I’ve had to repair what I missed with a combination of travel and private
study.. . and must admit that I did not tackle Chinese history in depth until this
year. My training in history was so spotty that it was not until I went to the Naval
Academy and saw captured battle flags that I learned that we fought Korea some
eighty years earlier than the mess we are still trying to clean up.
From my father’s textbook I know that the world history course he studied
was not detailed (how could it be?) but at least it treated the world as round; it
did not ignore three fourths of our planet.
Now, let me report what I’ve seen, heard, looked up, clipped out of
newspapers and elsewhere, and read in books such as WHY JOHNNY CAN’T READ,
BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, etc.
Colorado Springs, our home until 1965, in 1960 offered first-year Latin-but
that was all. Caesar, Cicero, Virgil-Who dat?
Latin is not taught in the high schools of Santa Cruz County. From oral
reports and clippings I note that it is not taught in most high schools across the
country.
“Why this emphasis on Latin? It’s a dead language!” Brother, as with jazz,
in the words of a great artist, “If you have to ask, you ain’t never goin’ to find
out.” A person who knows only his own language does not even know his own language;
epistemology necessitates knowing more than one human language. Besides that sharp
edge, Latin is a giant help in all the sciences-and so is Greek, so I studied it on
my own.
A friend of mine, now a dean in a state university, was a tenured professor
of history-but got riffed when history was eliminated from the required subjects for
a bachelor’s degree. His courses (American history) are still offered but the one or
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two who sign up, he tutors; the overhead of a classroom cannot be justified.
A recent Wall Street Journal story described the bloodthirsty job hunting
that goes on at the annual meeting of the Modern Languages Association; modern
languages-even English-are being deemphasized right across the country; there are
more professors in MLA than there are jobs.
I mentioned elsewhere the straight-A student on a scholarship who did not
know the relations between weeks, months, and years. This is not uncommon; high
school and college students in this country usually can’t do simple arithmetic
without using a pocket calculator. (I mean with pencil on paper; to ask one to do
mental arithmetic causes jaws to drop-say 17 x 34, done mentally. How? Answer: Chuck
away the 34 but remember it. (10 + 7)2 is 289, obviously. Double it:
2(300 – 11), or 578.
But my father would have given the answer at once, as his country grammar
school a century ago required perfect memorizing of multiplication tables through 20
x 20 = 400 . . . so his ciphering the above would have been merely the doubling of a
number already known (289)-or 578. He might have done it again by another route to
check it: (68 + 510)-but his hesitation would not have been noticeable.
Was my father a mathematician? Not at all. Am I? Hell, no! This is the
simplest sort of kitchen arithmetic, the sort that high school students can no
longerdo- at least in Santa Cruz.
If they don’t study math and languages and history, what do they study?
(Nota Bene! Any student can learn the truly tough subjects on almost any campus if
he/she wishes-the professors and books and labs are there. But the student must want
to.)
But if that student does not want to learn anything requiring brain sweat,
most U.S. campuses will babysit him 4 years, then hand him a baccalaureate for not
burning down the library. That girl in Colorado Springs who studied Latin-but no
classic Latin-got a “general” bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado in
1964. I attended her graduation, asked what she had majored in. No major. What had
she studied? Nothing, really, it turned out-and, sure enough, she’s as ignorant
today as she was in high school.
Santa Cruz has an enormous, lavish 2-year college and also a campus of the