Drowning in Lake Mediocrity

I am going to quote a recent editorial that appeared in our paper; written by a college professor in North Carolina. I will try to do it without shaking hands and grinding teeth:

"We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of...Dan Brown.
No other names were offered.
The author of "The Da Vinci Code" was not just the best writer they could think of, he was the only writer they could think of."

*shake shake, grind grind* Sorry...I failed.

Mind you, this is not a survey of the proletariat. This is allegedly the best and the brightest of the current generation of academia. The article goes on to list vocabulary that the professor has used in everyday conversation that elicited blank stares of incomprehension from his college students. These words include: "impetus, ramshackle, lucid, advocate (both as noun and verb), derelict (as in neglectful), satire, pith, brevity, novel (both noun and adjective)".

A quick digression: If you turned red and shuffled your feet at your inability to name an author, or if you stumbled over any of the vocabulary words above, DO NOT BE ASHAMED. This post is not meant to embarrass you. It is to make you mad. Mad at who? Your fourth-grade teacher who read you Robert Frost poetry? Your seventh-grade teacher who made you perform Shakespeare in class? No! They were the occasional oasis in a vast desert of ignorance named the 20th century American public educational system. This is a system designed to stifle thought and repress free expression. Your teacher's attempts to raise your literary awareness were noble but futile efforts to rectify the damaging environment, sort of like ordering a triple bacon cheeseburger with beer-batter onion rings, hot fudge banana split and...a diet coke. The teacupful of inspiration and desire for wisdom was quickly dissipated in a lake of mediocrity and conformity.

This is not a holier-than-thou post. I am a product of the public educational system, too. It is nothing short of the grace of God that I can name any author above Dr. Seuss, or can write anything with more eloquence than "put all the mony in the bag i have a gun".

I want something better for my children than to teach them how to say, "Paper or plastic?". If you are reading nerdy material like this blog on the web, you probably do, too. We'll continue this discussion tomorrow after I calm down a bit.

Right now, I gotta go read to my kids.