Leon Botstein
IMITATIVE LITERACY
Concern over a supposed decline in literacy in America is on
the rise. Edwin Newman, John Simon, and William Safire are just
three who express their outrage at the frequency of improprieties in
speech and writing. Indeed, the crisis in literacy that one now hears
about in casual conversation among the sophisticated and the cultured
is usually one of usage. People, especially young people, are accused of
bad grammar, poor word choice, sloppy construction, poor spelling,
and a lack of sensitivity to etymology. College graduates in particular
are taken to task for their inability
to
write simple prose and speak
correctly and clearly. Those with the presumption of education appear
to
be the worst offenders among the ranks of the illiterate. After all,
college graduates have had the privilege of higher education and
oughl
to be literate. This current clamor about illiteracy reflects a shift from a
historic interest in empowering the underprivileged, the poor and
dispossessed, with the wriuen word to a fear that the elite, the
privileged and affluent, have lost interest in either becoming or
remaining literate.
There is indeed a crisis in literacy among the middle classes,
among college-bound students and college graduates. At the same time,
a catastrophe of illiteracy persists among the poor. The character of
these twin problems is related but perhaps is not as obvious as it would
seem to be at first glance.
In
order to get at the causes of this dual crisis in literacy, one needs
to
go beyond the misleading nostalgia and satiric moralizing about
proper speech and writing that Newman and Simon encourage.
Improprieties themselves can reflect a valid choice or an act of sheer
ignorance or an act of miseducation where the sense of the importance
of language altogether has been lost or significantly altered. The
avanl–
garde
argument against the tyranny of proprieties in language of the
1950s and 1960s was rebellious. It claimed that "the King's English"
failed to convey and evoke the range of expression desired by individu–
als who refused to accept the ideology of manners and social conven–
tion that "good" English seemed to imply. This old and now tired
