An Anecdote to Ponder: “If English was good enough…”

by Craig Bennett*

Many years ago, when the Reader’s Digest appeared in our daily mail delivery each month, the magazine featured brief, often humorous anecdotes that appeared apparently as space-fillers at the end of articles that concluded somewhere before the bottom of the page. Often they were even categorized by a title, such as “Humor in Uniform” (about funny things that occurred in the armed services) or “Life in these United States.” One that I recall in particular, however, I found more disturbing than the Digest’s editors may have intended.

The anecdote in question involved a rural school district in Tennessee that, apparently some time before, was considering the addition of French to its list of offerings for those high school students who were interested in studying a foreign language. This happened to excite some unexpected controversy, however, as some of the “good ol’ boys” in the general neighborhood had been to France—especially Paris—during the Great War and had witnessed first-hand what scandalously immoral, licentious, and generally sinful lives the French people led. They weren’t about to tolerate the language of a nation with such abysmal morals being taught to their young people!

When the big night came and the school board was scheduled to meet and vote on hiring a French teacher, purchasing the necessary textbooks, and including the new subject in the high school curriculum, the locals staged an impressive rally to protest such arrogant behavior by the board if they should actually cast a positive vote to start corrupting the morals of the district’s innocent boys and girls. They were apparently out in force, carrying home-made signs, singing hymns, and invoking the Lord’s protection against the imminent educational apocalypse. And among them was an old farmer carrying a Bible and holding a sign that read, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.”

It’s interesting that the editors of the Digest back then didn’t see anything insulting, prejudicial, or judgmental in that story that might have prevented them from printing it. Nor, I suspect, did they notice much in the way of its broader implications for local rule of public education and the reasoning (or lack thereof) that sometimes guides it. The old farmer’s Bible was in English, as were all of the quotations of Jesus contained therein. As far as the old farmer was concerned, that settled it. But Jesus didn’t speak English. In fact, English as we know it did not exist in Jesus’s time. He spoke Aramaic, an ancient Semitic language originating in Syria and spreading throughout that part of the Middle East.

But the old farmer was obviously unaware of that fact. Or, in slightly different terms, he was ignorant of that fact. I have no idea how the language wars in that rural Tennessee district played out; but if the old farmer had enough allies who believed the same erroneous argument, the students in its schools would be deprived of the opportunity to study and learn a foreign language—a language that was still in wide use at the time as an international language before English would effectively replace it in a few more decades. A language the knowledge of which would be of obvious utility if any of those students were to travel in adulthood as representatives of American business seeking to establish a commercial presence in France or most of the other countries in Europe. A language that had contributed many great works of literature to the Western literary tradition—which most Americans would only ever be able to read in translation. And the good ol’ boys who had been abroad for the Great War should not have forgotten how invaluable any American soldier was to his unit and its commanders if he had enough knowledge of French to communicate with the natives and the commanders of the French forces.

But ignorance is an insidious thing. It leaves the ignorant wide open to both the lies of those who would like to manipulate them into serving the interests of the manipulators, and the bogeymen created by their own fears of the unknown. And for the ignorant, the unknown could include a great deal. And, just as in that Tennessee school district back in the early twentieth-century, if the ignorant can find enough allies, they can influence decisions that will have far-reaching effects on both their own lives and the lives of a great many others, many of whom have yet to be born.

Unfortunately, we’re presently living in a time when the forces of ignorance are recruiting with a desperate energy not seen for a few generations. Attempting to prevent the spread of any knowledge they fear, they’ve fastened on an all-too-familiar target: books. This country has a long, embarrassing history of banning books, and perhaps it should surprise no one that a few fear-ridden factions are at it again. And if they succeed in their efforts, the broader, long-term effect will be no different from what it would have been if that old Tennessee farmer and his allies had been successful in theirs.

The world is a much bigger place than rural Tennessee, and there are many more varieties of people who populate it than would be found there. The same is true of any present-day school district in any region of the United States. And the more we manage to keep our children from learning about that big, wide world and the many different kinds of people in it, the less well-equipped they will be with the knowledge necessary to deal successfully with either of those. Is this really what we want?

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly Bookstore, Kutztown, PA

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