As a parent we want the best for our kids. When my son was just four my wife and I decided that the schools in the city we lived in at the time were not great and started looking around to where we could relocate. We spent over a year, looking at school districts, neighborhoods, deciding between existing homes and new developments, and making decisions such as should we move closer to our aging parents.
In the end we chose the small bedroom community of Yorba Linda, California, and a neighborhood with a school with great scores. My wife volunteered in the classroom and I volunteered with the PTA. We were active in his learning at home as well. I was a parent leader in scouts for 12 years. And we made sure that his academics were supplemented with extra curricular arts and culture activities, visits to museums and historical places.
US History
The first time I ever had a concern about what he was learning in school was when in high school they were studying WW2 and he wrote a term paper. The topic was about the Island Hopping campaign of the Pacific and how the US needed to capture pacific islands close enough to mainland Japan to be able to fly bombing missions. It included mention of the airbase at Tinian island which is was used to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Having read the paper myself I was shocked when the teacher gave him an F grade.
The reasoning the teacher gave was his belief that the US hadn’t flown bombers from the island of Tinian or other islands, that US bombers carrying the atomic bombs had, according to the teacher, flown from Australia. All these years later I’m still dumbfounded by this statement. As a veteran who studied American history, as well as US military history in ROTC, and the owner of several shelves of books on military history, I knew that everything in my sons paper was 100% correct. A meeting with the teacher revealed that he didn’t know the material he was teaching and that he was doing the one thing that all teachers tell their student to never do… using Wikipedia as a source.
Here was someone with a college degree and a teaching credential, who was teaching American History, and who has a text book printed before Republicans started revising history books to remove the uncomfortable truths about our past. And even that person didn’t know basic facts. Like Australia is an 8,500 mile round trip from Japan. And that the largest US bomber of the time had a round-trip range of only 5,500 miles. Tinian island is just a 3,000 mile round trip to Japan which is why the US built an airbase there. A phone call to the school principal resolved the issue.
Last week while camping at Palo Duro Canyon state park in Texas we toured the visitors center. One of the rooms featured exhibits from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) who built the park, as well as most of our national parks. A couple in their 50’s came in and I heard them reading aloud a sign which talked about the Great Depression and the CCC created by President Roosevelt to give jobs to some of the 13 million people left unemployed. Their conversation showed that they truly had never heard of the Great Depression or the millions who were unemployed as a result. How? How could an adult my age, or any adult who has been to school in the US, have never heard of the Great Depression?
It used to be funny when I would stay up and watch the Jay Leno show on NBC when he would do his segment called ‘JayWalking.’ He would go out to public places and ask people questions, often about geography and history. It was funny to watch someone who didn’t know what country the Panama canal was located in, who thought that Florida was next to the Pacific ocean, who thinks that there was a bridge ‘under’ the English Channel, or didn’t know where or what the Berlin wall was. In hind sight, it wasn’t funny at all, it was sad.
Billy, where’s your Grammar?
History isn’t the only thing not, apparently, being taught in school. In my prior career one of my most important responsibilities was communicating with clients. An important component of communication is spelling and grammar and part of my job involved overseeing the communication of my staff to ensure that they were communicating both effectively and correctly. I was stunned and saddened that my staff, most of them half my age, communicated so poorly. And not just their spelling and grammar, but also sometimes their inability to communicate effectively.
I checked into a Rocky Mountain National Park campground some years ago and the employee about 10 years my senior asked me if I had any “chillins” [sic]. I had no idea what he was talking about and was getting frustrated when I asked him repeatedly what he meant. Finally he said “you know, little ones.” Children? I asked. Here was an adult who had gone to public school in the US, Louisiana, and he could not pronounce the word ‘children.’ To say noting of the fact that ‘children’ is the plural and ‘childrens’ is grammatically incorrect. It was like watching the scene in the movie My Cousin Vinny where the judge asks; “what’s a Ute.” The Vinny character, played by Joe Pesci, who was someone who had graduated from law school, could not pronounce the word ‘youth.’
His family and his teachers allowed him to use that grammar and pronunciation and never corrected him. Never taught him to use correct language. You have to wonder if the administrators of those schools ever checked on the teachers. In my experience, teachers are often the root of the problem. I know several teachers personally and not one of them knows the difference between “there’s” and “there are,” “you’re” and “your,” “has” vs. “have,” or “fewer” vs. “less.”
Media Influences
I have begun to notice that those in the media and in entertainment are guilty of butchering the English language as well. Newscasters who have been to journalism school don’t know how to use proper grammar. In a recent television commercial the narrator said “your” instead of “you’re.” I am a huge Star Wars fan and after the first season of Ahsoka I decided to binge Clone Wars so that I could get caught up on the back-story and was horrified by some of the grammar. And since the captions are turned on in our Disney+ app, I could literally read every time the voice actor used incorrect grammar.
Making a grammatical error during a live news broadcast could be forgiven, especially if they were to correct themselves. But hearing it in a scripted, pre-recorded format such as a commercial or television show tells me that no one is paying attention. Not the talent, not a director or recording supervisor. And there can only be two possibilities; either everyone involved do not themselves know any better, or they are deliberately ‘dumbing down’ their content to appeal to their audience. Frankly, I don’t know which prospect is more frightening to think about.
Educating America
One of my favorite comedy movies is the 2006 film Idiocracy. It portrays a dystopian future where evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. But I fear that it may not be fiction. That it may be a harbinger of our future. The last few years have demonstrated how important education is and, just like in the movie, the consequences of its absence. We’ve seen how easily Republicans can lie and somehow make thousands, even millions of people believe those lies. There is no such thing as “alternative facts.” Trump has been quoted as saying; ““If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” If no one corrects the lies, the truth will never be heard. Much the same as when no one, especially teachers, corrects incorrect history, spelling or grammar, it will permeate through our society, from one generation to the next.