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July 2004 The main article in this issue explains that you do not have to be highly educated to teach your children about The English language, and there is also a short article about educational research – Who Needs Educational Research? Thanks to everyone who has written in over the past few weeks enquiring about what has happened to the newsletter, it is touching to know that it is being appreciated! Gareth LewisThe
English Language Education is principally about the use of language: this simple fact has become obscured over recent years with schools being asked to take responsibility for teaching children science, information technology, cooking, etc., but what schools are really about, and what they have always been about, is teaching children how to write in a certain way and to speak in a certain way. This is why written examinations play such an important role in school life, and why ‘educated’ people are always recognised not by what they know, but by how they speak. One of the principal roles of schools is to create a uniformity in the way that people use a language – they teach them to spell words in a certain way, to write in sentences, to use recognised forms of punctuation, and to follow rules of grammar. There are good historical reasons why this should be the case: in the days when only a small proportion of the population could read and write, and before the advent of national and international means of communication, there were huge regional differences in the way that the language was spoken. If scholars had been allowed to develop their own system of writing, based upon their local dialect, then it would not have been long before different versions of English emerged in each centre of learning and English would have fragmented into a new family of languages each with its own rules for spelling and grammar. In these circumstances it was clearly essential that institutions such as schools and universities should teach people to write and spell in a standard way. The situation today, however, is quite different: modern means of communication ensure that not only people living in neighbouring towns and regions are in tune with each other’s use of language, but even people living in different countries and different continents are able to communicate freely with each other without being told what to say or how to say it by their local school. Furthermore, it is no longer a small minority of the population who are sent to school; everyone is now required to have an education, irrespective of whether or not they are destined to eventually earn their living through using the written word. This has drawn attention to the fact that many children find the process of being made to use language in a certain, standardised way, very traumatic. In some cases this may be due to the rigidity of the timetable that they are expected to follow – there are many children who experience great difficulty when they are made to read and write at the age of only five or six years old – and some people find the whole process of being made to use language in a specific way extremely stifling, with the result that over the period of their schooling they lose their creativity and their ability to express themselves. Parents assume that these difficulties must be endured as part of the price that must be paid for living in a civilised society, but this view fails to take account of the fact that, in order to survive, a language must be allowed to change and evolve. It is therefore quite possible that a system of education which is appropriate at one time, becomes completely inappropriate a few years later. This is the case with schools in relation to language. Schools are good at maintaining a standard form of language, but are a hindrance when change needs to be facilitated. In today’s world, language has to adapt to developments such as global telecommunications, the internet, modern media, new technology, travel, migration, international organisations, multinational companies etc., and it is almost inevitable that the language being taught in schools should lag several years behind the language that is being used in the real world. Language and History History provides examples of languages undergoing such upheavals; for example, in the time of the Roman Empire, a standard form of Latin was maintained as the language of western Europe, through the agency of a formal system of education. When Europe was overrun by ‘barbarian’ tribes, schools disappeared, as did the language in its written form, but the invaders did adopt Latin as a spoken language and it was able to evolve into something that was more suited to the needs of the time – in this way the languages that we now recognise as French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, were born. It may not be apparent that any comparable process could be happening in today’s world, in which almost everyone goes to school and in which there is a standardised version of the language being maintained by institutions, such as universities and publishing companies. Insofar as many Western languages are concerned, change is indeed not happening at any appreciable pace, but the English language is a special case, and despite appearances to the contrary, it is not, and never has been, fully under the control of academics or any other centralised authority. Languages such as French and German are overseen by committees of university professors, and other luminaries, who decide on the official version of new words, arbitrate on disputes about spelling and grammar and publish guides to the official version of the language. The power that these committees are able to exercise within their own countries has grown in inverse proportion to the influence that these languages have on the world stage. English, on the other hand is not subject to this kind of regulation, and, perhaps as a consequence of this, its importance in world affairs is growing more rapidly at this present time, than has ever been the case for any other language in recorded history. The Origins of the English Language The very origins of English make it different from other European languages: after the Romans left the British Isles it was Anglo-Saxon, which owed its roots to German and Scandinavian languages, that was spoken by the British; this language was pushed underground when the Normans invaded England in 1066, and French became the official language of England and Wales . The unpopularity of the Norman aristocracy meant that their language was never fully adopted by the people, and, as a result, a new language eventually emerged that was a hybrid of the Germanic-based Anglo-Saxon, and the Latin-based French. This new language was English and it was unique amongst the languages of the time in that it had no coherent rules either for grammar or for spelling. This was by no means a bad thing. It is probably no coincidence that the one work of modern western literature which is universally acknowledged to be truly great, should have been written in English – and by someone who had largely avoided a formal education. William Shakespeare was able to mould and shape the language to suit his own requirements, and in the process not only created works of unsurpassed beauty but also enriched the language itself. Such things are not possible when a language has become fossilised into a particular form with rigid rules for grammar, syntax and spelling. Furthermore, it cannot be a coincidence that it should be English – even though it started life being spoken by down-trodden people living on a relatively poor, and traditionally isolated, part of the European continent – which was the one European language able to break free of its roots and become a genuine world language. Foreign language students of English are often intimidated by the way in which it appears to consist of an apparently random collection of words drawn from all different parts of the world, and by its lack of coherent rules for spelling and grammar: its use of irregular verbs, the lack of agreement between adjectives and nouns, the way in which it has abandoned the use of different genders for ordinary nouns, and the complexity of its tenses do indeed make it a difficult language to study formally, but once people start to actually use it as a means of communication, they find that it is remarkably adaptable to their needs. The English language allows even beginners to exchange ideas and information with relative ease. The growth in the use of English worldwide now seems to be running parallel with the growth and the use of new technologies. The versatility of the language lends itself particularly well to the internet, to e-mail messages, to text messages, to modern styles of writing, to television and films and to all aspects of the modern media. Its dominance in the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, has contributed to its success by making it the automatic language of trade and commerce. There are hundreds of millions of people now using the English language as a practical means of communication, and, as a result, it has taken on a life of its own. For example whereas even only a few years ago, there were relatively few publishers – all of whom basically conformed to using standard forms of English in the material that they printed – there are now literally millions of people who publish internet sites, each of which is potentially available to millions of readers. The success of these sites is determined not by how ‘correct’ they are in their use of language but by how effectively they can use words to attract and keep people’s attention – obeying traditional rules of spelling and grammar is not always an advantage. This means that schools and universities are now no longer able to dictate how the language should be used; instead of setting the agenda, they have to change their curricula from year to year in an attempt to keep pace with events that are taking place in the real world. In these circumstances, having a rigid education in the English language may no longer be an advantage: students can leave the education system with grade As in English and then find themselves unable to communicate with other English speakers from around the world. Young people now need to acquire a range of language-related skills, ranging from writing e-mails and text messages, to conducting a conversation with groups of people for whom English is their second language, and from writing business letters to designing websites that can be understood by people around the world. The Process of Change Difficult though it might be for ‘well-educated’ native English speakers to acknowledge, the fact is that the language is changing: people around the world only adopt those aspects of it that they find useful and appropriate to their purposes – if they don’t like apostrophes, they will not use them, if they don’t like capital letters, they will not use them either, if they find some spelling awkward and difficult to remember, they will change that also, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Commercial pressures mean that if some forms of English become favoured by young people, or by people who have more spending power, then advertisers and writers will use these forms of English in order to attract those people’s attention; these forms then become the standard and things that were previously considered to be correct are seen as being archaic and out of date. People who have spent ten to twenty years of their lives being drilled in the use of English sometimes cannot accept that things that they were taught were ‘wrong’ have become ‘right’ and things that they were taught were ‘right’ have been demoted to being just one of the various acceptable alternatives. What Should Parents Do For parents, the implications of this state of affairs are potentially very positive. In times when change is not taking place, people might be justified in forcing their children to learn rules of language against their natural inclination. But when language is changing there can be no excuse for forcing children to write or speak in a particular way. There are millions of children who do not want to learn to read when schools try to teach them, there are millions of young children for whom spelling and grammar makes no sense at all, and there are millions of children whose lives are blighted by the bullying that they endure from teachers and well-meaning adults who try to make them conform to an accepted use of language. All these children would be much better off if they were left to come to terms with language in their own time and in their own way. ‘Correcting’ work, and setting tests and exams in which children have to obey certain rules can no longer be seen as helpful and may have the effect of putting children at a serious disadvantage in later life. Young children in particular, should be free to twist language round to make it suit their needs rather than the reverse, so that when they are older they will have the confidence to adapt to every new situation in which they find themselves. All this means that the best thing that parents can do for their children is to simply enjoy the experience of exploring the use of language together. They do not have to worry about ‘correcting’ their children’s work and do not have to try to enforce a particular mode of spelling and grammar upon things that their children write. Being free to experiment with language may result in young children producing work that would make a teacher shudder, but it puts children in control and, as they grow older, instead of switching off to language, they will retain an interest in everything that they read and everything that they hear. Obviously, over the course of time, they will become sensitive to how other people write, and will alter their own style to suit the needs of the situation, but, with luck, they will never lose their interest in their language, and will both contribute to, and be in tune with, all the changes that take place as it continues to evolve. It is all too easy for parents to imagine that they have fulfilled their obligations if they succeed in getting their children into a classroom in which a teacher instructs them in the ‘correct’ way to write and speak, but in fact this is precisely the thing that could prevent a child from being able to succeed in a world in which the use of language is changing so rapidly. The way in which a parent is really able to fulfil their responsibility in this area, is to talk to a child, to read to them, read what they have written, to do things together, to be interested in what their children say to them, and to treat them with respect. These are the things which inspire a child to explore language. A child treated in this way, automatically learns to speak well because they know that people are interested in what they are saying, and they learn to spell and to write well, because they know that people are interested in what they have written. As they get older, they will have the confidence to face new situations – whether it be designing a website, conducting a conversation with people from other countries, talking to older people, applying for work, or whatever it is that life presents to them – and will be able to escape the trap of being confused and disappointed because things are different from what they were led to expect when they were at school.
Who Needs Educational Research? Ever since my wife and I first started educating our children at home, which is now almost fourteen years ago, I have been struck by the amount of research that is conducted on home education. At first, I used to try to fill in the questionnaires that were sent to me but recently I have been asking myself why people do this research and who it is supposed to help. Current research into home education is investigating how well children who were home educated in the eighties and nineties are doing today in relation to various criteria established by the researcher. When the parents of these children made their decision to home educate there was no educational research available which they could consult, instead they had to rely upon their common sense and decide for themselves what they thought was best for their own children. The most that any research can establish is that these parents made a good choice and that their children are doing fine; it cannot turn back the clock so that parents who did not home educate in the nineteen-eighties and nineties can do so now. The correct conclusion to be drawn from such research is not that ‘home education’ is good, but that the sensible thing for a parent to do is to use their common sense and do whatever they think is best for their children at any particular time – and this is surely something that we knew in the first place. This leaves one to wander if there really is any point in educational research at all.
Readers who have not looked at The Jamboree recently may be surprised by the wealth of its content: Wendy’s Craft Corner, Bethan’s Cookbook, Stories from History and the Gardening section are updated every month; there are new cartoons, including original cartoons of Aesop’s fables; and there are articles and, of course, a new Editor’s letter each month. A new feature this month is a guest book. Please feel free to send in comments and suggestions. http://www.jamboree.freedom-in-education.co.uk
The Freedom in Education Magazine contains the articles from this newsletter, material from The Jamboree, plus extra features such as a word search, a dot to dot, code, a quiz, geometry, and a cartoon that follows the adventures of a family of spoons who decide that the time has come for their children to receive and education. Even with the internet, many people say that they still prefer to receive a real magazine, printed on paper, through the post and The Freedom in Education Magazine is particularly popular with children. http://www.freedom-in-education.co.uk/magazine/fie_magazine.htm
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