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For about the 20th straight year, average American SAT scores have declined.
In one way, that's comforting news. It means that people my age are the smartest people in the history of America, since we did better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than anybody before or since. And back then, everybody said we were so addled by drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll that our brains had turned to mush and we couldn't think. So there.
Naturally, the educators who analyze the SAT results have a culprit, and as you might have guessed, the culprit is not educators. It is television. They say kids don't read much because they spend too much time watching all the sex and violence on the tube.
First let us grant that sex and violence are interesting. They get our attention. Most literature has plenty of both. Now consider what happens when real literature appears in the curriculum.
Shakespeare is often bawdy, and he fills the stage with bodies. Besides that, MacBeth has witches, which exposes innocent children to the occult.
Huckleberry Finn might be the best American
novel, but it's written in Missouri Puke dialect and has
racist characters. Plus, it encourages kids to run away
from home for adventure elsewhere, and the only parental
figure in the book, Pap Finn,
is abusive white
trash. Most of the other adults are fools or scoundrels,
and Huck himself makes Bart Simpson look like the Student
of the Year.
Charlotte's Web is a charming tale, but vegetarians would complain that it's obscene to expose youngsters to the disgusting concept of swine being raised for slaughter.
Go back to the real classics of antiquity, and it's even worse. Homer dispatches more people in a paragraph than the entire Rambo series has managed to date, and his work offers graphic seductions and unpunished substance abuse.
Clearly that sordid material would never pass muster
with today's pure educators. Not only is the content
unacceptable, but the vocabulary extends beyond the
650-word limit. Educators go out of their way to find safe,
dull stuff, and they'll tell you that real books are
over kids' heads.
However, I tried an experiment when the kids were in grade school. In college, I managed to pass the test on the Iliad without ever reading it, thanks to Cliff's Notes and Classic Comics.
It seemed like time for me to get an education, and the kids always wanted me to read them a bedtime story. So I started reading the Iliad to them. They loved it, which shouldn't have been a surprise. Homer's old tale is full of sex, violence, magic, ambition, anger, mayhem, greed, humor -- everything that a fifth-grader finds enchanting about MTV is also present in the Iliad.
Real books aren't nearly as sanitized as TV, but TV is certainly much more interesting than the books kids have to read in school. Thanks to the lethargy and cowardice of educators, many kids probably don't know that there are any other kinds of books besides the insipid pablum assigned in school.
If they did, they'd read more, because literature offers more sex and violence than the whole new ribald and risky fall schedule from the networks.
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