Did I miss something? Have I, like Rip Van Winkle, been asleep for the last twenty years?
There was a time when being called “intelligent” was quite a compliment. It meant that you’d gone to school and assimilated what you’d been taught. You spoke and wrote in English sentences that contained nouns, verbs, objects, adjectives, and adverbs. You could spell words correctly (at least, most of the time). You had a basic knowledge of the history of our country, and you understood how our government functioned. You were able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide without the aid of an electronic device. You had some knowledge of general science. You had read classic literature: Shakespeare, Dickens (oh, how I hated A Tale of Two Cities!), Poe, Hawthorne, among others. In short, you had received a solid, well-rounded educational foundation, and you’d done it by senior year in high school. If or when you went to college, you added to this foundation, acquiring additional knowledge in your chosen field.
What has happened to the education system in the United States? When did it become acceptable for our kids to be less educated than those in other nations? Even our young adults do not seem to have a grasp of the basics. Perfectly good English words are reduced to a single letter phrases to two or three letters. Instead of having a rich vocabulary to draw on when expressing themselves, they are reduced to using words that once wouldn’t be used in polite company, much less in front of toddlers. Amazingly enough, those words (especially the f-bomb one) are used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but the users don’t know that.
Our young people are being deprived of some of the finer joys of life. They are missing out on the tortured but glorious love of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, being able to do a quick sum in their heads to know whether they can supersize that fast food order and not be embarrassed by a lack of funds, or calling someone an insufferable cretin, and having him stop dead in his tracks because he’s not sure whether he’s been insulted or not. Those who can enjoy those things are labeled “nerd” or “dork,” and from those who should know better, “intellectual” and (my current pet peeve) “elite.”
The word “elite” was used and abused in the recent election. I couldn’t possibly count how many times it was used to refer to the Democratic candidate, apparently to distinguish him from the down-home folk on the Republican ticket. The ones who pronounce “nuclear” as “nu-cu-ler,” the ones who apparently would be good beer buddies. The thing is, I don’t need a beer buddy. And I want my country’s leaders to be a whole lot more intelligent than I. I want those leaders to be as educated as possible, to have developed the ability to think. I want them to be able to think on complex levels because the world out there is complex.
I’m so grateful for the outcome of the election. We have highly intelligent people in office again, especially our President Elect. With everything else he has on his plate, I fervently hope that he will pay some attention to the sorry state of our educational system, and find ways to repair it. If that makes me “elite,” so be it. I want the word “intelligent” to carry the positive connotation that it once had, and for our youngsters to be second to none in their educational foundation.
