Sowell nails it again.
There will never be a shortage of ignorant audacity. What is always scarce is thorough knowledge and carefully reasoned analysis, systematically checked against factual evidence . . . Assigning students to write letters and papers on vast topics is putting the cart before the horse . . . It is training them in irresponsibility [and, I would add, modeling irresponsibility as well].
Having read Professor Sowell's excellent piece, I was inspired to try to cut and paste part of it in a different order to try to make it a form letter Professor Sowell could photocopy and use as a reply to the presumptuous letters of which he rightly complains.Of course that is presumptuous on my part, too . . . in fact, given that the good professor does not suffer editors gladly, maybe I should fondly hope that he does not read this. In my defense, I'm not putting words in his mouth by publishing my "contribution" as his own, and I'm not standing between him and the public and, I trust, not changing the meaning of anything.
I think the point of the form letter I envision would be to chastise the teacher, not the student - for the very reason that the student does not know that he is being presumptuous (or, if he does know, is not writing of his own free will). And the teacher should know it, and be ashamed (of course the kind of leftist blowhard who would teach as fact that US military planners were overestimating the casualties an invasion of Japan would incur thinks that shame is for Republicans).
Perhaps a form letter rocket coming back at the teacher, through the student and therefore maximally embarrassing to the teacher, would shut off the flow of these letters at the source.
The canard about low casuality rates for the proposed Japan invasion is something I’ve read from a-bomb critics since I was a teen. We lost twelve thousand men just taking the small island of Okinawa. We would have lost about one hundred thousand trying to take Japan proper.
Those two paragraphs contain a lot of wisdom.
I can give an example of a writer who didn't realize the limits of his knowledge: Bill Bryson wrote The Mother Tongue, and as far as I can tell, it is good and reasonably scholarly book on the English language.
However, Mr. Bryson wrote some pages about the Japanese language in the book since Japanese is indeed a good language to contrast various aspects of English with. The problem with him writing about Japanese is his lack of knowledge of the subject and the egregious errors he makes about various aspects of the language.
Those blatant errors certainly made me wonder just how careful his scholarship was with respect to other parts of the book where he talks about far more obscure topics than Japanese, which is one of the world's top languages in terms of the number of speakers and where plenty of elementary material is available on the subject. As far as I know, there aren't many sources available to cross-check his assertion on the length of time for the use of Celtic names for numbers by shepherds in Yorkshire, which Mr. Bryson states occurred up into the 20th century.
Another profundity from Dr. Sowell
Heads of mush.
The teachers were trained the same way they are training the students. It is the blind leading the blind. None of them knows how to think.