It's as eternal as the first day of school. Every year some few teachers or pundits or politicians or some combination of them commences to provide a meal for their own voracious egos by trashing the intellectual capacities of "kids these days."
The latest installment appears on the Washington Post website today, "Writing Off Reading" by Michael Skube.
I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)
I assume he knows what meretricious is. I didn't until I read George Will's column from the same edition of the Post. Then I looked it up — in an online dictionary. Seems to be an apt word to describe Skube's snobbish trashing of "today's youth," who do not read enough to satisfy him.
Today's youth, generally, don't read enough to satisfy me, either. But that's been the case forever and ever and ever and ever. Geology teachers probably think kids these days don't know enough about rocks. Math teachers probably think kids these days don't know how to figure square roots in their heads, like they ought to.
Teachers love their subjects. They are immersed in them. They think the world would be a better place if only everyone embraced their subject as they do. Kids these days are always and inevitably untutored by the standards of immersed and myopic teachers. Kids these days are no different than kids of any days.
I suppose we will always see diatribes by those like Skube who can't see past their disappointment to gain anything like a historical perspective, who can't recall a time when they were unfamiliar with the words "impetus" or "ramshackle" or "lucid."
And every year there will be counter diatribes by the likes of me, those who think students are quite intelligent enough to read when they need to and learn the words they want to understand. Some of us will defend the learners of the world because we still count ourselves among their ranks. We'll even thank the Skubes of the world for flinging a few new words at us — I had to look up "recondite," too — but we won't thank them for using their erudition as a bludgeon.