Academia

Why Johnny Doesn’t Want to Read

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The other day Instapundit linked an article on the role of public school reading assignments in discouraging boys from taking up reading for pleasure. The subject is familiar to anyone to anyone who read Christina Hoff Sommers’ book on the subject.  In short, K-12 reading assignments don’t match up with boys’ interests. Boys prefer activity-oriented plot-based stories, schools gravitate toward girls’ interests – quoting Sommers, “[p]ersonal narratives full of emotion and self-disclosure.” I’ll have more to say on that later.

This has me waxing (mostly unpleasantly) nostalgic about my own school-age reading assignments. The earliest one I can recall is of A Tale of Two Cities. I remember scarcely anything about London and a few highlights about Paris. Shakespeare is something I could take only in small doses due to the language barrier. I liked the plot synopses and some of the more memorable passages such as Polonius’ advice to Laertes (someone should CGI W. C. Fields into the role of Polonius). One junior high class assigned two entertaining movie scripts – Colossus: The Forbin Project and Escape from the Planet of the Apes. At home my literary gateway to the world was World Book Encyclopedia; I especially loved the maps and the articles on foreign locales and peoples and exotic animals. I did not grow up reading novels or even comic books. In my late teens I tried reading my mom’s Agatha Christie novels, but for some reason I couldn’t quite get into them. 

High school offered (ahem) textbook examples of what’s wrong with school reading assignments. I have finally gotten around to posting Amazon reviews for the three high school reading assignments that turned me off to reading.

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Best Eaten Cold

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Revenge, as the old saying has it, is a dish best served cold. And revenge may not be the only – or the most dangerous – platter best dished up chilled. That would be the dish of anger – that ice-cold, sullen reservoir of fury in the hearts of every right-of-center, non-elite, law-abiding flyover-country middle American with Tea Partyish inclinations … a dish of anger ready to serve up in the wake of a just-barely unsuccessful political assassination attempt this last weekend.

You see, there is a considerable difference between hot fury and cold. Hot fury is impulsive, immediately violent, reactive and more often misplaced. It’s the unthinking destructive fury of the mob, lashing out indiscriminately. Cold fury, on the other hand, does not manifest itself in such spectacular fashion. Cold fury is focused, calculated, unspectacular; it takes its time, waiting for the optimum moment. Cold fury usually can’t be appeased, once unleashed. As I wrote some time ago, regarding the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance –

“The image of a “vigilante” most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable. The Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that. They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise – and they would not back down.”

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Evolutionary Stability is Real.

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From time to time, Cold Spring Shops calls attention to the effects of the sexual revolution and hook-up culture on human unhappiness.  Two observations from a 2011 post structure that argument.  First, “contemporary mating practices and admissions policies might not be evolutionarily stable.”  Second, “younger people have different time horizons, and different rates of time preferences.”  Those observations tended to rely on opinion columns.  The mini-dissertation below the jump will engage recent Serious Scholarship on those themes.

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Finishing School

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So, the recent fiery yet “mostly peaceful” pro-Hamas demonstrations of support on various university campuses making the fiery and “mostly peaceful” headlines over the last couple of weeks may yet have unfortunate results for the affected schools. This would be a consummation devoutly desired by those of us on the sort-of-conservative side of the political spectrum, who have viewed the increasing academic lunacy and dysfunction with concern and mistrust. Honestly, it’s long been obvious that there is a massive stench emanating from those ivy-hung quadrangles of higher learning. The tuition to attend them has been increasing at a breakneck rate for two or three decades, even above the rate of inflation, while the graduates of those institutions appear dumber and dumber and the ratio of administrative staff to student body approaches 1:1. Of late, even those graduates boasting diplomas from formerly respected colleges appear barely scathed by literacy, or any kind of practical, useful-to-the-working-world knowledge and skills at all. No wonder that an increasing number of 18 year olds are coldly, rationally considering the cost-to-benefit ratio and opting for a trade school or an apprenticeship.

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Cursive and Other Archaic Skills

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My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive – which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late – in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering – freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly – you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.

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