READINGS IN LANGUAGE

Promoting a wider vocabulary to reduce economic inequality

In “A Wealth of Words,” an article that he wrote for the Winter 2013 issue of the City Journal, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, argues that to reignite the aristocracy of merit and to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom. “There’s a well-established correlation between a college degree and economic benefit,” he says. “And for guidance on what helps students finish college and earn more income, we should consider the SAT, whose power to predict graduation rates is well documented. The way to score well on the SAT—at least on the verbal SAT—is to have a large vocabulary.”

Hirsh explains that study after study has firmly correlated vocabulary size and life chances. He points out that although vocabulary isn’t perfectly correlated with knowledge and people with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary: “Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the American population began knowing fewer words, getting less smart, and becoming demonstrably less able to earn a high income.”

To hasten word-learning by students, Hirsh recommends that schools and teachers should make sure that the subject matter particular words refer to has already been made familiar to the student: “The speed with which students learn new words increases dramatically when schools create familiar subject-matter contexts within a coherent sequential curriculum… The fastest way to learn words is to learn about things—and to do it systematically.”

Read E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s “A Wealth of Words” in the City Journal now!

RELATED READING:
In “The ‘Mystic Writing Pad’: What Would Freud Make of Today’s Tablets?”, Rebecca J. Rosen, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, writes in the January 25, 2013 issue of the magazine about an obscure 1925 essay of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that referred to a new recording device called the “mystic pad” as a sort of metaphor for the human mind. By extending Freud’s metaphor to today’s devices, Rosen argues, we get this other insight from Freud’s essay that he didn’t make much of it at the time: “What makes the human mind distinct isn’t just its ‘layers’ for perception and storage, but the imperfections in that system. Though we build ever more perfect memory devices, we can’t replicate what makes us us: our flaws.”

Read Rebecca J. Rosen’s “The ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” in The Atlantic Magazine now!

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