A nation whose national policies are controlled by voters who cannot clearly distinguish between ''aggressive" and "belligerent" is almost certain to make serious errors. Most American voters today cannot distinguish between
What do those words they throw around—and can’t use!—actually mean? And on what basis are the American voters deciding the national policy?
And ... what would be the result in a society which did apply that use-vocabulary test? What sort of economic, political, and class structures would result? What would happen to educational systems?
There’s no use installing more courses in Semantics and Linguistics, either! If a man has poor eyesight, we can help him with lenses—but if he has poor color vision, courses in Art and Aesthetics won’t help a bit.
I never knew how poor my color vision was, until I discovered that my wife could travel twelve hundred miles from home, see a piece of silk material of an extremely complex gray-blue tone, recognize that it matched a piece of wool she had at home, and buy it. Despite the very different textures of the two fabrics, and some two weeks of time-lapse— she was perfectly correct.
Now her level of color-memory and color-discrimination is abnormally high. The point is simple; it would be utterly futile for me to seek to train a talent I simply don’t have. I’d never be able to match that performance.
But if you’ve got that talent ... training comes so automatically you never notice it.
So with use-vocabulary, which is simply an objective expression of semantic-discrimination ability.
What would happen, in educational philosophy, with such a factor recognized, and made directly, personally important to every citizen?