Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

May 17, 2005

Dear Colleague,

One of the biggest generation leaps I can think of is between John Shakespeare and William Shakespeare. John, the father, signed his name with a cross. William, the son, is the acknowledged master of the English language for not only his time, but possibly for all time. William's vocabulary alone--31,534 words--is unparalleled. Equally astonishing is his willingness to expand his vocabulary and so reinvent himself and his world. After a period of success with his plays, he proceeded to double his vocabulary so that it could cope with the realities of Hamlet, Lear, and The Tempest (Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004). By contrast, think how timid we academics are! We learn a jargon at grad school and stick with it till we get tenure and beyond, hanging on to "production and reproduction," "hegemonic," "contesting this... writing that," "constructing this... deconstructing that," for fear of having to do our own thinking and risking the loss of the imprimatur of our mentors and peers. Even in mid-life, Shakespeare was limber in the mind, eager to learn new words and ideas. By contrast, we seem to develop lexicographic sclerosis even as don our PhD gown.

The Elizabethan Age deserves some credit for Shakespeare's meteoric rise. Lesser talents also rose, just not so spectacularly, under the pull of an image of splendor--a heaven on earth--invoked by high ceremony, theatrical arts, and, above all, an ornate language. This included Latin. "All men," wrote Queen Elizabeth's tutor, Roger Ascham, "covet to have their children speak Latin." In sixteenth-century England, all men meant "bricklayers, wool merchants, glovers, prosperous yeomen--people who had no formal education and could not read or write English, let alone Latin--wanted their sons to be masters of the ablative absolute" (Greenblatt, p. 24). Why? Because that--and not wealth--was the surest path to upward mobility.

Upward mobility was a feature of Chinese society as compared with, say, India which was hampered by its rigid caste system. Chinese society was, of course, stratified, but the talented young could nevertheless rise provided they had ambition, and ambition meant becoming literate. China espoused a cult of literacy that reminds me of Elizabethan England. In the 1930s, when I was a child, less than 10 percent of the population knew how to read and write. By the 1980s, the percentage rose to around 80. This enormous increase in literacy has provided China with a disciplined labor force, without which the current economic boom is impossible. India's economic progress is slower, handicapped by--among other things--its small number of literate workers.

What about upward mobility in the United States? Is the solution also literacy? Literacy in Elizabethan meant Latin and ornate English. In China, it meant classical Chinese, the canonical books, T'ang poetry, and Song drama, elements of which managed to filter down to the culture of peasants. (See John Hersey, The Single Pebble, 1956). In today's America, literacy means knowing mathematics, the basic language of all the sciences. It is--alas--not Ebonics. Another handicap is this: whereas Shakespeare aspired to the language and mannerism of the class above him, today imitation is in the opposite direction, with the children of the privileged trying to speak the argot of the drug-infested streets.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu