Aggh! I absolutely abhor political correctness. This post by Jonathon is very interesting and disturbing. It reminded me of some of the very serious problems we face here in the U.S. with regard to education, and some similar sad problems in Japan.

So, first of all, as I've mentioned in the last few posts, the English language depends heavily upon both Latin and Greek for its neologistic capabilities, and for most of its more specific, detailed, and complex vocabulary. Without an understanding of these roots, one is unable to grasp fully the expressive capacity of English. I feel somewhat handicapped since I never learned Latin or Greek in school, so I'm trying to learn Latin now, but I have always had a good understanding of the word roots we commonly use.

We lose a lot when these subjects fail to be taught to the next generation. And now, not only are we losing connection with the upper reaches of our vocabulary, we're also losing all sorts of other things due to the irrational and excessive fear of offending young students. It's stupid, and I'm really upset when I'm forced to think about it. I'm probably not going to be satisfied to send my children to public school in this country, ironically the country where my Puritan ancestors built the first schoolhouses to teach from the King James Bible, and where we had such an incredible level of literacy and education up to the turn of the 19th century.

Similarly, Japan has lost a lot of the flavor of its language through excessive standardization, almost PC-ization of the kanji system. Ask any Japanese today about the stroke order of a character, and they'll say there is only one proper stroke order. In fact, for most characters there have always been alternate stroke orders, usually at least 2 or 3. There have been different styles to writing some characters, alternative forms, and stylizations that have been basically lost due to this standardization push.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a standard. I'm just saying that the modern Japanese person has in many cases lost the intuitive understanding of style when it comes to kanji. People used to prefer certain forms of characters; now, only one is usually considered the 'right' form. People used to write characters with their own style. Now, many people resort to a child-like pencil style when writing characters. I just wish they hadn't gone so far sometimes. It would be nice if everyone could have an elegant and idiosyncratic calligraphic syle of their own.