LEND ME YOUR EAR: RECIPE FOR REDISCOVERING AMERICA BY 1992

Teenage slang was the subject of an AP article about a teachers' conference held recently in Indianapolis. Representing a division of the National Council of Teachers of English, mind you, the group asserted that "Slang is just as important as mastery of standard English."

Let us hope the participants meant slang is as important only to teenagers. One member of the group, President Haley-James, conceded the young people "should tailor their language to the setting." This too gives us pause. Did she mean that if her charges attend a rock concert featuring "urban-oriented rap music", as someone else has euphemistically dubbed it, they and their companions should adopt the vulgar language (including body language) they confuse with music and style? Whatever happened to self-respect? Individuality? Creativity?

Everyone knows teenagers en masse are a special (evanescent) breed who have always gone to extremes to prove it. We were once teenagers too. But we left our pig Latin or whatever outside classroom rooms, and off-base language was limited to non-academic pursuits or the walls of cubicles in washrooms. Funny is fine, but obscure is tricky and often dirty, and if a teacher wishes to "slang" with the students, as one Indiana teacher phrased it, ignorance of special meanings could be embarrassing. Even well-intentioned students get caught up in incorrect translations, though to be fair, we know teenagers who are remaining mercifully immune to the foreign vocabulary of their peers. And as the Indiana group brought out, teenager lingo changes rapidly, and by the time adults wise up to it, a new crop of teens has come up with a vocabulary just as foreign to their predecessors.

Time magazine is celebrating Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 with a challenge to readers to rediscover America, in recognition of our 500th anniversary. We've been invited to participate in a poll to help establish our nation's chief priorities, and a select group of distinguished national leaders, already polled, agreed that "Education is the Number One priority for our nation." All the responses (published in the magazine's March 18 issue) are enlightening, but James A. Michener's "What Is The Secret Of Teaching Values?" is the one most needed by America's teachers today.

"Values," writes the author, "are the emotional rules by which a nation governs itself. Values summarize the accumulated folk wisdom by which a society organizes and disciplines itself. And values are the precious reminders that individuals obey and bring order and meaning into their lives. Without values, nations, societies,and individuals can pitch straight to hell."

What values are being taught in or out of today's classrooms? Are our teachers qualified or even allowed, to foster self-respect and respect for others? The late Norman Cousins, in an article on "The Decline of Neatness" appearing in Time shortly before his death, wrote: "The first aim of education is to develop respect for life." The author lamented the downward slope of neatness in every aspect of life, from sloppy dress to wretched manners to slovenly speech: "Vocabulary, like blue jeans, is being drained of color and distinction. A complete sentence in everyday speech is as rare as a man's tie in the swank Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel."

Violence in language especially the notion that emphasis requires the use of four-letter obscenities greatly disturbed this many-faceted writer and thinker. He deplored that adults as well as young people ignore neatness and creativity in both speech and dress, that in their efforts to prove their individuality they wind up looking as though they'd been "stamped out by cookie cutters."

In his latter years, Cousins became a role model even for his doctors and their patients, and famous worldwide for his work in the field of psychoneuroimmunology a fancy term for how to cope with what ails you. And he presented the answer to Michener's question about how to teach values before it appeared in print (he died before it became known):

"...our schools might encourage the notion that few things are more rewarding than genuine creativity, whether in the clothes we wear, the way we communicate, the nurturing of human relationships, or how to locate the best in ourselves and put it to work."

Sounds like a fail-proof recipe for rediscovering America 500 years after discovery!