She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.

And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason:

> Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.