I’ve Gone Back to Fourth Grade
Sitting on a train and listening to a gaggle of Gen Z’ers carry on is among life’s most painful experiences. The vocabulary is so limited as to be unfavorably compared with a primitive tribe. The inability to form a basic sentence is alarming. The relentless use of “like” and “you know” and “whatever” is painful to the ears. I’m no fan of AirPods or headphones but they are essential on these occasions.
The problem is broader than a single generation. Most podcasts I find unlistenable simply because whatever language they are speaking is not English. It’s something else entirely and barely coherent. My complaints are not traceable to some kind of grammatical snobbery. There is much more at stake here: the very capacity of humanity to communicate.
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Reflecting on this problem—it affects everything from movies to popular music—I was curious how people long ago came to develop literacy and erudition. That sent me on a search for the “McGuffey Reader” of the old times. They are still widely available in physical and digital forms. I confess to never having picked one up before. I had heard of them and maybe even owned one when I was young but had never actually opened it or read it.
The first reader was published in 1836 as edited by William Holmes McGuffey, an English professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The famed novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe had recommended McGuffey to the publisher. The result consisted of sections of stories and poetry for grades one through six, one book for each grade. They became the core textbooks for most American kids—all over the country—for nearly a century, selling 150 million copies.
I fully expected that they would be written at a higher level than you see in newspapers today, to say nothing of typical prattle one would hear on trains or podcasts. Nothing could have prepared me for what I found in them. I decided not to game my quest by going immediately to the sixth reader. Instead I chose the reader for the fourth grade, the one published in 1901.
