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The Destruction of American Education, or, The Downside of the Maya Angelou-Style Personality Cult
My younger cousin just graduated from Columbia University a couple of weeks ago. Before going to college, she attended a high school associated with the University of Chicago (where both of her parents are professors). Both of these places are widely seen as desirable places to go to school. They are well-established institutions of American “elite” education. My cousin, while no Albert Einstein, wasn’t there for sports or diversity. She even got a job after college at a very competitive consulting firm. Most people, upon seeing her resume, would consider her “well educated.”
Walking through a bookstore the other day, she asked me if “Dickens is worth reading.” I thought she was joking. Dear readers, I was very wrong. It so happens, through all of high school and college, she had never been assigned Dickens, Chaucer, Milton, T.S. Eliot, Austen, or Melville! The list went on and on. Needless to say, nary a Bible was cracked during all this time either.
Effectively, my cousin was raised without a heritage. Her American/English-speaking birthright was denied her. Though she thought herself in possession of a stellar academic background, she knows worse than nothing about her civilization. I say “worse than nothing” because her head has been crammed full of multi-culti garbage.
It will come as no surprise when I tell you that she read Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison in high school. Every minute we spend teaching kids to revere mediocrity is a minute stolen from the contemplation of beauty and genius.
We spend a lot of time (and rightly so) discussing the degradation of the college humanities. But the rot starts much, much earlier — and lasts a lot longer.
In the face of this, how can we do anything but homeschool our children? It’s only a matter of time until every public high school curriculum is degraded beyond recognition.
Are there any rays of hope? Any places where this is being reversed? Are we losing ground everywhere?
Published in General
I don’t think that the issue is necessarily whether the students will enjoy reading classic works of literature or whether they will use it. But I think every kid should at least be exposed to it. Otherwise the few who might find the experience rewarding might never find that out.
Well, my point was that kids are exposed to a very large body of literature in HS. It’s not just Maya Angelou (which I never read) or Toni Morrison. I was in an inner-city HS in NYC, so not the most prestigious place to go, and yet I was still exposed to lots of stuff, most of which I can’e even remember to be honest.
I have nothing against kids reading these works, of course, just that the notion that this is all that important or formative for the vast majority of kids. I can’t figure what impact reading a ton of Oscar Wilde had on forming my world views, or whether reading Shakespeare improved or diminished my desire to read more of his work (I’d say, diminished). I’m sure it has for some people, but it probably doesn’t for the majority.
Most of the themes of these literary works are pervasive in our culture, and most kids are exposed to them directly or indirectly through many mediums. Watching Battlestar Galactica probably exposes kids to a dozen themes found in classic literary works.
Either way, most literature is…a cult of personality, whether its classic authors or modern ones. At least, that’s the way it seems to me, being unable to really distinguish them on sheer “quality” alone.
One doesn’t have to get literature in a literary way for it to be valuable. Or even like it or get it at all.
If the only thing you take away is that there was a world before you – that people 100 or 1000 years ago were intelligent, feeling, breathing human beings living real lives – then literature is valuable.
Sure. I didn’t say its not valuable. Just that, very few kids at that age have the aptitude to really get it, or will be impacted in any meaningful way by it.
Or that the majority of kids in the US public school system aren’t exposed to a large body of classic literature. Seems to me they are.