To begin, I laugh. (Tee hee, prejudism, very amusing.) But then, I mourn, and the sadness is the part that sticks around. Because these are not isolated incidences. In every batch of essays I've seen this year, there are enough abuses of the English language to make Dr Johnson shudder in his grave. Obvious abuses, like they're/their/there; and who among us has not erred in this way? But when I find whole nonsensical paragraphs that say nothing, and say it badly (for I can forgive them saying nothing, if it is said well) I am afear'd. Here is a generation's worth of young minds captivated by the vacuous twitterings of social media, instead of Tolkien; salacious pop lyrics, instead of John Donne; narcissism, and not the Oscar Wilde variety, which has the saving graces of irony and wit. Rather, these teenagers are pining away for their own image in a pool of water, deaf to the echoes of the masters who have gone before and call them to something better. This world calls them to spurn everything that is not immediately gratifying; and Shakespeare and Auden and Austen are not immediately gratifying. They require the reader to work a little - to consider new perspectives, to broaden horizons, and that is really too much to ask the self-obsessed hipsters in our classrooms.
Here's an irony: one of the thematic concerns of The Longest Memory is the literacy that was denied slaves on Virginian plantations in the nineteenth century. Chapel, the main character, a slave who risks his life by learning to read, talks about a volume of Shakespeare in tender terms - to him, it is a rose, its pages are petals, and its contents beyond price. In the end, he dies for the wondrous beauty of words, whipped to death for pursuing the bookish dream of Paradise. It seems to me that our students are willing to die for much less.
Child! do not throw this book about!
On the Gift of a Book to a Child - Hilaire Belloc
Child! do not throw this book about!
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
Child, have you never heard it said
That you are heir to all the ages?
Why, then, your hands were never made
To tear these beautiful thick pages!
......
One can forgive another for saying nothing if it is said well. This is an interesting concept and, I think, quite true. (I've been reading about rhetoric this afternoon. For some of its practitioners saying nothing but saying it well seems to have been the main aim!)
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems is that kids aren't taught to compose English any more. That is, they don't learn the nuts and bolts of grammar and then, at a higher level, they don't learn the basics of a good sentence. Sad. I was never taught anything of that sort in Primary or High School. I only learnt about English grammar through studying other languages (and even then imperfectly).
As you say, the worst thing about this lack is that it inhibits thought. Thought happens in language, through language. So when you can't express something the idea is damaged, too.
Sigh.
That's why we need people like you in schools, Erin! Look at it that way.
I'm sure when I was in year 11 I wrote many of those awful, ill thought out essays. It wasn't until uni that I learnt to think and get my thoughts on a page, messy though they were. But as the above person mentioned, at uni the nuts and bolts of grammar (and punctuation) aren't taught. I'm actually considering having some private English and Latin tutoring before I return to uni next year because every time I write something I find myself embarrassed by the mistakes I can feel are there and paranoid about the ones I can’t.
ReplyDeleteTo E: you are absolutely right. We don't teach 'composition'. Quite often we expect them to have intuitive knowledge about how sentences work and how arguments should be constructed. An encouraging development, though (which I won't be around to see) is that at my school we've introduced an accelerated English program with distinct disciplines of Rhetoric, Grammar, and Literature. We have a superb Classics person who's orchestrating the whole thing. It's started at Year Nine, and will travel through the whole school - so in a couple of years we hope to see dramatic improvement! In the meantime, I can only lament in public forums :)
ReplyDeleteTo K: you may have been one of 'those' students, but your writing is careful and logical these days. I think the Latin tutoring is a wonderful idea - it gives you an intricate grasp of English grammar. Don't be embarrassed about your writing, and believe me when I say that it's better than that of most adults!