Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems clear that America’s leading political and intellectual elite is growing increasingly naïve. How else can one explain their predilection for adopting unlikely—even bizarre—solutions to problems their grandparents solved easily and without fuss.
Take teenage pregnancy, for example. Mayor Bloomberg of New York is tackling this serious problem by stepping up the intensity of sex education in schools, and by the wholesale distribution of various kinds of contraceptives through school health clinics.
In other words, having taught kids how to get up to sexual mischief, the schools, through the indiscriminate distribution of prophylactics, are then giving them the license to put what they have learned in the class room into practice.
This betrays a touching ignorance of the irresponsibility engendered by raging teenage hormones. It also ignores the famous dictum of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman: “If you subsidize something, you get more of it.”
Grandma and granddad solved the problem with a rule guaranteed to quell the ardor of all but the most ardent of teens: “If a girl gets in the family way, she marries the father. No ifs, ands, or buts!”
Now take reading: The average American high school student can apparently no longer comprehend the Cliff Notes that provide simplified paraphrases of William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. Pupils are now being given Cliff Notes of the Cliff Notes.
This elevates the fostering of ignorance to hitherto unscaled and embarrassing heights. Shakespeare didn’t write for sophisticates, but ordinary people—journeymen, day laborers, shop assistants, cooks and chamber maids. His fans included a goodly sprinkling of beggars, hawkers, pickpockets and ladies of doubtful virtue.
People today probably find it amazing to think that this motley audience understood virtually every word the Bard wrote. Otherwise they wouldn’t have forked over their hard earned cash to attend his productions.
At least 95 percent of the words Shakespeare employed are still in use today and still have precisely the same meaning as they did 400 years ago.
Logic, thus, indicates that the net result of more than a century of public education is that the average American school student now possesses a working vocabulary that is only one tenth of the size of that possessed by the scum of the earth of four centuries ago.
One of the purposes of teaching kids Shakespeare was to increase their vocabularies—a vital tool for communicating and comprehending subtle thoughts, complicated ideas and abstract concepts.
No wonder the Chinese—and just about everyone else—are overtaking us! GPH✠
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