A Lack of Adult Speaking and Writing Skills Betokens an Infantile ...

By Mike Gray

The impairment of literate thought has been slowly and inexorably tunneling through the culture since the John Dewey-inspired, child-centered, ?progressivist? movement in education of the 1920s. Dewey?s Democracy and Education (1916) was a manual for the precocious subversion of the mind. Western education then received a resonating shock from the intellectual anarchy that erupted in the 1960s and it has been atrophying ever since, as is glaringly obvious not only in the performance of our students but in the mental emaciation of our politicians, journalists, academics, and public intellectuals. These are people many of whom, with only a few welcome exceptions, can no longer think straight, some of whom cannot formulate a coherent sentence, and others of whom are reduced to relative helplessness without external devices to shepherd them through a political speech.

? David Solway, ?Infantilizing the Culture,? Pajamas Media

Solway believes that the deterioration of culture? ? which can with some justice be blamed on bad governmental policy ? has resulted in more than merely ?dumbing down? society:

The problem can be tersely and accurately described as the ongoing infantilization of the culture, a pathology that needs to be attacked at the root, if it is ever to be resolved. In the famine of books, conversation, directed studies, and even ?literate strangers? at the supper table (to quote E. D. Hirsch?s Cultural Literacy), can we be surprised at the anorexic lack of verbal stamina, limpid thinking, and intellectual substance that cripples the development of our children? Starvation does not generally produce robust vitality. It is a great error on the part of teachers to downplay the element of labor and rigor in learning to speak, read, and write with purpose and clarity, as if these accomplishments were easy, effortless, natural, pure play. ?Either follow this long itinerary or renounce everything,? St. Augustine correctly advised in On Order from Against the Academics ? Aut ordine illo eruditionis, aut nullo modo. The venerable ancient knew a lot more than our modern pedants.

When it comes to public schools, you would reasonably expect students to emerge from them knowing something, but you would be mistaken:

Almost certainly, the chief culprit in the gradual stupefaction of the citizenry is the public school ? ?thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds,? mourns John Gardner ? abetted by scholarly lassitude and the gutting of the canon which have become prominent aspects of what is ironically dubbed ?higher education.? (I recall a former director general of my college recommending that Shakespeare be expunged from the curriculum as ?irrelevant.?) As Thomas Sowell writes, ?Too many people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters.? Howbeit, we need to start with primary and secondary education, where stagnation and decline seem to be the general order of the day, if we are to get a handle on the predicament we are trying to come to terms with.

There may be some sort of synergistic feedback between the educational system ? fatally hamstrung by political correctness ? and the home scene, which serves to magnify the problem:

What we are witnessing in our homes and schools and public squares is more of a pedagogical Requiem than an Ode to Joy as we proceed to ?amuse ourselves to death.? The plague of political correctness which ?progressively? devitalizes us is only another index of mental decay, as if, let?s say, retitling the famous fairy tale as ?Snow White and the Seven Vertically Challenged Persons? would change the fact that there are dwarves and midgets in the world. Indeed, PC is merely an extension of the pervasive inability to parse the world accurately, to think clearly, and to accept descriptive aptness as a legitimate and necessary modality of adequacy to experience. It is part of the same syndrome of retardation, the degrading of the grammar of thought, in short, the imping of the mind that afflicts the culture at large.

These developments have dire implications for freedom, as the population at large becomes progressively less literate and, consequently, easier to control.

Read Solway?s article here.

Source: http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/06/11/a-lack-of-adult-speaking-and-writing-skills-betokens-an-infantile-culture/

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