Article: Loss of language, loss of thought

by Wolfgang Grassl
(excerpted article - full article can be found HERE)

Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.


What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more.

Assume a typical question in an introductory class on marketing: "Why do we segment markets?" A typical student response is: "What do you mean?"

The traditional way of defining something, according to Aristotle and the scholastic logicians, was per genus proximum et differentiam specificam: We need to name the higher category to which a term belongs, then specify some characteristic that sets it apart from other things within this category.

However, "like" does not seek to place a ball into the next higher category of spheres or objects, nor does it offer a synonym. It gives an instance of balls, or of the usage of balls. Providing merely an aspect of what is to be explained is not only reductionist (by substituting a part for the whole); it is also a subjectivist move that avoids describing and thus reflecting on the essence of what is to be explained. It is indicative of our age of increasing relativism under the guise of "pluralism" and "tolerance" -- your feeling about the nature of something is just as good as my feeling, because there really isn't any "is"; there may not even be an "a." Then a ball might as well have edges, for who can tell me that I can only call something a ball if it is round?

The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all.

Surveys show that the average American receives some 5,000 external stimuli per day and spends more than eight hours a day in front of screens -- television, computer monitors, cellphones, gaming consoles, and so on. Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events. Vicarious living and proxy experiences are the deeper problem with our students' loss of language.

Of course, not all students are alike: Many do excel and emerge as active thinkers and thoughtful speakers. But as a society, we are a far cry from seeing the critical thinking that progressive educators want to convey. In order to think critically, one must be able to keep causes apart from effects, fact from interpretation, belief from knowledge, definitions from explanations, and much more. Critical thought requires determining the range of alternatives and applying to them a clear and consistent standard of evaluation.