And not a single one of your cited works is a dictionary. How in the world does one learn to look up words, find roots, find parts of speech, or even grammer instructions without such an aid.
This is overreaction of the extreme kind. Dictionaries ( even a collegiate one) should be available to students. You build vocabulary by using words. One of the aids in that is a good doctionary. I grew up with an unabridged Oxford’s that I was free to roam through at will. Words will not turn you into a monster.
On a side note, I do remember as a kid looking up the word “bitch” as well as ‘fellatio’ - and dare I say it was not a gateway to hell.
And the best way to learn new words is to read all kinds of books. The books contain new words in context, and they show how to use them correctly.
Dictionaries ( even a collegiate one) should be available to students.
Absolutely. How else would a student know what a new word means? I personally have M-W set as one of search engines in Firefox, and I use it now and then. There are at least 170,000 English words in existence, and I don't claim to know them all (very few people on Earth can honestly do that.)
Besides, banning a dictionary in school does nothing. How much one must be detached from reality to believe that a curious child won't go to a library and ask for a largest, thickest dictionary there? A librarian will give it to him without a second thought; that's what dictionaries are for. And it's not like a student needs to *always* have a dictionary article about sex or something else in front of him. Once is enough, even if the page is not copied right there in the library.
And in any case, I was curious enough to check, and M-W defines "sex" and "oral sex" in such a dry, expressionless way that hardly anyone could get any excitement out of reading that. A child can get much more just out of reading a newspaper, to say nothing of the TV.
I happen to agree. In our homeschool with had university level dictionaries. ( More than one.)
However...I am not willing to advocate using the power of the state ( that means police force) to **force** other people's children into an environment that I personally would approve for my children. I am not willing to use the threat of police action to ***force** my neighbor to pay for imposing my personal educational worldview on either my own children or other people's children.
The problem here is that behind every government school ( and its non-neutral religious, political, and cultural worldview ) stand armed police to force the will of the state. ( Real bullets in those guns on the hip.)
There is a solution: We must begin the process of privatizing universal K-12 education. This means vouchers, tax credits, and charters to begin building a private school infrastructure. We must move toward making all government schools into voucher schools and/or charters. Gradually we must move to having parents take on the full responsibility of paying for their own children's education.
yes, agreed. here here....what he/she said.
I do not dispute the value of dictionaries, but the problem is that the information provided in school libraries is neglectful of some of the grander, more important, and useful parts of American history and culture. It has been simplified, sterilized, and stultified to the point of being meaningless.
Back in the 1960s for example, I know of two men who wrote a book that I put first on the list. That is, biographies of great Americans. They were both superb historians and scholars, and created a worthy collection of the true greats of American history, who were critical to our nation in their time. And most are little known except to historians, today.
It had a picture or portrait, if one existed, of them and the context of their lives, then just a page or two of who these people were and why they truly mattered. Their prose was carefully crafted, erudite, informative and witty.
They brought it to a school textbook publisher. They soon noted a large chart in front of his desk, just a list of words, and they asked him what it meant. It was a list of words at the 5th grade reading level.
Its purpose was that if there was a word in any textbook manuscript, that was not on that chart, it was replaced with one on that chart, so students would never see a word with which they were not familiar.
The two historians then left with their manuscript, and made no further effort to publish it.
My point is that they *should* have published it. Because even though school textbooks are still vandalized for reasons of political correctness, real knowledge *could* make it into school libraries, where at least some students *might* find it.