In which I rant about the education department

I read an article over the weekend about the state of English education in this country and how we can hardly expect students to learn English and grammar if their own teachers have only the barest grip of it.  And wow ‑ did I just write a sentence that long without a single comma in it?  Why yes, it looks like I did.

But to return to my point: ’twas an interesting article ‑ one that made me nod in righteous affirmation and scowl and clench my fists in utter fury.  Let’s start with the title, shall we? “Can’t write can’t spell” ‑ where’s the comma?  I know I can hardly speak, given the comma‑less state of my opening sentence, but unless the title was intended as a piece of highly‑refined, ironic humour, there needs to be a comma in the middle.

*breaks out red pen and scribbles one in*

Once I got past the urge to beta the title, I moved on to the body of the article and read of universities and the difficulties they experience as they deal with students who haven’t been taught the basics of grammar and who can barely string a coherent sentence together.  And what would be the reason for that?  Could it be the amount of grammar that is taught to students at primary and secondary school?  Which would be “next to nothing”? You know, I think it might.  What did I know about grammar by the time I reached secondary school?  Let’s see... I knew the difference between a verb and a noun.

And that was it.

What a wonderful grounding I received in my own damn language.

Let’s look at the cause of that by taking a quote from the article:

“And what happens to teachers struggling to come to terms with language structure, in particular those teachers who were school students during the “process writing period” of the ’70s and ’80s?”

I’m not a teacher, but I was a product of that “process writing period” of the late eighties.

More quoteage:

“We went through a period where we sometimes didn’t correct their (students’) written expression for fear of offending or demoralising them,” says Fred Ackerman, president of the Victorian Principals Association. “You could call it (the process writing approach) a bit of a fad . . . the general concept was, the more children wrote every day, the more creative it would be and self‑improvement would occur.”

And this is why, exactly, I hate the education department so much.  It’s also where my ability to express my anger begins to slip away (but, hey, at least I know who to blame for that...).  I cannot adequately express how betrayed I feel.  The department responsible for educating me and ensuring I knew my own language decided it wasn’t worth the bother.  Oh no.  All of those pesky rules were only going to demoralise me!  Instead, let’s just throw me into the pool of whims and vagaries of one of the most illogical languages around and hope I can swim in it.

Instead, I learnt my grammar through reading.  Luckily, I seem to have a memory based on pattern‑recognition, so I was able to develop a feel of when a sentence was right or wrong.  I could fix sentences and feel relatively confident that they were grammatically accurate... but I had no idea what I was actually doing.

And here’s my favourite quote from the article, tacked on to the end as though it’s making a point:

“In 2005, a study by Professor Richard Andrews from the University of York found no evidence to suggest that the teaching of traditional grammar, specifically word order or syntax, was effective in assisting writing quality or accuracy of five‑ to 16‑year‑olds.”

Um, so?  Also, have they been into a school lately?  Have they seen how students write?  I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for one minute that this is at all true or even accurate.  It’s like suggesting that teaching students how to use tools won’t help them in woodwork, or that showing students how to use PhotoShop won’t help them learn how to create graphics.

Once again, I’m annoyed by the arrogance that assumes we implicitly know the rules of our own language, simply because we speak it from birth.  We don’t.  And I just wish the education department would start living in the real world and grant to students the ability to communicate their ideas.  We’re living in a world where the written word is possibly more important than ever: if we don’t know how to express ourselves and communicate with others, then we fail.

Just like the education department failed before us.