I Have a (Word) Dream: I

After I won the quarterly "spelling bee of champions" last night at the Mississippi Pizza Pub in Portland, it gradually started dawning on me what I would like to do with all the eager 20-30 somethings who take part in those spelling bees. Some of them are very smart and ambitious young people, but they reflect both the virtues and limitations of the age in which they were brought up. I know because my children are 25 and 20.

The "virtues" are that they generally have loving parents who have invested a lot in them. They have had parents attend soccer practice as well as games, teach them in homeschool (a few of them), consult with teachers, oversee a countless array of "lessons" for them and, generally, so impregnate their lives with the concept of improvement and success that the young people really do want to succeed very much. But the limitation that they face, almost to a person, is their education. Why is this a limitation? Because the American education establishment decided in the late 1960s/early 1970s that classical languages and memorization would go out the window of American education. It would no longer be cool to study Latin (much less Greek) or to memorize poetry.

Why not? Well, everyone knows, as the saw had it, that memorization is just rote memorization, and since we are in the business of producing "creative" people (which the schools really aren't concerned about), we simply can't have time for such a boring and useless activity." And, classical languages? Well, when cities are burning, when America might be "falling behind" economically in the world, we must push our young people into things that are perceived either more socially relevant or economically productive.

Latin is, after all, a "dead" language. But it is only dead for those who do not read. It is only dead for those who do not think. It is only dead for those who do not speak. I suppose that may encompass some of the educational establishment in our day, perhaps even a great deal of it, but our kids are the victims of this kind of thinking. They are the long reflections of our anxieties and fears. So, thinking to make them "productive" citizens, we jettisoned Latin (much less Greek) and memorization, thinking that by so doing we were doing our children a favor. In fact, we were consigning them to limited intellectual horizons.

I think the recent explosion of interest in spelling bees mostly by 20-30 somethings in major American cities bespeaks a yearning by these young people to fill in some of the gaping holes in their educations. Though they may not realize it, they really are longing for classical languages. Oh, I don't think in fact that most of them want to spend their weekend reading Anacreon. But what I mean is that the smart ones of the younger generation now realize how deficient their education was and that they want to make some effort to repair the damage. By participating in spelling bees they can engage in an organized activity (they love organized things), challenge their minds, and enlarge their view of the world.

But few of them really pursue this new thing that has come into their hearts and minds. They don't know how to puruse it. That is, spelling bees bespeak a longing, a longing for precise knowledge, for education that takes deeper (i.e., words open worlds), for deeper acquaintance with the roots of our language in the classical languages. But they don't know how to quench the longing. Even the talented younger people who participate in these bees, however, do not really know how to "study" to make themselves not only better spellers but better thinkers. That is where I come in.

The Idea of a Spelling Weekend

All of these thoughts began to wash over me last night as I was sitting with three friends after my spelling bee victory listening to the dulcet and heart-touching tunes of Dan Balmer at Jimmy Mak's Jazz club in Portland, OR. And then the idea came to me. One of the best things I can do for earnest young 20-30 somethings who want to learn to hone their spelling skills, and perhaps to deepen their minds in the process, is to take them on a weekend "spelling retreat" where we would learn not simply the "tricks" of the spelling "trade," but I would launch them on a disciplined way to enhance their word knowledge and spelling awareness. If people can pay $70 an hour for a personal athletic trainer, many of whom just tell the person to "keep pumping," and if many people can pay others big amounts of money for lesser things than that, why won't people pay money to learn to develop their minds in this way? Ok, perhaps the idea might start as a Saturday seminar, a way to stimulate interest in the concept.

Well, before I begin to hire artists to design t-shirts or mugs for the event, I should tell you what that weekend would entail. That is the task of the next essay.

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