Or not. One's safer, one's probably more fun.
While I was in Shanghai, one of the teaching assistants asked me if I had ever read Our Town by Thornton Wilder. No, managed to skip that. She was amazed -- I was an educated American, how could I not have read Our Town? Luck, I said, and sly animal cunning. She asked if I would mind reading it over the three weeks so I could discuss it with her. Sure. Our Town doesn't take any three weeks to read in English. If she had handed me a Chinese copy, of course, I'd still be Pu Dong, figuring out the whole mess. Or, probably not. Nothing but Winesburg style prose to get me on a plane. But, she asked, she was lovely and I was there to be the American business expert...so, why I wasn't reading some awful economics tome was sheer luck.
Bloom and his ideas about what we all should read aside, My-Ling had an excellent point from her perspective -- you say you're educated and you haven't read this classic? Well, no. I say I read for knowledge and pleasure, and this doesn't fit any other criteria. Because I was a big reader, I got to skip a lot of tripe that people who weren't big readers had to read. I was reading John Le Carre as freshman in high school while other folks were stuck with The Red Pony. The Red Badge of Courage. The Scarlet Letter... if you read enough awful shit with the color red in the title, you'll never be a communist.
This author puts it in perspective. We learn an alphabet, some phonics and away we go. Character based, tonal languages are far more a pain in the ass for those who are being educated in it. If a dash or a slash is the difference between 'Mao our glorious inspiration" and "Our glorious inspiration is a cat turd," well, you have to get it exactly right or the consequences are daunting.
Forget the harmony guff for a minute, and the philosophy of education for that matter. If you’re learning a character-based, rather than alphabetical language, as you would be in China or Japan, there’s a hell of a lot more rote learning and memorization involved: it’s unavoidable. So are the tests that go with it. And that’s before you get into tone grammars, which require pitch perfect tonal expressions. On top of that, the teaching style is just more authoritarian, as it used to be generally and as it used to be here. None of my teachers would have welcomed a question that raised doubts about their authority over their subject. I suspect none would now, either.
Well, mine did. And, this Tiffany piss in their mouths, is what they got. However, I'm grateful. Yet we all know that there are a lot of folks like this one cited in RBC this morning...A few years ago, a young student complained about the readings in our introduction to American social policy. She wanted to know the right answer, and our syllabus just confused things by including conflicting readings...
One of the reason the young go in for cults is because they want the "certitude" of knowing what is correct...I remember the shock on my Chinese students faces when I encouraged them to practice their English and if they made a mistake, learn from it. Didn't fit -- so from China to the boys from South Alabama...
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