A few days ago, Mark Morford opined about the appalling effects of media on America’s youth and predicted general doom:
…My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.
It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. …
Interesting, infuriating, and (undoubtedly) intentionally scary essay. He does offer a small ray of hope.
With that in mind, I figure that in the future, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland will read like this. Unfortunately, as with most parodies, I suspect only those who appreciate the original will get the most humor out of it—which may further reinforce Morford’s point.
As long as we’re parodying poetry, consider Meowl! (Unspecified prize to whomever identifies the connection between the two poetic parodies.)
I don’t know. Before it was the Internet and television it was the movies or the drugs or the sexual revolution or rock music or…
Yet somehow, semester after semester, I find my classes filled with students who want to be pharmacists, and police officers, and ESL teachers, and youth pastors. They may not be called on to use a ruler much to draw a straight line, but most of them could probably teach Morford a thing or two about using AUTOCAD to make a 3D rendering of his classroom while they are sitting through his lecture before running off to a meeting to start a community recycling project. There is nothing new under the sun, including prognostications of gloom and doom to be brought on by the current generation that allegedly doesn’t have its collective life together the way “we” do.
I sometimes wonder if jeremiad makers like Morford ever keep a copy of their own work from when they were the same age as the people they were teaching. I’ve got a couple of papers from my high school and undergraduate days in my desk that I pull out and take a hard look at whenever I get too snooty about the work that this generation is producing.
Before movies, etc., it was—I don’t know—general human depravity? What Pope calls “dullness” that results in The Dunciad, which ends:
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
And yet, here we all are, still, somehow.