gat

at Yenching University outside Beijing where I recently went to see for myself the effects of
Westernization on the young Chinese elite, says the generation educated entirely in simplified
characters will have difficulty reading anything published in China before the late 1950s.
First, said Plato, wipe the slate clean.
There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books
to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in
school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them,
being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very
effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the
same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do—forcing pictures and graphs into space where
readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect
should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.
Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect
reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his
"infinite delight" with Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically
in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure
with its "Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses." Cowley was twelve at
the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many
elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened.
"Frank had a dog. His name was Spot." That happened.
*
This quotation is from John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion. Draper, an excellent
scholar, took the story from one Abulpharagius, a writer composing his story six stories after the burning of
Alexandria’s library. But no earlier writers confirm Abulpharagius’ account and the known character of Umar (of
Medina, not Syria!) is quite liberal—for instance, he opened the holy places of Jerusalem to all sects, Hebrew,
Christian, or whatever—and inconsistent with such a statement. Furthermore, the reverence for learning in early
Islam would all by itself bring this alleged statement by the head of the Muslim empire into question. So, while the
anti-rationalist logic is still flawless, it might be well to consider what group(s) had something to gain by spinning
history this way. Official history seems to be saturated with such machinations, hence the need for underground
histories…of everything!
The Cult Of Forced Schooling
The most candid account of the changeover from old-style American free market schooling to the
laboratory variety we have under the close eye of society’s managers is a book long out of print.
But the author was famous enough in his day that a yearly lecture at Harvard is named after him,
so with a bit of effort on your part, and perhaps a kind word to your local librarian, in due time
you should be able to find a hair-raising account of the school transformation written by one of
the insiders. The book in question bears the soporific title Principles of Secondary Education.
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