Dumbing down doesn't help

Two FB posts intersected this past week and caused me to groan loudly. The first was an article describing a list of words the NYC Department of Education thinks should be banned from standardized tests. Okay. Maybe they planned to get rid of every 7 syllable word under the erroneous belief that students would not know what they mean. Nope. Turns out words like divorce, disease, poverty, and dinosaur. And the reasons were unbelievable. They might upset a child who did not believe in dinosaurs or didn't celebrate a particular day, such as a birthday, or may have a sick relative.

The second post was an image of President Obama carrying a book as he boarded a plane. The post asked friends to send it on to at least 20 others, with the clear connotation there was something horribly wrong with the photo. And what was that horror? Our president was carrying a copy of Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. 

 These seem to signal a deep-seated mistrust of words and ideas. How can we be expected to function in a world-wide society if we actively court the level of ignorance that would have our children protected from actual words and our president dumbing down his reading list? I'm afraid that active fear of ideas is part of the reason there is such a schism in American society today.

A third event, only tangentially related, but troubling nevertheless... This semester a student objected to the "liberal crap" I was asking students to read. He took his concerns to his father who then took them to the vice president of instruction. The irony is that the text being used was only an example, and students were asked to examine and challenge the writing, not to accept it. The student chose to drop the class rather than be exposed to such unacceptable ideas.