During the height of the pandemic, school districts went into distance-learning mode, essentially, into “We’re-afraid-your-kids-are-going-to-kill-the-teachers-by-transmitting-COVID-19 distance learning.” Suddenly, America became the largest homeschool since the Neopaleolithic Period—though, one could argue for such ancient times that cave-school, lean-to school, or rock shelter school are a more appropriate terms than homeschool.”
Now, there is something positive to be said about trained teachers committed to educating youth as opposed to untrained people educating them because they happen to be home (or in the cave) at the moment. The former is often formal and structured; the latter, often informal and unstructured. Formal schooling has the added merit of its supposed cosmopolitanism: Teachers from many universities add diversity of perspectives and a supposed wealth of knowledge in a school equipped with many educational resources. Formal schools aren’t perfect platforms of learning, however, in that they tend toward standardization and a least common learning denominator—an approach to learning characterized as “one size fits all.”
Having grown up during the depression in a poor family of nine children, my mother had to leave school after her freshman year to help support her siblings. Thus, she never graduated. She did, however, have a fondness for crossword puzzles and the news, even world news. She read both the Greensburg Tribune-Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (It was my mother who, showing me the paper with the famous picture of Stalin lying in state, said, “This is very bad man who died”—I can’t remember the rest of the conversation) Anyway, however she managed it, she grew up literate with a sense of grammar, particularly with a sense of subject-verb agreement. That is, Mum would say, “He doesn’t,” and not “He don’t.” In contrast, my father, who did graduate from high school and became a linotypist first for the Trib and then for a private printing company, always said, “He don’t” and “It don’t.” Paradoxically, he corrected sentences reporters and private individuals submitted for publication, and he did so reading the “chase” of metal letters that were, if I recall properly, both upside-down and backward as they emerged from his linotype. * That he could see subject-verb disagreement and syntax in the written word but fail to do so in the spoken one, reminds me of my own past.
As I grew from childhood to teen hood, I began to adopt the faulty agreement I heard my father, my classmates, and other adults speak. I lived in a sea of “he don’ts.” But my “uneducated” mother corrected me—repeatedly. And she scolded me for using “yinz,” that Pittsburgh-area version of “y’all” and “you-uns.” No doubt as a teen, I, like so many of my peers and elders, could not connect my formal education that involved diagramming sentences and memorizing the rules of syntax to my everyday speech. So, my mother “schooled” me in both—at home, in the car, at the store: In that sense, I was not merely homeschooled, but everywhere-schooled.
She was relentless in her task as my personal “teacher,” a characteristic often missing from formal settings with teachers overwhelmed by vast numbers of strangers they will never see after graduation day. She was determined to see that I acquired a proficiency in “proper” American English—I use that term instead of “Standard English” because she would not have, for example, required my (note the possessive before a gerund here) using formal shall instead of informal will, as in “I shall go to the store” instead of “I will go to the store.” ** Like other mothers, she wanted her son “to shine,” and she believed that faulty agreements cast a shadow over intelligence.
All this autobiographical and biographical stuff isn’t an exercise in “biographia gratis biographiae.” I offer it not for its own sake, but rather as an analog of the times. Whereas it is true that many “educated” people do not use the contraction doesn’t with the third person singular, it is true that most of those same people would flinch if they heard “He do…” instead of “He does.…” Somehow, throwing the negative into the mix erases 12 or more years of public schooling on subject-verb disagreement—don’t it?
Why is there a faulty connection between learning and doing? The question has a wider sweep than subject-verb agreement. Take economics and history as examples of the same broken connections. Personally, many people learn in the School of Hard Knocks that they have real limits to their wealth, that they cannot put more on a credit card than they have the ability to repay and that interest rates consume more of their earnings each time they overspend on the “card.” Yet, when people are given carte blanche on spending taxes, as congressional representatives are, they forget the lesson they learned repeatedly “at home.” Thus, Congress spends, and spends, and spends. And there doesn’t seem to be any “mother” to correct the representatives. The same forgetfulness applies to school lessons on socialism. No lesson on the subject seems to stick in practice with many Americans—with the exception of naturalized citizens who fled socialist and communist regimes. More than a century of socialism’s failure to secure prosperity for any but the elite few never rings a bell of warning. That socialism has led not only to impoverishment, but also to the quashing of individual freedoms is a lesson taught, but not remembered. That socialist governments killed more than 160 million people in twentieth-century “democides,” such as Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians during which a minimum nine million people died, never seems to matter. The current war in Ukraine seems to be proof of the disconnect between learning and reality.
Think of the binding energy in atoms here. I’ve known physicists who use “He (she, it) don’t” in social settings. These were “highly educated people.” I assume that their college physics lessons on election orbits stuck more tenaciously than their English lessons on subject-verb agreement because, like my dad, they saw the lessons in light of their work.
Electrons, every physicist can tell you, have a ground state. To move from one orbit to the next requires energy from an outside source. To shine, to give off light, electrons need to break the binding energy of the nucleus much the way my mother put energy into freeing her son from a ground state of persistent ignorance. Without her efforts, I might be writing, “In the eyes of some modern social democrats, socialism don’t hurt no one because it do help everyone.”
Many people stay in their ground state unless an external source of energy, some mother, moves them. Does you agree?
Now think of your reaction to that last sentence. You realize that because I put it online, it will be around for a very long time, present not just in your mind, but also indefinitely present in the cyberworld. Do that bother you? It bothers me, and I’m the one who put it in this blog just to make a point.
What is that point? There appears to be no external source of energy to move the electron of truth about uncontrolled spending by Congress and the folly of believing that socialism is a humane political construct that provides equity. No amount of pointing out the failures of socialism to “democratic socialists” seems to effect a change in thinking. The pattern is set even though the truths of runaway spending and socialism are evident; the “he don’t” of today’s budding socialists has no persistent corrector. With an ever-increasing number of “he don’t-ers,” the chance of establishing a connection between the folly of overspending and the country’s economic health becomes rarer. And with no one constantly reminding democratic socialists that impoverishment, imprisonment, and even death are the legacy of socialism, the chances of their implementing ever-expanding socialist programs increase yearly.
That today’s world is literate is the result of formal education in schools from Murmansk to Johannesburg and from New York to New Delhi. Yet, billions of educated people cannot escape the binding energy that keeps them in a ground state. Like electrons bound to nuclei, those who can’t apply learning can’t escape their orbits of ignorance and folly. They are destined to repeat the “he don’ts” of overspending and socialism.
*A bright man, as foreman of the private printing company, he taught himself and the employees how to use computers as printers phased out linotypes in favor of computers.
**Although I did not then and do not now say “I shall go to the store,” I do have picture of me as a three-year old dressed in an Eton suit. However, lest you think I was an incarnation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, note that though I know both to be incorrect, I like Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Bread’s “It Don’t Matter to Me.”
Now, there is something positive to be said about trained teachers committed to educating youth as opposed to untrained people educating them because they happen to be home (or in the cave) at the moment. The former is often formal and structured; the latter, often informal and unstructured. Formal schooling has the added merit of its supposed cosmopolitanism: Teachers from many universities add diversity of perspectives and a supposed wealth of knowledge in a school equipped with many educational resources. Formal schools aren’t perfect platforms of learning, however, in that they tend toward standardization and a least common learning denominator—an approach to learning characterized as “one size fits all.”
Having grown up during the depression in a poor family of nine children, my mother had to leave school after her freshman year to help support her siblings. Thus, she never graduated. She did, however, have a fondness for crossword puzzles and the news, even world news. She read both the Greensburg Tribune-Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (It was my mother who, showing me the paper with the famous picture of Stalin lying in state, said, “This is very bad man who died”—I can’t remember the rest of the conversation) Anyway, however she managed it, she grew up literate with a sense of grammar, particularly with a sense of subject-verb agreement. That is, Mum would say, “He doesn’t,” and not “He don’t.” In contrast, my father, who did graduate from high school and became a linotypist first for the Trib and then for a private printing company, always said, “He don’t” and “It don’t.” Paradoxically, he corrected sentences reporters and private individuals submitted for publication, and he did so reading the “chase” of metal letters that were, if I recall properly, both upside-down and backward as they emerged from his linotype. * That he could see subject-verb disagreement and syntax in the written word but fail to do so in the spoken one, reminds me of my own past.
As I grew from childhood to teen hood, I began to adopt the faulty agreement I heard my father, my classmates, and other adults speak. I lived in a sea of “he don’ts.” But my “uneducated” mother corrected me—repeatedly. And she scolded me for using “yinz,” that Pittsburgh-area version of “y’all” and “you-uns.” No doubt as a teen, I, like so many of my peers and elders, could not connect my formal education that involved diagramming sentences and memorizing the rules of syntax to my everyday speech. So, my mother “schooled” me in both—at home, in the car, at the store: In that sense, I was not merely homeschooled, but everywhere-schooled.
She was relentless in her task as my personal “teacher,” a characteristic often missing from formal settings with teachers overwhelmed by vast numbers of strangers they will never see after graduation day. She was determined to see that I acquired a proficiency in “proper” American English—I use that term instead of “Standard English” because she would not have, for example, required my (note the possessive before a gerund here) using formal shall instead of informal will, as in “I shall go to the store” instead of “I will go to the store.” ** Like other mothers, she wanted her son “to shine,” and she believed that faulty agreements cast a shadow over intelligence.
All this autobiographical and biographical stuff isn’t an exercise in “biographia gratis biographiae.” I offer it not for its own sake, but rather as an analog of the times. Whereas it is true that many “educated” people do not use the contraction doesn’t with the third person singular, it is true that most of those same people would flinch if they heard “He do…” instead of “He does.…” Somehow, throwing the negative into the mix erases 12 or more years of public schooling on subject-verb disagreement—don’t it?
Why is there a faulty connection between learning and doing? The question has a wider sweep than subject-verb agreement. Take economics and history as examples of the same broken connections. Personally, many people learn in the School of Hard Knocks that they have real limits to their wealth, that they cannot put more on a credit card than they have the ability to repay and that interest rates consume more of their earnings each time they overspend on the “card.” Yet, when people are given carte blanche on spending taxes, as congressional representatives are, they forget the lesson they learned repeatedly “at home.” Thus, Congress spends, and spends, and spends. And there doesn’t seem to be any “mother” to correct the representatives. The same forgetfulness applies to school lessons on socialism. No lesson on the subject seems to stick in practice with many Americans—with the exception of naturalized citizens who fled socialist and communist regimes. More than a century of socialism’s failure to secure prosperity for any but the elite few never rings a bell of warning. That socialism has led not only to impoverishment, but also to the quashing of individual freedoms is a lesson taught, but not remembered. That socialist governments killed more than 160 million people in twentieth-century “democides,” such as Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians during which a minimum nine million people died, never seems to matter. The current war in Ukraine seems to be proof of the disconnect between learning and reality.
Think of the binding energy in atoms here. I’ve known physicists who use “He (she, it) don’t” in social settings. These were “highly educated people.” I assume that their college physics lessons on election orbits stuck more tenaciously than their English lessons on subject-verb agreement because, like my dad, they saw the lessons in light of their work.
Electrons, every physicist can tell you, have a ground state. To move from one orbit to the next requires energy from an outside source. To shine, to give off light, electrons need to break the binding energy of the nucleus much the way my mother put energy into freeing her son from a ground state of persistent ignorance. Without her efforts, I might be writing, “In the eyes of some modern social democrats, socialism don’t hurt no one because it do help everyone.”
Many people stay in their ground state unless an external source of energy, some mother, moves them. Does you agree?
Now think of your reaction to that last sentence. You realize that because I put it online, it will be around for a very long time, present not just in your mind, but also indefinitely present in the cyberworld. Do that bother you? It bothers me, and I’m the one who put it in this blog just to make a point.
What is that point? There appears to be no external source of energy to move the electron of truth about uncontrolled spending by Congress and the folly of believing that socialism is a humane political construct that provides equity. No amount of pointing out the failures of socialism to “democratic socialists” seems to effect a change in thinking. The pattern is set even though the truths of runaway spending and socialism are evident; the “he don’t” of today’s budding socialists has no persistent corrector. With an ever-increasing number of “he don’t-ers,” the chance of establishing a connection between the folly of overspending and the country’s economic health becomes rarer. And with no one constantly reminding democratic socialists that impoverishment, imprisonment, and even death are the legacy of socialism, the chances of their implementing ever-expanding socialist programs increase yearly.
That today’s world is literate is the result of formal education in schools from Murmansk to Johannesburg and from New York to New Delhi. Yet, billions of educated people cannot escape the binding energy that keeps them in a ground state. Like electrons bound to nuclei, those who can’t apply learning can’t escape their orbits of ignorance and folly. They are destined to repeat the “he don’ts” of overspending and socialism.
*A bright man, as foreman of the private printing company, he taught himself and the employees how to use computers as printers phased out linotypes in favor of computers.
**Although I did not then and do not now say “I shall go to the store,” I do have picture of me as a three-year old dressed in an Eton suit. However, lest you think I was an incarnation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, note that though I know both to be incorrect, I like Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Bread’s “It Don’t Matter to Me.”
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