Comte de Sats Germain on Nostr: GM ☕ I just remembered what I was thinking before I fell asleep. The lexicon ...
GM ☕
I just remembered what I was thinking before I fell asleep. The lexicon problem... Our shrinking vocabulary.
Idk about y'all, but I'm almost constantly frustrated by my inability to remember the right words when I need them. You ever read a very old book and notice variety of words used? Its easily three of four times the number of different words that a modern writer uses. Same with speeches from the 1940's - and I think you can observe a lexical shrinkage in the speeches compared to even older books, despite the speeches being much more eloquent than a modern speech.
So... Are we getting dumber or what?
I think its caused by our schools, and actually there are two separate causes, but both are in our education. But first, realize that no amount of studying will fix it. I've tried. Maybe I'm just too dumb... Rote memorization, making lists and flashcards, using Enki, searching online for our lost lexical corpus (its not there) - I've tried it and it doesn't work.
The first and greatest cause is simply sending kids to school at all. Think about it... Who had a bigger vocabulary, when you were a kid? The older kids and the adults. Schools cram 40 kids of the same age into a room with one or two teachers. Who are kids going to absorb language from? Its an empty environment.
The second problem is that rhetoric is absent from our education. Ancient orators learned rhetoric from an early age. Schooling followed what we now call the "classical" system - seven main subjects, corresponding to the seven "planets" and what they represented symbolically, and a class had all ages of students, even old men sitting next to kids. Younger kids were mostly with their parents, learning their trade by helping. That's a very effective way to educate a kid - they'll learn useful things and absorb the vocabulary of their parents, and then begin formal studies as an adolescent. Its a better way of teaching... Its just better.
Who, among us state educated retards, is going to write like Plato? Yes, let's just go straight to the father of all western thought - why not? Aren't we supposed to be advancing, surpassing our forbears? Nietzsche surpassed his forbears. Kant did... Goethe did. These guys were not handicapped by a state education.
And you know who is writing good books? Becoming leaders? Only - **_only_** - people who moved a lot as kids or were not in public school. Look into their background. This is always what you find. Not mediocre books and mediocre leaders - the good ones.
Don't send your kids to school. I say this as a former teacher. Love your kids enough to teach them yourself, or seek some arrangement that does things different from the state schools.
And GM.
#teaching #teach #education #vocabulary #rhetoric
I just remembered what I was thinking before I fell asleep. The lexicon problem... Our shrinking vocabulary.
Idk about y'all, but I'm almost constantly frustrated by my inability to remember the right words when I need them. You ever read a very old book and notice variety of words used? Its easily three of four times the number of different words that a modern writer uses. Same with speeches from the 1940's - and I think you can observe a lexical shrinkage in the speeches compared to even older books, despite the speeches being much more eloquent than a modern speech.
So... Are we getting dumber or what?
I think its caused by our schools, and actually there are two separate causes, but both are in our education. But first, realize that no amount of studying will fix it. I've tried. Maybe I'm just too dumb... Rote memorization, making lists and flashcards, using Enki, searching online for our lost lexical corpus (its not there) - I've tried it and it doesn't work.
The first and greatest cause is simply sending kids to school at all. Think about it... Who had a bigger vocabulary, when you were a kid? The older kids and the adults. Schools cram 40 kids of the same age into a room with one or two teachers. Who are kids going to absorb language from? Its an empty environment.
The second problem is that rhetoric is absent from our education. Ancient orators learned rhetoric from an early age. Schooling followed what we now call the "classical" system - seven main subjects, corresponding to the seven "planets" and what they represented symbolically, and a class had all ages of students, even old men sitting next to kids. Younger kids were mostly with their parents, learning their trade by helping. That's a very effective way to educate a kid - they'll learn useful things and absorb the vocabulary of their parents, and then begin formal studies as an adolescent. Its a better way of teaching... Its just better.
Who, among us state educated retards, is going to write like Plato? Yes, let's just go straight to the father of all western thought - why not? Aren't we supposed to be advancing, surpassing our forbears? Nietzsche surpassed his forbears. Kant did... Goethe did. These guys were not handicapped by a state education.
And you know who is writing good books? Becoming leaders? Only - **_only_** - people who moved a lot as kids or were not in public school. Look into their background. This is always what you find. Not mediocre books and mediocre leaders - the good ones.
Don't send your kids to school. I say this as a former teacher. Love your kids enough to teach them yourself, or seek some arrangement that does things different from the state schools.
And GM.
#teaching #teach #education #vocabulary #rhetoric