Leah Hudson

On the flak about a Supreme Court justice needing to ask a doctor for a definition of a woman (and on the flak that there should be, about a Supreme Court justice who apparently cannot see a difference between prescribing testosterone to a boy whose body is not producing enough on its own and prescribing it to a girl whose body is producing just as much of it as the girl's body needs): There are ideas so stupid that ONLY people who have gone to college will believe them. This is in fact the unacknowledged aim of much of higher education. Nature, I used to say to my students, provides to each person a certain measure of dullness, which, by dint of much study and hard work, you can deepen into downright stupidity, confirming it with degrees of honor and impressive credentials, so that you will not backslide into common sense and the truth. I think that the 20th century provides plenty of examples of how it goes: Only people schooled INTO stupidity could have thought that teaching English as if it were made of Chinese pictograms was a wise thing to do. Only people schooled INTO stupidity could have thought that you could dispense with having children memorize the basic operations of addition and multiplication. Only people schooled INTO stupidity could have thought that Soviet ideology could substitute for the peasant farmer's vast experience with his own land. I'm sure you can think of many more examples of the phenomenon.

In 1985, I began to teach college students for the first time -- English composition. We were given a free hand to teach the courses as we thought best, the students (UNC-Chapel Hill) were personable and bright, and the books we used were solid. Still the essays were pretty bad. I tried to understand why it was so, why my students were regularly committing grammatical errors for which there was no name. The best students wrote fair but clumsy English. The average students wrote bad English. The poorer students wrote no language at all. I told one of my professors that, at age 18 or 19, it was nearly impossible to learn how to write well, if you were not already in the habit of reading intelligent and eloquent books. The problem, I said, was not that the students were poor writers, but that they were poor and inexperienced readers. Writing is an art, after all, and we begin to learn an art by imitation. My students did not have the rhythms and manners of strong English prose in their minds -- in their bones, as something that you're hardly conscious of, just as someone who has been hearing the violin day after day since he could remember anything, and who took it up when he was little, can hardly enumerate and describe all the habits he has learned. But there's another source of trouble that I wasn't aware of at the time, and that was not as pronounced then as it is now. That's the ubiquity of the lousy stuff. If you pick up a book published in 1900, chances are that it will have been written in fairly competent English, even at the worst, because otherwise it wouldn't have gotten published at all. My copies of popular magazines from about 1875 to 1920 (I have about 20 years' worth, of The Century, Harper's, Scribners', and a few others) seem sometimes to have been written by members of a lost species of intelligent life. Noise works its harm. If I look at hymns written since 1965, and I compare them with the hymns in any Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist hymnal from before that time, I see poetic incompetence, vagueness, sometimes bad grammar, and in general a failure to consider that hymn-writing is an art, and you begin to learn an art by patiently attending to what the masters of the art have done before you. But the noise is everywhere now, and if you're going to start you have to clear away the noise.