Will Rogers Writing Style – Example 2: COMMENTARY
Say, any of you that have kids in school, either grammar, high or college, it don’t make any difference, but
can any of you parents get head or tail of what they are doing, what they are taking, what they are learning?
This modern education gag has sure got me licked. I can’t tell from
talking to ‘em what it’s all about.
All the kids I know, either mine or anybody’s, none of ‘em can write so you can read it, none of ‘em
can spell so you can read it.
They can’t figure and don’t know geography, but they are always taking some of the darndest things: political
science, international relations, drama, buck dancing, sociology, Latin, Greek art.
Oh, Lord, the things they go in for runs on by the hour!
Everybody has swimming pools, but nobody has got a plain old geography. Gymnasiums
to the right of you, and tennis courts to the left of you, but not a spelling book in a carload of schools.
Then they got another gag they call “credits.” If you do anything
thirty minutes twice a week, why you get some certain “credit.” Maybe
it’s lamp shade tinting, maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s a thing they call “music appreciation.”
They give out these things at schools for anything that anyone can think of.
Some of ‘em you get more “credits” than for others. If
a thing is particularly useless, why it gives you more credits. There is none
at all for things that we thought constituted “school.”
You could write, read, spell, figure, and give the capital of Rhode Island,
and they wouldn’t give you a “credit” in a year. But you can
tell where a Latin word was originally located, and how it’s been manhandled and orphanized down to the present day,
and you are liable to get a horde of “credits.”
Course you can’t go out and get a job on it, but these old professors value it mighty highly. Some of these days they are going to remove so much of the “punk and hooey” and the thousands
of things that the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth
the price and learn ‘em something they might accidentally use after they escaped.
But us poor old dumb parents, we just string along and do the best we can, and send ‘em as long as we are able,
because we want them to have the same handicaps the others have. We don’t
know what it’s all about. We just have to take the teacher’s word.
The smarter a nation gets, the more wars it has. The dumb ones are too
smart to fight. Our schools teach us what the other fellow knows, but it don’t
teach us anything new for ourselves. Everybody is learning just one thing, not
because they will know more, but because they have been taught that they won’t have to work if they are educated.
Well, we got so many educated now that there is not enough jobs for educated people.
Most of our work is skilled and requires practice, and not education.
There is just about as much “hooey” in everything as there is merit.
The heathen live with less effort, and less worry.
Trying to live “past” our parents, and not “up to ‘em” is one of our drawbacks. The old Chinese got the right idea along that line.
But every once in a while some fellow does pop up and declare himself. Look
at that college professor at Chicago University. (Robert Maynard Hutchins) He said our learning system was all haywire.
He is a smart young fellow, that guy. I heard him speak at a dinner in
Chicago during the convention. He
knew a whole lot more than just where a lot of words “come from.” This
education is just like everything else. You got to judge it by results. Here we are better educated (according to educational methods) than we ever were. And we are worse off than we ever were, so it’s not living up to its “billing.” It’s overrated. It’s not
worth the price.
It’s costing us more than it’s worth. They got to devise some
way of giving more for the money. All he is getting out with now is “credits”
and nobody on the outside is cashing ‘em.
Excerpted from article published July 31, 1932.
