The Scandal of Uneducated College Graduates
Although amused, I did not respond with: “LOL.” Of course, LOL had not yet risen to its present prominence, and even now people don’t type LOL, they use an “emoji.”
His witticism was spot on, though. Acronyms have become our substitutes for writing and speaking, catchword substitutes for thinking. They stop discussion rather than start it.
There was someone who saw this coming almost one hundred years ago, and he went by a Three Letter Acronym. It was GKC: the profound, prolific, and prophetic English writer, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). “Catchwords,” he says, “and capricious and disproportionate splashes of news, [and] all this chaos of capital letters and uncompleted sentences, [are] very bad for the brain. It is doing exactly the opposite of all that public education is supposed to do. It is ‘stupefying:’ it is manufacturing stupid people.” 1
The rise of incomplete thinking has been marked over the last several decades by a near-total loss of true humanities studies at many colleges and universities. It’s a terrible scandal that, without authentic humanities education, universities around the world are manufacturing cohort after cohort of uneducated people.
