A Very British Disease

The stage was set for the premier – the first reading on British television of the new novel, Freedom, which is being hailed as the next great American novel. The writer, Jonathan Franzen, began reading. His eyes began to narrow, slowly until the point he appeared to be squinting. Then suddenly they widened, baffled, and with a cloud of confusion descending over his face he raised his bewildered glaze to the presenter sitting in front of him, and said that he had to stop. Apparently the track that he had just read was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors which even he could remember should have been dealt with several drafts before.

The furore that erupted over this literary heresy resulted in the whole [whole of the United Kingdom first edition] first edition of the book in the United Kingdom being pulled by the publishers. Obama said he had read the book, and that it was fine. The Americans take things like this very seriously. Probably, because of their relatively shorter history, the American novel is the next best thing to the narrative of the nation’s history. How could HarperCollins a publisher of such renown get it all wrong?

As a teacher I could not help myself thinking if this debacle was not symptomatic of the deplorable state of literacy in the UK today. From politicians to presenters on television and radio and down to customer service assistants in the shops one is constantly being bombarded with the wrong use of tense and words so baffling I could only excusably describe as a purposeful use of slang. Some common misapplication of tense include, “I was sat …..”, and “I done it”. It is in the classroom where one is acutely confronted with a frightful awareness of the future. Students, supposedly with eleven years of schooling behind them and yet with no concept of spelling, punctuation and grammar. I had the misfortune, well not once, but a particular bad case where a student began without a capital letter and proceeded with a track of nearly three hundred and fifty words excluding commas and full-stops, and riddled with spelling mistakes and atrocious grammar throughout its entirety.

How then has a nation that gave the world it’s most widely spoken language descended to such a stage. One could argue from here to the next millennium about the why and how, but my opinion is that since the 1960’s a certain intellectual slothfulness has crept into the nation’s psyche, coupled with half-witted politicians looking for cheap votes. Government after government have continually tampered and tinkered with the state education curriculum. There was even a period when teachers were encouraged not to be overly concerned with the language element of students’ work if the subject was other than English itself. We are at the point now where teaching has ceased to be a profession, of practitioners making independent judgements about their charges’ learning, to become humdrum exercise of clerical work, ticking check boxes and the nonsensical filing of endless forms.

One morning last week, while driving to college a professor came on the radio and said that SMS text language should be incorporated into formal language in schools because it was now the natural language of communication among the current generation. I almost drove into the car ahead of me.