Let 'Em Speak Greek:
It's so easy to blame problems in the schools on the obvious-- and wrong-- causes. Well, not totally wrong. But those are not the root causes. You gotta look at history. Problems in the schools predate all those popular and easy whipping-boy reasons. You have to go back to World War I. In 1919, as we brought our little wounded expeditionary force back from across the Atlantic, one lesson began to settle in. OK, if we couldn't make the world safe for democracy, we could at least make it safe for America. Which we set about doing. First came the "Festung Amerika" ["Fortress America"] mentality. When that didn't work out too well, we hitched up our britches and went to work constructing the presently successful planet-wide Pax Americana with its overwhelming bipartite application of power: global capitalism under American aegis, along with a vast, hi-tech military machine that nobody else can even come close to matching. Mind you, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, I'm just pointing out what happened. So. There you are. and HERE we are, top dogs, kings of the hill, strutting our free-market stuff from the Bay of Mandalay to the Halls of Montezuma. Yankee Doodle disguised as Ronald McDonald, with an armed-to-the-teeth Yosemite Sam always ready in the wings.
But for the rest, the bottom 90 percent, well, talk to any public school teacher. Um, yes, there are problems. Johnny can't write, Johnny can't read, Johnny can't speak beyond pop culture monosyllables. In fact, Johnny can't do much of anything except accumulate minimum-wage bucks which he then drops every weekend on the latest mass culture garbage coming down the cineplex / MTV chute. What happened back in those dim days after the trauma of World War I to bring us to this unpretty pass? Many things of course. Many, many things, as American capitalists got a better fix and focus on Realpolitik. In the schools, one thing--little noticed and hardly lamented-- happened. We stopped the mass teaching of Latin and Greek. If we're top dog (and we are, God save us all), then why should we worry about anybody else's language (not to mention DEAD languages, fer chrissake). Let THEM learn English. And there, my friends, you find the beginning of the decline of American culture, and of course the simultaneous rise of American global hegemony. Johnny can't write-read-speak, because Johnny can't think. Johnny can't think because "language" to him means "English," and the rest of the world take the hindmost. But even the "English" that Johnny gets needs those quotation marks around it. Whatever it is, this "English" definitely ain't the King's (or Queen's) English. You doubt me? Why do you think American television has nothing to approach the BBC's Masterpiece Theater (come on now, we're talking LANGUAGE, not neo-colonial content or post-colonial nostalgia)? Why is American best-seller fiction the laughing stock of the literate world? Why, once you leave New York/Chicago/Los Angeles are American newspapers at best-- AT BEST!!!-- a semi-literate joke? Why? Because we haven't been teaching LANGUAGE properly since after World War I. We've been teaching, um, "the language arts," "language skills," or, uh, "linguistic proficiency," Basically what we've been teaching our own children is what we teach immigrants: survival English. Just enough to get a driver's license, to understand TV commercials (so we can all be effectively obsessive, unquestioning consumers), and to comprehend and communicate drive-thru orders. Oh yes, and just enough "English" to know how to fill out credit card applications. It turns out that's all you need in the way of "language skills" to survive in, and be a good, contributing cog in, the global capitalist machine. Work, work, work. Spend, spend, spend. What's notably absent is: think, think, think. Who's thinking? Who has time to think? Who CAN think?
How to fix the schools, and the country? Do two things. 1. In first grade, every (EVERY!) student either chooses or is assigned one foreign language, which he/she then studies (along with all the usual subjects) every year, through 12th grade. Here's the catch: the language cannot be a European language, at least not a living European language. Why not? Because the European languages are too similar to English. If you want real language skills, you have to escape good old Euro-centrism. So. Across the board, in all American schools, first graders (and everybody else) chooses from among, say, four languages: Classical Greek, Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese. Distant languages, distant cultures, different alphabets. Is that howling I hear in the distance from the Amero-centric vested interests of the education establishment? Is that jingoistic cries of betrayal I hear from Amero-centric vested interests of the politico-religious establishment? Why yes, of course. Once they calm down enough to talk, they start jabbering: Where would we get teachers for these obscure (!) (obscure? Mandarin after all is only spoken by more people than the next FIVE most popular languages combined) tongues? And when you tell them that finding teachers is no problem-- America is full of recent emigrants who'd be happy to help out-- they really start howling. You want to put UNTRAINED FOREIGNERS in front of MY KID'S class in the school MY TAX DOLLARS support??? The only answer is the honest answer: You want your kid to think? To write GOOD English? To speak well? Then you're gonna have to suck up and face reality. The only way to achieve that is years-long study of a really foreign language. Period. 2. The second, and also essential, part of the school fix: Reduce average class size across the board in all public schools in America to (you ready?) 12. That's it. Hard? Yes. Hard for everybody, students, teachers, schools, parents, the whole society. Expensive? Yes. But surely a country that can afford $300 billion annually for its military and that can pay off $1 trillion a year in debt can afford a few hundred billion to create a generation of articulate, analytically gifted, culturally sensitive children. Do this, and come back in 30 years and what you'd likely find is that the profitable if somewhat burdensome Pax Americana would have been overshadowed by an American Renaissance. END
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