Saturday Mitchell

Schools are in favor of sensitivity and opposed, of course, to insensitivity. In the traditional curriculum there are still some outdated things which cause insensitivity. Historical dates cause insensitivity. The square of the hypotenuse causes callousness. Untempered grammar and spelling produce elitism. The multiplication table can engender inhumanity, and precise diction has been known to produce fascism.

Richard Mitchell, the author of Less Than Words Can Say, wrote those words in 1979. They're on page 90 of that book. They sound prophetic, yet were based on a review of teaching practices way back then.

What do we hear these days? That math is racist. So are speaking and writing well. One might suppose they always have been if you listen to teachers in 2026. They have been trained in this approach for decades now, and kids can't read, write or cipher at alarming rates of ineptitude which have been rolling downhill, building like a snowball since, well, I was in school. We are raising in our public schools a nation of illiterates. 

But they feel good about themselves, so it's all right. They are sensitive, whatever that means, about the ills of the world. Never mind that they might actually feel better if they knew things whereby they might be able to do something about them. Yet those are hard to teach. Everyone can get an A in Sensitivity.