Sir Walter Scott, "Lady of the Lake," Cynthia Ozick, in Dumbing Down: . . . the Strip-mining of American Culture . . .

Alarm sounded in 1996 . . .

Walter Scott's 1810 poem set in the Scottish highlands in the 16th century, "Lady of the Lake," was "often the first poem studied thoroughly" by the Oakland, Calif., ninth-grader in 1900, said Elizabeth A. Packard in her study edition.

Mine is a 1914 version, so Ms. Packard's work held up at least that long. It's a textbook study, you might say, of what literacy used to be, at least what teachers tried to make it be. Today's freshmen might (a) yawn at the story line, of centuries-old dynastic and clan struggles, in verse no less, and/or (b) squirm uncontrollably at being required to figure it out.

Reading poetry may be a lost art. Ms. Packard, "head of English and history in the high school at Oakland," expected more than once-over-lightly treatment. A note by her, for line 32 of the first canto, tells the student to "learn all the plants mentioned."

Learn them, she said, meaning get them down, master them, make them your own. "Why?" asks the student of any age, hers and ours. "Who cares?" "I care," says Ms. Packard, "and so will you some day. Do it."

At Fenwick High in 1949, they said memorize the near-opening lines of this "Lady," and so it's with a pleasant shock of recognition that I find two lines that have been popping up in my skull for many years: "The stag at eve had drunk his fill,/ Where danced the moon on Monan's rill."

"What's a rill," I wondered, and eventually looked it up: a stream or brook.

More to the point, I had Scott's rhythm roaming through my semiconscious: that "where danced the moon," for instance. Not "where the moon danced." I was exposed, if not as thoroughly as my Oakland counterpart of 49 years earlier, to language as a created thing. Exposed, I may add, within a tradition, and a comparatively noble one at that.

Scott is florid and overdrawn, some say. Longfellow too, as in his "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee" at the start of "Song of Hiawatha." Romanticism oozes from every pore. So what? There's room for that, especially in the minds and hearts of ninth-graders, where it reigns anyhow.

And I'll tell you something: Scott’s stag being chased and finally eluding the hunter and his dogs is exciting. Kids could go with that, with help from their friends the teachers.

Dumb, dumb, and dumbed down . . . In Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-mining of American Culture (Norton), essayist Cynthia Ozick says her immigrant mother got a literary education in New York public schools that urged reading "for the stamp of heritage" -- apparently a form of socialization.

Only in America, she might have said.  And only from books, she did say, comparing a book to "a riverbank for the river of language."  Without the riverbank, language is "only television -- a free fall, a splash, a spill."  Which is what an "aural" (merely listening) society finally comes to: "spill and more spill" -- and "a widening delta of dumbness," says the Wall St. Journal reviewer.

The more kids work their way through books, the firmer the sides of their riverbank, I say.  An allegedly reform-minded Oak Parker spoke at a meeting about non-honors students' "getting to do the neat things honors students do."  She has no idea of rigor.  To her it's expanding the playground.