Word: menckenism
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...increased nearly a million since 1930, the number of teachers had decreased 15,000; the amount to cover per diem cost per child slipped from 63? to 49?: funds for building expenditures dropped from $400,000,000 to $154,000,000 annually. To some people, notably Henry Louis Mencken who belabored the pedagogs in his American Mercury last month (TIME, Feb. 20), this might have seemed a blessing. Of such critics the superintendents took no direct notice last week. But they were girded to fight, most of them agreeing, however reluctantly, with a Wisconsin superintendent's statement: "The teaching...
...continue to believe that the study of Greek and Latin is largely a waste of time, at all events for the average student." H. L. Mencken, famous American writer and critic, told a CRIMSON reporter recently. Mencken, one of the greatest living authorities on the English language, has for many years pooh-poohed the importance of the classics as a background for the correct use of the English tongue...
...certainly in agreement with the belief that it is a valuable and decent thing to write English correctly, and with a proper regard for its extraordinary beauties," Mencken said. "If I were the editor of a daily newspaper I would certainly insist that even the sports pages be written for better than they are. I sometimes marvel that Americans are so insensitive to the gross abuse of their mother tongue. Certainly such a magazine as Time, if it were printed in England, would be denounced violently for its apparently deliberate degradation of the language...
...gogues themselves Mr. Mencken calls "bureaucrats, irresponsible and unintelligent quacks . . . enemies of all genuine intellectual enterprise . . . silly babus. . . . The babu can give his pupils only what is in his own head, and that is surely not much...
...Mencken was privately tutored, attended Knapps Institute (no longer existent) and Baltimore Polytechnic (high school...