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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.

Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.

We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.

I don't doubt that intelligent and capable students could benefit from such an education, but your average child today would be lucky to get through a single YA chapter book without scrolling TikTok for 5 hours after every page, so I think the baseline curriculum should focus on providing them with the rudiments of a shared literary culture. With proper tracking of students, the higher levels can study foreign languages, among other things, but for most people it's a waste of time (and I say that as an aspiring polyglot).

This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.

You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another.

This is profoundly not true. Young children easily learn multiple languages at once, and adults typically struggle to learn a second language to native-like proficiency.

Continuing the metaphor you've created here: I think it's very likely that a young person raised in a "multicultural" environment where they consume the full Western/Eastern canons simultaneously is likely to have a much better proficiency of both than someone who fully studies either canon before moving onto the other.

You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."

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