and how various groups acted in what they perceived to be their self-interest.
“The insistent question is: how does one go about trying to rescue a culture in the throes of custodial dissolution?”
A perfunctory reading of history would tell us that there is no rescue possible for a culture in any form of dissolution. It gets replaced by some other form, good or bad, but the revival of learning may take centuries when a literate culture evolves back into an oral culture.
What worries me more than anything else is that I see a very real shortage of skilled people in the “everyday needs” type of jobs like plumbers, mechanics, woodworkers, masons, carpenters, electricians, etc. The most ominous for our modern economy is the lack of skilled machinists. Our whole civilization is built on the ability to use machines to make other machines. Many employers say that most applicants simply do not have the cognitive skills to learn a trade.
What scares me is that dystopic books such as Hunger Games are promoted by this decadent society and read as gospel by today’s youth.
Looking at the ordinary University curriculums of, say, the 1900s and before you will find that Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were just the minimum language requirements of a curriculum heavy on Greek and Roman writers and philosophers, the Bible, the great works of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, History, Literature,English and American history, political theory, economics, mathematics,and chocked full of what, by today’s standards, are the courses taken by advanced scholars, and not your average undergraduate; and those courses—as well– taught ethics and virtue and discipline, a work ethic, and the values of hard work, persistence, truth, and ethical dealing. Fast forward to today’s universities and view the watered down, crap—mostly leftist propaganda and victim studies–undergraduates study today.
Walk into practically any store, talk to the people who work there, ask them about their stock and what they have available, have them tally up your bill, and you will increasingly encounter the uninformed, listless products of today’s educational establishment, who usually couldn’t care less and who obviously can’t add or subtract to save their souls.
Talk to today’s college graduates about the subjects they were supposed to have learned about and you mostly draw blank stares.
Pre-WWII Italian Communist Party member and Marxist Theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s plan for the triumph of Communism involved a largely violence-free, patient, multi-generational campaign to use the new technological developments in media to widely and deeply disseminate leftist propaganda, ideas delivered by the elites who helped to form public opinion–“thought leaders,” academics, political and religious leaders, writers, entertainers and playwrights, cultural icons, celebrities, and other prominent people–to envelope the people of bourgeois societies in a sea of propaganda that reached into every aspect of life and, was eventually able to entirely subvert, change and replace their knowledge, values, culture, and leadership “hegemony” so that they would be gradually “transformed” into Left led societies espousing and living leftist ideals, with the results we see today.
Communism could not win if people in these bourgeois societies “clung” to their current viewpoints, so a fundamental and absolutely essential part of that campaign was to detach the people in these bourgeois societies from their current knowledge base and the ethos, attitudes, and behaviors that grew out of it, and the vulnerable cleavage point for this attack was education.
Thus, the extremely successful assault on the Academy by Gramscian, Postmodern thought, which rejects all of the knowledge and experience gathered in the past and the old certainties—history, philosophy, standards, values, ethics, analysis and its tools–as totally wrong and illegitimate, as a meaningless charade,as merely the power game played by the haves against the have nots,and leaves people in a value-free world with no right or wrong, and only the game of power to play.
And we see the results of that victory by Gramscian Postmodernism all around us.
If the Gramscian attack on the Academy was so successful, then there must have been something wrong with the Academy. In the world of ideas Darwinian principles do their work no less certainly than in the biological. Successful crops are no longer seen to be the result of the sacrificing of a young child to a fertility deity. Ideas come and go. When people have had enough of anomie, they will again take up the search for meaning. Of course, they will be poorly prepared, but nature abhors a vacuum. The need for meaning will be fulfilled.
The “academy” WAS the Gramscian attack, with not a little help from the “we have seen the future and it works” set in newspapers and radio. The elite colleges were firmly under communist influence by the ’30s and were a fertile ground for the NKVD/GRU once FDR recognized the USSR and they began to establish consulates. It wasn’t for nothing the SF Consulate was a hotbed of industrial and atomic espionage; there was a very fertile sea for spies and traitors to swim in. The New York Consulate had the whole Ivy League to play in and it was made very welcome.
Everybody likes to blame ‘Boomers, but I’m an early ‘Boomer and when I started college in ’67, most of my professors in Humanities courses were outright open Marxists. The fact that you could keep a 2-S deferment in grad school led lots of guys to stay in as long as they could to avoid the Draft. That led to a lot of Ph.Ds that had understudied Marxist/communist professors for a decade and they moved easily into tenured positions. Then rather than accept that it was going to take a lot more than just going to the same schools to “integrate” Blacks, the whole educational establishment dropped the already lax academic standards, lax and unequal so that guys could stay in school to avoid the draft, to hide how poorly Blacks were doing in White schools from K-12 on up. We now have at least 52% of the population who are simply too ignorant and brainwashed to effectively participate in republican democracy.
You don’t even have to go to college curriculum, just take a look at McGuffey’s Readers, first published in the 1870s. The Sixth Reader, which would have been for sixth or seventh graders would be very tough reading for the average college grad these days. I used McGuffey’s with all my kids and despite the best efforts of teachers using the latest groovy techniques, they all always read above grade level.
I took a philosophy survey course about fifteen years ago now, just as sort of a tune-up. The professor was only an adjunct because his politics weren’t right and they ran him off the next year because he was too tough. He liked to have students read passages from the text aloud, something rarely done these days in either HS or college because some do it better than others and that makes the ones that do it less well feel bad. Of course, some of it had big, old-fashioned words with which the college sophomores and juniors, mostly, were unfamiliar and they struggled and stumbled A LOT. I know I could read aloud much better than anyone in that class by the time I was in the third or fourth grade, but then my teachers and my parents weren’t so concerned with cultivating my self-esteem. The professor knew me, so he mercifully never called on me to read aloud. What we discovered was that you could tell how the kids had been taught to read just by listening to them. The ones that had some phonics training could decode an unfamiliar word; they might muff the pronunciation a bit, but they’d basically get it. The one who’d been taught “whole word” or other kinds of “sight reading” would miscall words in ways that rendered the sentence meaningless or completely change the meaning and charge right on blissfully unawares. How can someone who can’t even call the words read for comprehension at all?
McGuffey’s Readers actually go back to the 1830s, not the 1870s. See http://books.google.com/books?id=Yf8VAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=McGuffey+reader&hl=en&sa=X&ei=naZwT6jiO4WPigK7qczPBQ&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false for the 1836 edition of the Second Reader.
David, I always enjoy your work and this article was as thought provoking as usual. I was struck by something that you may find interesting. As a Jew upon awaking from a nights sleep before getting out of bed I thank The Almighty for returning my soul to me. The second prayer of my day, done immediately upon arising and washing my hands and face ( as much an acknowledgement as a prayer ) begins- ” The beginning of wisdom is the the fear of Hashem… “.
Society has turned from education because it has lost it’s, ” fear of Hashem ” .
An interesting story. Oft times scarcity brings more intense involvement and value. What other courses were your impromptu students taking at that time? Our culture is blessed with plenty of options for our time and also pressures to fill time with certain “requirements”. This blessing can be made to seem a curse. Your experience in Casablanca is fundamentally one of encountering a group of students thirsting for knowledge; that happens in the U.S. as well, perhaps as often, though under better conditions and lighting. I suspect our culture produces a far greater percentage of people who go to college. It is very easy to attend college in the U.S. and many do so for social or economic rather than intellectual reasons. The result is more jobs for teachers, but a smaller percentage of those students have the active interest that you saw that single night in Casablanca. Good fortune to you, as a teacher, for having such a gratifying experience and good fortune to us for you sharing it.
This is the best site for anyone who desires to find out about this topic. You notice so much its almost onerous to argue with you (not that I truly would want…HaHa). You undoubtedly put a brand new spin on a subject thats been wrote about for years. Nice stuff, simply nice!
Back in the Golden Age we said, “has been written about,” or if we were really sticklers “about which much has been written.”
Formal English is a dead language, Dwight. If you speak it or write it you scare women and children. It marks you as some sort of authoritarian, and God forbid one uses any words derived from Latin or Greek. SeewatI’sesayin’?
Pretentious, self-aggrandizing, blowhard. Why us this even on pjmedia? Would do nicely at salon.com or any other Leftist site. One amazon book reviewer said it best about his beloved book, The Immortal (this America, we speak English): ” I would not recommend this book to others, save for anyone interested in examining the conflict of a closeted gay married man at the turn of the 20th century”
Tata
Tata means breast or, in your case, boob.
Oh, you mean ta ta, as in adios.
If you visit the sites, goodreads, shelfari, or librarything, you’ll see plenty of literate people.
It’s just one of those weird coincidences, I’m sure, but just “coincidentally” one of the major—and little reported on–forces over the last several decades in teacher education and curriculum development has been none other than unrepentant urban terrorist, Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education, and University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who obviously decided that subverting capitalist, bourgeois society from within was likely to be much more successful in the long run, and beat bomb throwing and being on the lam.
Say, just out of curiosity, how did Ayers—son of very wealthy and well-connected Thomas G. Ayers, former Chairman and CEO of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, and nick named by some “the Godfather of Chicago politics“–and his lovely wife, Bernadine, manage to stay on the lam and out of jail for something like ten years?
Some enlightening analyses of Ayers pedagogical methods and objectives can be seen at http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html and http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/AyersreportfinalMay25NEW.pdf and http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169 .
What I intuited then and fully apprehend now is that without a more or less equivalent degree of responsibility and determination on our part, an awareness of the value of literary studies and an ethical commitment to mastering our intellectual history and incorporating the wisdom and intelligence of the larger culture that ultimately sustains us, the world in which we live and which we take for granted will surely founder.
The defining characteristic of our era, foundering.
Didn’t Gide fly his airplane into the night sky and disappear, like Amelia Earhart and John Denver ?
The Little Prince lit up my life.
Here’s a recent literary work sailing off the shelves in Toronto
Actually, the author of “The Little Prince” was Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and he was the one who disappeared, on a reconnaissance flight over the Med in 1944;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry
Gide died of natural causes in Paris in 1951.
As for John Denver, he didn’t “disappear”. He crashed in an experimental light plane he had just bought;
http://www.avweb.com/other/ntsb9905.html
A pilot with his accumulated hours really should have known better than to go that far offshore with a brand-new aircraft. Especially one with which he was still familiarizing himself.
As the saying goes, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are very few old, bold pilots.”
Saint-Exupery had a good reason to be “bold”. Denver did not.
cheers
eon
Do you mean Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?
Oops, I see it has already been dealt with downthread. I taught Wind, Sand and Stars a number of times.
As for the recapturing of a literary tradition and an accompanying depth of mind, the very nature of the type of communication with which youth is obsessed (texting, tweeting etc.) conditions and programs the brain itself.
Even reading a book on a Kindle is a different kind and quality of reading than holding a book.
Tough to put the genie back in the bottle or even find the genie and the bottle in the same room, or even on the same planet.
Tanstaafl, I think you might mean Antoine de St. Exupery – he’s the aviator who wrote Le Petit Prince.
Oh that’s right.
mea culpa
La Porte Étroite & La Symphonie Pastorale (just to irritate Mal above) I read decades ago, the former had a big influence on me.
Whether biblical or not, the way is, indeed, narrow.
…and ‘Night Flight.’ (Vol de Nuit). It was turned into a pretty good movie by David Selznick, starring John and Lionel Barrymore, and an impossibly young Clark Gable.
Anyone of a number of reasons, including modernity itself, the inclination as Chesterton put it, to think “our time” is, must be, superior to the past. And by inference we are superior as well. An infectious attitude which worms it’s way through a society at all levels. Given that, what respect or veneration does the past, history & culture, receive.
Then there is the usual other factors, TV, a professional teacher class caught up in technique, and their benefits, the cheaper attractions of increased leisure, the regular suspects. But as Albert J Nock put it, there will always be an Isaiah’s remnant of the literate, at least I hope so.
Thank you for the wonderful, and moving, column.
This is the battle for our soul that will decide if the West will survive.
Like other Readers here, I am pretty old and I look with sadness and fear at what is happening to the mind of the new generations.
But on the other hand I contemplate with wonder the unbelievable revolution that Internet is: with effort and difficulty I gathered a library able to support my studies, now I find web pages in which thousands upon thousands of decisive classics are published, for free, in wonderful critical editions. Have you ever seen the classical library at Perseus -Tufts ? The online edition of the whole Patrologia Latina and Graeca ? The philological detail of the edition of the Bible at Biblos. com ?
Absolute wonders !!!
If I had had all that when I was twenty !!!
Now I can write and find a quotation from an Author for a footnote in five minutes ! And compare editions and translations !
It’s a revolution.
We are still in the chaos phase, with much destruction. But the new lines of a possible Renaissance appear, clearly, on a far horizon.
Never, ever, culture has been so near to each human being. Never, studying has been so helped.
And yet…the spell check tries to tell me that “Patrologia” is spelled wrong and that tells me much about the minds who worked at the spell checker…
“Clearly, the failure of both memory and knowledge has become epidemic.”
And it shows in our presidents, big time. Believe it or not, one of the last presidents who had a decent background in history was George H.W. Bush. Ronald Reagan was very good, too, showing that if you went to college during the World War II generation, you usually ended up with a better education that stuck with you longer.
Clinton’s knowledge of history was not that good and George W. Bush’s was even worse, showing that the baby boomers just couldn’t be bothered by history. Which is a dangerous thing when you think about it, because you would want your president to be able to refer to some aspect of past history when faced with a modern crisis. In fact, many of our modern global problems can be traced back decades, if not centuries. Would George W. Bush still have invaded Iraq had he known of all the ethnic fighting that had gone on in that nation since it was created after World War I? Would Bill Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden in the 1990s rather than let him go, knowing that it’s better to kill a bitter enemy in that part of the world rather than show weakness and let him escape? History is the foundation all presidents need if they are to govern properly, and sadly too few of them even have a clue as to how the world worked a few years ago, let alone decades or centuries ago. Obama is a great example of that right now.
“showing that the baby boomers just couldn’t be bothered by history. Which is a dangerous thing when you think about it,”
That’s basically bullshit. ‘Boomers, especially early ‘Boomers like Clinton and GW Bush were among the last cohort of Americans to have a comprehensive exposure to American and Western History from Fourth or Fifth Grade through at least their Sophomore year in college. Slick Willie was your basic draft dodging ’60s communist and that fact and his white trash Southern upbringing tells you what you need to know about Slick. Just as Slick was rising out of the clutter, a labor arbitrator friend of mine, Hahvud Law ’48 and a to-die-for resume, and I were drinking an after action analysis and he asked me what I thought of that Clinton guy. I replied that I didn’t know much about him but he and I were about the same age and were both from the white-trash South, so if he was being seriously talked about for President, he must have taken every shortcut and broken every rule; hate to have been so right.
GWB was by all accounts, well all non-lefty accounts, a pretty good student and quite well-read. I don’t think you can attribute some of his questionable decisions to historical ignorance – other than a sort of institutional ignorance of the Byzantine and Muslim Worlds that comes from our Eurocentric, mostly Catholic-driven, view of “the East.” I think he was highly motivated to go after Iraq because his father was heavily criticized for not having “finished the job” – a BS argument itself, and because Saddam Hussein had tried to kill the old man; that tends to piss off even transplant Texans.
Intellectualism will not save us. It will only produce more intellectual snobs and Obamas (but I repeat myself). Leave idols alone and come back to good old gratia Dei.
The curse of the Left: Morons who reject intelligence in favor of faux-intellectualism.
The curse of the Right: Morons who reject intelligence as just another sort of faux-intellectualism.
eon, gnosticism is the belief that transcendent wisdom is endowned only to a chosen few; or at least that is what I have heard. Who does the chosing and the disposition…I dont know. But, IMHO, your friend is pretty right in his/her assessment of the current administration.
I have read enough that I rarely stumble on the pronunciation of words, but I find myself constantly going to the dictionary for the meaning. We encounter very few new words (acronyms excepted, of course) in our spoken language and I find real refuge in books that have challenging dialog. It is how I have always learned, but it is the hard way. If we could all speak as eloquently as the written word, I suppose we would all have a better education by now. I believe it is up to teachers to provide this type of spoken dialog with students, and I believe students would more often seek such discourse in the written word. Teachers will have to teach students to slow down and absorb, and I don’t know how they can do that in the modern sound bite world. Nice article on an important problem that is not going to go away.
I don’t know that you are wrong. But I’m not certain that seven rent boys with a single copy of a minor work are indicative of the overall moral virtue of a far-away land. Why not take it for what it was? A gift, an absolute gift, that ya’ll were able to share together.
And I’m not sure comparing over-fed, surfeit business majors who treat your class as a stumbling block towards their degree are necessarily an indictment of the West.
I’m sure there’s a reading group at the local gay bar for “rubyfruit jungle” or a mystery readers’ group for any of her other works. and if I want to pay attention to beautifully wrought sexual deviancy I can read “Tales from the City” or I could watch Mad Men, or watch TftC on PBS.
And,any Sunday School class will be struggling through both the Bible, line by line. The least educated will be encountering Pilgrim’s Progress as if it were a newly published comic book.
I mean, if I have a class, if the teacher is second-rate, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be graded on my remembering of the teacher’s view of the great work. My opinion or research of what other great writers have said counts against me. I’ve had this eyebrow-raising incident: I know the author. I’ve been familiar with the author my whole life- friend of the family. I take a class, and am required to write a paper about a single chapter in his first, least challenging, book. I write what the author himself says is the theme, and failed. The teacher informed me that the theme was “War is Hell.” no.it.isn’t. not in this book. Which means, I’m not particulary going to try to learn or study or throw myself into a work while in class. Outside of class……
I think the West decided to erase history after WW2. Maybe WW1. It’s not the least understandable impulse. Having set flame to the world, I think people really wanted something new and peaceful. Ignorance of the past was to create new Eves and Adams.
Mr Zang-po- thank you for the references to older works published online.
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Your students in the Souk chose to learn and clearly were academically minded and very interested in the subject.
Your students at home are forced to learn, even if they are the vocational type.
Makes a big difference in enthusiasm I think.
You could maybe try to replicate your Souk experience by creating a small voluntary study group to work through books together — select an out of copyright classic and you can record it as an audiobook for librivox.org, it’s a nice keepsake too.
Speaking of literate thought and good writing, don’t pass up reading Cashill’s article about Obama’s, “Dreams of My Father”, ghost written by Bill Ayers. American Thinker, March 23, 2012. If I hear about the brightest President in history one more time, I’ll puke.
“The fact that my former student was under the influence of something other than Miller Lite seemed appropriate in the narrative circumstance. He may have been floating in a narcotic reverie; nonetheless, he was struggling with a book.
Maybe that’s the best we can hope for now. But at least it’s a start.”
No, sir; if this is the best we can hope for, we are simply doomed.
Not sure which is scarier, the original article or the comments. If Gide and Faulkner are what we’re banking on for the salvation of the canon–well, good luck. There was a time when people knew what the greatest books were and why they were great. Is that time passing?
Does anyone have any advice on how to supplement my children’s public school education? I live in an area with astronomical property taxes, so private school is not an option, but I want them to learn the classics and to rise above the pathetic education they will be given here. Are there certain books or classes I can consult? They are still very young, so I have time.
I yearn for the days when the average person read Hemingway and Steinbeck in their spare time; when people spoke the way they do in movies made before the 60s. It certainly seems like we are moving backwards. When will it stop? When we live in a jungle instead of a society?
and I have no idea how you do make this happen at your school, or in your private life, but the first grade teacher at this school uses the Open Court reading system. She bought her own set 20 something years ago. Her students graduate from first grade reading proficiently. It’s a complete phonics based system, with all kinds of bells and whistles. She takes kids who don’t even know all their letters, and by February every kid in her class can read. My three kids left her class reading above grade level. She has photos of her students- they are graduating with high honors from competitive college programs.
And I know it’s the teacher b/c I didn’t try to teach them anything about reading- I wanted them to figure it out on their own, so the words would be their own, rather than a visit to the virtue dentist, a la bill bennett.
Oh- spouse recommends Bill Bennett’s book on ‘what your child should know” or something like that. It’s a big blue book. Spouse uses it to plan out the lessons he tries to teach them. They have learned a great deal, so apparently it’s a useful book.
I approach it different- I take them places and let them figure stuff out. This is far less organized, and takes longer.
It’s a team effort.
Thank you, every one of you who replied to my post. I am printing out and highlighting the recommendations you’ve written; they are invaluable to me. I appreciate your taking the time to type them out.
I can’t wait to revisit the Greek mythology and Aesop’s fables that I was taught in school, and I’m so happy to have some ideas for both boys and girls.
Bless you!
how old are they? honestly, you don’t have to rush them- you turned out alright, right?
Little Golden Books- I don’t know about current ones- but ones from my husband’s childhood, and his father’s childhood- so 50s? 40s? are really plush with the language. The watercolor illustrations are heartbreakingly beautiful.
Richard Scarry books- all of them- the earlier fifties ones, and the later busytown ones- your kid will spend time looking at the pictures. I know we get all excited about “seeing”- but to get to that- you have to practice looking for a while, for all the little details. It stands one in good stead, for later looking at classical art- there’s details there, that don’t jump out at first.
And, well, in busy town- everyone IS busy- so there’s a common civic culture. That’s worth something. My girl thought she might like baking,from the busytown baker story. She made cupcakes from a box, under supervision, and now she claims she wants to be a professional baker. She made her father’s birthday cake and frosted it ( cake and frosting from box) this weekend. She felt quite brilliant. There’s a fire station staffed with busy pigs in busytown. The kids got a tour of a fire-station, and they could relate it to their little picture book, instead of having this vague, amorphous experience “out there.” Cat Mama goes shopping and drops kids off at school, and cooks breakfast and so on.
Thanks, ari. The kids are six, five, and almost 3. I did turn out right, but the elementary schools were still good when I went in the 70s. We read stories from old textboods that were not designed for political correctness. My teachers dressed professionally and came from that magical era before the sixties.
Your ideas are excellent, thanks so much.
while I’m thinking about it- this is not straightforward academics- but if you can send your kid to school in approximately school uniforms- the teachers relax a little, and take more time with your kid. The boys got sent to school in knit golf shirts in solid colors and jeans- white, blue, navy blue, grey- and jeans or khakis or shorts. The little girl is being sent in real catholic school uniforms- white knit shirts and polyester over-dresses. They’ll fit her for two years, easily.
The teachers, subliminally, think your kid is worth more of their time. They’ll find ways to make sure they are learning. They just- they’re easier- esp if you tell them that your kids dress this way to show respect.
My kids’ friends’ parents started doing the same, and the fights with the school and with the teachers went down quite a bit. The kids were getting encouraged to read stronger books, they were getting more encouragement on their math ( that alone was HUGE) ( noticeable HUGE difference) ( not just my kids) and kids who had been labelled “problem” children were then getting evaluated- glasses, needing more gym time, “creative”, “high touch”, and so on- instead of being labelled problem children who needed extra punishment.
Where we live- uniform shirts cost about $5 to $7 at the start of the school year- even the grocery store sells them. They last- reinforced seams, stain-resistant, and so on. Target sells them. Old Navy sells really soft shirts. Pants cost about $12 to $20, and we find the boys only rotate about two pairs at a time. One year the oldest had one pair of jeans that he’d wear. Since they all look the same, it’s pretty easy to under-buy.
The girl’s uniform dresses cost $20 each. They are polyester. They look brand-new still. She’ll probably get two years wear out of this set, and then I can sell them. I know her teachers started calling her smart when she started wearing them- this Christmas- rather than pretty- which is about the last year and a half. She’s getting told she’s preparing for college- and she wasn’t being told that, before.
She wears them with cotton tights. None have shredded so far. The shirts are all- cotton, with reinforced seams. She says the outfits are really comfortable-enough that I have to fuss to get her into playclothes, which are, theoretically, the most comfortable of all.
It’s subliminal social psychology of clothing, and I’m surprised it works as well as it does. It’s a noticeable difference, for my kids, and for their friends who adopt this method.
This is an incredible idea! My husband suggested the same thing when I sent her to a parochial pre-K program that did not require uniforms. I can see how it would make a difference, and it sure would make my life easier.
it is really crazy how different they are treated. we live in a frequent testing district. She has always tested ahead. We have the reports from parent-teacher conferences. The first 18 months are: meticulous, finishes work, ahead academically, nice, follows rules. Teachers talked about how sweet she was, and how she got along with people, and how nobody bothered her, while the other little girls would get upset. So- you can visualize what she’s like, right? Okay, my father bought uniforms for her for Christmas. We’d been sending her in nice clothes,in european-style dresses, in university tee-shirts, in “move over boys, the girls are taking over!” ( old navy) tee-shirts. We thought she looked pulled together or ambitious, depending on the day. The feedback was – sweet, bright child.
My dad gave her a half-dozen different uniforms.
The very next parent-teacher conference- the teacher said ” She’s smart- I want her to be more of a leader- I want her to practice leading.” ” I’m preparing her for college. She’s been getting along on cute- that’s not enough.” Her kindergarten teacher from the year before also started saying that she was going to college and that she needed to study. Same kid, same skills, same personality, VERY VERY VERY different reactions.
All the teachers have had full careers in public schools, and private schools really aren’t that big around here. I don’t know why they are changing their feedback so much-she’s the same kid. She’s still ahead, she’s still meticulous, she’s still unflappably and calm, she’s always said she wanted to own her own business ( the child has sold painted rocks to me since she was three years old- I still buy them, three years in) They are taking her more seriously now. She’s six, and they are talking about college, and which schools have good business majors. She’s the same kid, with the exact same ambitions since she was three years old. The teachers changed.
I ran into a mom friend this morning at the gas station. She just flipped her daughters into uniforms about six weeks ago. She’s got seven kids, five daughters, these are the youngest. The teachers are now treating these last two daughters noticeably different now, as well.
Chris, My advice is to strictly limit screen time–that means computers, games, phones, TV–until the kids are at least juniors in high school. They will read, play, think, interact with real people instead. The best high school students are generally the ones who had lots of books and not much screen time.
I was barred from tv, computers and the phone, and rebelled quite thoroughly. spouse wss raised by TV. I find him more than a little perplexing.
We’re both within two degrees of separation on most people in show business- producers, actors, directors, writers, special FX, composers, writers, comics writers, pro magicians. No idea how- we’re conservative, and we darn near live under a rock. Which tells me it’s a pervasive industry. And it pays incredibly well, if you’re any good at it.
Our compromise was that the kids had to make a game, to be permitted to own a video game system. One kid got on the computer, and borrowed his dad’s civilization game, and built a map for a civilization, and various other things. The other kid took cardboard from cereal boxes, a pack of typing paper, a pack of pens, and several rolls of scotch tape, and built a roomsize map, and a whole bunch of 3 dimensional planes and boats. Seriously- out of typing paper and tape! Propeller planes! And wrote down convoluted, impossible rules, But still- a roomsize map! and propeller planes! and the little girl built a game “christmas candyland” that involved helping other little kids and who knows what else. It had dice and rules and a game board and characters….they earned their game system. They still think like that. Which is good, b/c the game designers I know all paid cash for their cars and houses.
For television- it varies. The only two people I know who really restrict television also have their kids in three separate enrichment programs. So they are spending 3k+ each month to not watch TV. I like TV. I like that good television is amazing and wonderful and entertaining and funny. YMMV….the one summer we banned TV for a week, the kids cut a box up, so that it was a TV set frame, and entertained us with their own television shows, made up on the spot.
A screenwriter was a casual acquaintance of my three year old, and I can say, wow, what a fine SUV he drove- cash paid for it- and his bike was a Bianchi, again cash purchase. So, it’s a job, and I’m not against them working in the industry. It’s freakishly lucrative. Skip Press has a Dummies Guide to screenwriting, so you can casually talk about analyzing how stories are built, when they watch TV. The oldest is already more analytic about tv than me. Spouse knows the formulas for various shows, and they talk about how they are built, as they watch.
They are lucrative, growing industries. The high-school valedictorian is not guaranteed a good life.
OTOH, the oldest’s friend got game systems at age six, and his imagination is completely paralyzed. But he’s going to be a techno- repair drip, at best, anyway. Gaming is probably more imagination than he’d have on his own.
Most kids I know game with their dads or uncles, so they do wire into each other. I like that part about it a lot.
Joy Hakim has a series of really beautiful history books aimed at kids. It’s sold at Barnes and Noble. They are from original source materials. She writes in a clear authorial voice- she addresses the kids. She wrote it for her own kids.
I think it has gone bankrupt, but Great Illustrated Classics are dirt cheap- like $3/ copy, hardbound, flimsy-ish paper- illustrated every other page, 273 pages each, 70 ish- we have 35 of them- redacted classic literary works. There are 8 biographies. We have two of them- George Washington and Davy Crockett. They go from little kids classic short stories, up through The Red Badge of Courage and Tale of Two Cities. They’ve got Dracula, Invisible Man, King Solomon’s Mines, Tom Sawyer. Redacted means they use original sentences culled from the original books. Moby Dick and Treasure Island are my kids’ favorite books from the series.
Other publishers try to do something similar, but they are re-written, rather than re-dacted, and frankly, the covers aren’t that inspiring. Boys desperately want to see MEN doing fascinating things- and the covers and illustrations deliver. The reading level is about fifth grade, but I know high school teachers that use them, as well. My dad read Tale of Two Cities in GIC.
B&N has a version of kids books, but it’s depressing and grim. Try to find GIC, if possible. Central Texas has been scoured clean by ambitious parents. I haven’t seen them in a few years, and they used to be distributed in craft stores, grocery stores and half-price bookstores. You know that silly commercial ” I loved it so much I bought the company”? Well, I’d like to do that. These are genuinely great books at a great price, for kids.
You can get through a chapter a night in about ten minutes, so it’s great for bedtime.
There are kids bibles. That’ll keep you in classic stories for about three months, thereabouts. My husband read two separate kids bibles to the boys when they were younger- the toddler one, and the next step up. They stunned some researchers at the uni, by knowing so many obscure stories from the bible, when they were in kindergarten. I was surprised as well. I didn’t think any of it would stick for years.
Honestly, the Disney storybooks with bright illustrations are really good. They are pitched at particular reading levels, the pictures are well-done, and the kids feel clever being able to match the action to the words. My little girl is reading the book to herself now, after years of bedtime: she feels more accomplished with this, than any other story she’s conquered. There’s a lot to be said for joy and mastery. And, well, so much of our modern culture is Disney.
Mark Twain has stories that I dearly wish came in illustrated books- not woodcuts- shiny happy pictures. Prince and Pauper, jumping frog, and so on..
Stanley Lombardo has done a rocking awesome translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. You can read it to them with whiny voices, grouchy voices, all of it. It’s the best translation for reading out loud. The others look prettier in hardbound, and they are meant for silent reading. Really annoying.
D’aulaire’s Greek myths is expensive even in paperback- $20 paper, $30 hardbound. But it’s beautiful, it’s complete, and it’s stood the test of time- it came out ???fifty years ago, and it’s still the best possible kids intro to greek myths and literature. The pictures match up with the stories. They convey further information. The writing is marvellous as well. Anything in myth past this will bug you, b/c you’ll want that same serene, magical tone. I love it. I read it as a child, and now I’m reading it to my kids. It’s captivating a 6, 9, and 11 year old, all at the same time.
oh, how things work for kids. diagram-heavy.
“castle” “city” “pyramid” not so many words, lots of line illustrations and diagrams of building. if you have boys who build things, this is the way to go.
history channel documentaries: Victor David Hanson is involved in a series of them. This is for later elementary. My kids can make jokes that I don’t even understand- Miltia- who? and Hydas- what?
Hugg America and Hugg a Planet- stuffed pillows. The kids know the states from their dad going over a few states each night.
Charlie Brown, this is America, is a two DVD disc set. It has all sorts of history on it, using Peanuts characters. The kids had already seen all the Peanuts regular videos- It’s the Great Pumpkin, and so on, so it made it easy for them to pay attention all the way through. There are jokes, as well.
DK publishing has a series on video-tapes on “amazing animals” starring a little lizard named henry.
for little girls: mary engelbreit did the cover art for a series of classic little girl books. for around age 8- 10.
American Girl books, seriously, are really good. I haven’t seen a weak one, yet. I wish they had books like this for boys, both fiction and non-fiction.
Gave my kids every “How Things Work” I could find.
der. the “this is america, charlie brown” covers stuff like the Mayflower, the Great Transcontinental Railroad, the Constitution, stuff like that. I didn’t know most of the stuff on them. The characters are the Peanuts characters, so it’s watchable for all ages.
I know it’s controversial- see Kathy Shaidle on Star Wars nerds- but the Star Wars universe is bigger than George Lucas. There are the six movies. Well, they have kids books that talk about overcoming fear, telling the truth, being honest, being brave. There are tween books ‘origami yoda’ that center on friends and problem-solving, there are the cartoons that cover the clones- what’s it like to be an individual? it’s not blah-blahing- but you can watch and talk. and, well, the movies do cover choosing evil and then redemption by choosing good. it’s had approaching 40 years to soak into our common culture. Part of what’s frustrating to kids is stuff not relating to the rest of their world- and star wars does. grown men talk about it, kids talk about it, there are action figures and legos. It talks about men stuff.craft stuff to make, too. origami, and felt and markers…
and thomas the tank engine was written by a british reverend who talked about doing your best, being really useful, and so on. The trains are all over barnes and noble and who knows where else. they can grow up and start collecting train villages, go on train rides, talk to their grandfathers about railroads, visit real railyards…that whole connected to the world thing. Maps. building railroads all over the house, with docks and zoos and airports and towns and who knows what else. so, books, videos, prayers, character-building lessons, hands on beautifully crafted wooden toys….it’s a win-win all around.
Percy Jackson drives me nuts- poorly written prose- but I know three little boys who decided to go learn about Greece, read books on myths, talk to each other, and taught themselves greek letters enough to send notes to each other- using greek letters for english words- so I’m willing to give it a pass. That’s not a hat-trick any other book has done. Seriously, second grade little boys were sending secret messages to each other using greek letters. Beta for B, and so on. What’s not to love?
if you’re in a good district: are there cheap ( read: free) plays? most plays aren’t obscene, the comedy is broad, and you’re sitting right there in the middle of it all. Musicals, too. Shakespeare, even. His comedy is pretty broad,some of it is funny for kids.
it’s all about finding the shoes that fit, so they can walk forward into the west, you know?
As a classical musician and teacher, my product has always been optional. People would take lessons for just a few reasons: they read it would increase their child’s learning ability, as a mark of the cultural class they identify or wish to identify with, or they believed it would be fun. I could count the students who took lessons because they loved music on one hand. But those are the ones who stuck it out, because learning is difficult.
In America, we have a focus on utility. Most see fine literature as being useless. We have lost faith in education as a road to success. How many people read to their children any more? It’s easier to turn on the TV or something. So perhaps it is to be expected that those who attain literacy will be those who love literature for itself.
As always and with everything, it is the few who achieve the most, and the most for the most of us. Pushing, through subsidies, easy classes, and self-direction, more and more mediocre into going to college instead of actually going out and working, diminishes the competitiveness of the U. S. But that is our future. As most of the rest of the world is diminishing forced unionization, cutting expenditures and rationalizing their economies, the United States continuing power shifting from “business” where one works for reward to “progressivism” where one is given things by some made-up “right”. Yes fewer challenges makes life easier, but without challenge everyone heads downward as will our standard of living and innovation. But we get an American Idol – the President to dictate to us how we all should act and live.
The level of economic, political and historical ignorance among the supposedly-educated is alarming. Recently I had an friend from the past, an Obama volunteer and retied educator, tell me that the debt was no problem because the “government could print money.” When I tried to enlighten her as to the effects of such a policy her reply was that she, “doesn’t do economics—it makes (her) eyes glaze over.” The heart despairs. I will link to this from my Old Jarhead blog.
Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
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Great essay — and if Tom Bertonneau reads this, Tom, I remember voting for you to become a member of my department many years ago. Delighted to see that I had the right man!
I recently conducted a little experiment with some early issues of Boys’ Life Magazine. They’d been sent to me by the BSA on my request, when I was writing (pause for shameless plug) Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. The writing is very fine indeed: several adventure stories, a first-person account of the life of a cowboy; some how-to columns; and some excellent moral preaching. I decided I’d look up the algorithm commonly used to determine “grade level” and apply it to passages of at least 300 words from various places in Boys’ Life, Issue number one, March 1, 1911. Well, they consistently came in at around Grade 14.7. Keep in mind that this was a magazine peddled by and for boys, and not college kids. Meanwhile, I applied the same algorithm to the prose of a current New York Times feature, on the gold standard — in other words, on a fairly sophisticated subject. That came in at 12.2, probably a grade or two or three higher than average, for the Times right now.
The algorithm, if anything, UNDERSTATED the difference in literary sophistication, because it considers only the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word; so that a word like “thresh” counts the same as a word like “the,” and no account whatsoever is taken of rhetorical flourishes, syntactical inversions, irony, allusiveness, and so forth.
True story: I am at a library book sale, in Canada (or Nanada, as I call her, the Nanny Tyranny or Tyrananny of the North). I haven’t found anything I like. A girl approaches me and asks if she can help. When I tell her that I’m looking for what some people call “classic” literature — what I’d call very good fiction or poetry — she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. As the conversation continues, I tell her that I’m a college professor and a translator of Dante.
“I’ve never heard of him,” she says.
“You’ve never heard of Dante?” I reply. “He wrote a poetic account of a journey to the hereafter, divided into three books, one for Hell, one for Purgatory, and one for Paradise. It’s called The Divine Comedy. You’ve never heard of that?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I don’t mean any disrespect for your favorite author, but I’ve never heard of him.”
The girl was about to become a freshman at Saint Francis Xavier College, one of the best schools in eastern Canada.
I could recount many such stories. Many of my freshmen now tell me that in their high schools they read almost no poetry and almost nothing written before 1900. I have students — and they aren’t dumb, at least not by nature — who not only have never read Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Milton, and Pope; they have never even HEARD of them.
Hey! Hi! We both read your politically incorrect guide! Thank you for writing it!
I think the dividing line on literature is 1917. My dad says 1914, but I’m pretty sure it’s 1917.
The only one to make it through, for kids, was Louisa May Alcott. she’s the shock-troop for most women’s lit.
It is intriguing that some among the conservative commentariat are becoming anti-technologists, railing against the information revolution as undermining the difficult study of history and culture that supports Western Civilization. Is it not better to seek means to use this new technology to enhance the delivery of the information they deem crucial to our survival? Otherwise, we are no better than the masses who decry every advance that the market provides, on the basis that it undermines the established firmament… like some philosophical seamster’s union fighting against the advent of the loom.
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The decline of literate thought is both a cause and consequence of the corporate domination of American life. Corporate overlords constructed society so people would be mindless and docile; they will be only workers and consumers.
Corporate power must crush independent, critical thought at every juncture so the people will never rebel. That is why Rush Limbaugh is America’s most popular radio show host, and why Noam Chomsky, the world’s most important living intellectual, can’t get any air time at all.
Critical thinking will arise in people once corporate power is crushed.
Mr. Solway, I couldn’t agree more.
So, I am going to stop spending so much time on line, and switch from word processing, to writing by hand. In fact, I agree so much, I did not finish your piece. Though while scrolling down, I paused on “Eon”‘s excellent writing tips. I liked them. A lot. Most of which, commentators here have violated. Especially the one about short paragraphs.
Though typing this, it did strike me, thanks to computers, I am writing more, and getting better. And I am thinking right now, something Aristotle said about the youth of his time. I’ll paraphrase: Kids today do not respect their elders. They do not listen to their parents, or teachers. They are ignorant, and never study. All they want to do is get drunk, and party on the weekends(end paraphrase).
What’s more, I keep thinking about that “last lecture” book, by that Randy guy (i don’t know why, but what the hell). He also said, TV, and movies, and video games, are a colossal waste of time (oh, that’s why, your piece about the end of civilization). And my first reaction was; oh, but it’s not a colossal waste of time to teach our best, and brightest, how to program computers so well, they can sell these skills to TV, and movies, and video game makers? And for big bucks? Hmmm…. I hope so!
And my second reaction to Mr. Randy was; that last kid may not be his. The first one defiantly is his. The second one, who knows. But the third? While it’s impossible to tell from the photos, I would have checked. Just to be sure.
As far as pop culture, and other distractions go, I think every generation thinks their stuff don’t stink. Take Chaucer, for instance. I can’t read him. It’s old English gobbledegook. Though, when I did wade through it at school (because i had to), I thought it was very funny. And bawdy. And I never thought of him again. Until years later, when I first heard Kid Rock’s song “Black Chick/White Guy.” I remember thinking; “You know, I bet that Chaucer guy would love this!” Know why? Because that’s exactly what he did.
Of course, if anyone reads this far, they won’t like that. Too bad. If Chaucer were around today, and young, he would be a rapper. And speaking of writing, and Hemingway (some of the guys here mentioned him), I only want to say; he won the Nobel prize for literature. If anyone wants to give that the raspberry, feel free. But I bet, if any of you won one (good luck), you would not turn it down. Even though they mostly give them to commies (milton friedman accepted his).
So, what have we learned here today? First; I am going to keep reading on-line after all. And posting. (it’s fun) Second; every generation thinks their stuff don’t stink. And third (though this is out of left field); without the internet, America would have zero chance against the enemies of civilization. Thank you Al Gore! (another fat socialist pig) Good night!(the crowd roars) THANK YOU CLEVELAND!!! SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!
Correction. The line, “I hope so!” should no doubt read, “I hope not!” You idiot. Again, it should read, “I Hope not!” Not, “I hope so!” Jake guy. And is there an edit feature around here, or what?
Signed, I’m Ron Burgundy?