Visigoths

We're raising Visigoths, or more to the point, not raising them. having been socialized by their peers, television, and video games rather than adults, they don't know how to become adults, and they don't care.( I could have linked to a dozen or more stores of behavior that would have horrified any self respecting Visigoth)

They can't think. We can't think. Our attention span, once reduced to fifteen minutes by television commercials, is now reduced to the length of a couple of tweets. The next teen novel will probably be written as a series of twitter posts and Facebook statuses.

We can blame the parents- we always can blame them. Ultimately, it is always, of course, the responsibility of parents. But where did the parents learn that our young wolflings are best socialized by other wolflings rather than adults? Where did they learn that their input was unwelcome, that they should leave the care and nurture of their offspring to the 'experts' for the majority of the week?

Are the schools performing their stated mission of doing for the children what their parents won't or can't, or are they part of the problem?

Almost certainly, the chief culprit in the gradual stupefaction of the citizenry is the public school — “thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds,” mourns John Gardner — abetted by scholarly lassitude and the gutting of the canon which have become prominent aspects of what is ironically dubbed “higher education.” (I recall a former director general of my college recommending that Shakespeare be expunged from the curriculum as “irrelevant.”) As Thomas Sowell writes, “Too many people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters.” Howbeit, we need to start with primary and secondary education, where stagnation and decline seem to be the general order of the day, if we are to get a handle on the predicament we are trying to come to terms with.
Attending a meeting of 3000 writing instructors in Atlanta in April 2011, Mary Grabar observes that teachers are “not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly.” Communication is now “redefined as ‘performance’ ” involving the body, images, song, hip-hop, visual rhetorics, clothes, “everything but the written word as traditionally understood.” For Grabar, there is a political agenda at work in what we might call Operation Dumbing Down. The group’s program “is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression.” Liberal education has become political indoctrination. “The shift to the sub-literate or anti-literate,” she writes, “has evolved from the 1960s revolutionary project to dismantle Western civilization though the institutions, primarily educational.”

Someday somebody will write a 12 volume set titled The Rise* and Fall of the United States of America, but I do not know who will read it.

*(Thanks, Cindee, for catching the typo)