Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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