Our expert in education mentioned Charlotte Iserbyt to me more than once. Alec Satin also mentioned her - with delight - as the author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. Iserbyt's books sell for $200-$450 on Alibris used books. I read that the Amazon prices were higher.
I probably read the book a long time ago, because it was my mother's contention as well, teaching in the public schools and seeing the required reading get mushier all the time. I was scandalized in second grade, when I had to read such lines as
"See Jane run. Run, run, run.
Run, Jane, run.
Look, look, look." Dick, Jane, and Spot
In Moline, we enjoyed the good fortune of having teachers who were educated in the 1930s and earlier. They did their best in giving us a classical education, including Latin for anyone who even thought of going to college. For the last 60+ years I have seen the quality of education go downhill. Latin is as rare as a genuine Biden sighting.
Thanksgiving and the stolen election remind us of our duty to remember the past, recall the hardships, and use past heroics as inspiration for the future.
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| Cole, The Empire in Decline |
America's Founders Were Literate
When I was thrown into teaching world religion to undergraduates, I had to learn more about the rise of the Ottoman Empire. I got the full set of Gibbon and enjoyed the background of those often ignored years - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The books came out starting in 1776, a year familiar to many. Did they have an impact? I remember my parents saying, "We are going the way of the Roman Empire." That was around the dinner table in the 1950s. Few would know how to start that topic now.
Seminaries Are Graduating Illiterates
We should not be surprised that all the denominations have dumbed down in harmony - or is it collusion? - with public education. All the so-called church schools are owned by the same philosophies, bought with federal funds and doled out for doing what is "right."
Did the clergy battle against the original text of the Bible being turned into a game of Monopoly? They gave up that battle about 100 years ago.
That supposedly minor concession led to everyone having his own personal translation (Otten-Beck) and his own favorite dogma to promote - OJ and Church Growth among many, both flowering in the muck of do-it-yourself Bibles.
