“Do you know what the members of
educational establishment have done in order to minimize failure at reading?” The rhetorical question is posed by Deborah
Blake in a Standard-Examiner newspaper commentary 6/27/2000, titled “We don’t
give kids the power of words.” (I was so
impressed then, I saved it in my WWII file cabinet to be re-enlisted years
later.) Her answer: “They’ve cut down
the vocabulary in our textbooks so the students don’t have to deal with it. The dummyng-down of our vocabulary hasn’t
just come in our elementary and secondary schools; a college-level technical-writing
course taught us to write at a sixth-grade level, ‘because that’s what the
majority of workers can understand.’ … I
mentioned the reading level requirement to my husband, an engineer at one of
the local aerospace firms … [and learned] his superiors had also told them to
write to the same level so that the technicians could understand their
instructions.”
The writer goes on to recommend as a
solution that adults and children “read more of everything … morally acceptable
…”
The article concludes with her
personal experience: “One spring day long ago, I took a copy of Euripides’ play
Medea [an ancient Greek tragedy] to a
little league game to read. This was a
book I’d first read in eighth grade.
… Eventually, one mother asked
what I was reading. I showed her. … Her
response was immediate and typical, ‘You’re just too intellectual for the rest
of us.’ I learned to take ‘easy’ reading
to the games; a romance novel was typically the most accepted.”
In light of the topic, it’s
interesting that the profile added by the newspaper staff reveals common,
blind faith in their spell-check software:
“Deborah Blake of Bear River City [Utah] is a free-lance technical
writer and poet. … He
column runs every other Tuesday.”
Have we come a long way, Baby, in thirteen
years? Or in thirty-plus years since my
wife Kay stitched her adorable ABC’s? --
a sign of her lifelong engagement in youth education.
