Literacy and Numeracy

 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that school leavers in England (we are not told about the rest of the United Kingdom) have lower levels of literacy and numeracy than those of their grandparents. Indeed, England is the only country in the developed world in which 16-24 year old people show worse basic skills than those approaching retirement age.

Of course, many of today’s developed countries have only achieved optimum standards of literacy and numeracy during those few decades. However, many arrived at that standard as quickly as we did so  the findings indicate a real problem.

Of course, the educationists, individually and collectively, have always claimed that educational standards were improving. They point to the constantly improving results of  A levels and GCSEs, fuelled by rampant grade inflation. .

Oh, by the way, I am not just an angry Daily Telegraph/Daily Mail reader and parent and grandparent. I taught for forty years full-time and part-time as a further education teacher.

When I was a pupil and student, teachers were not afraid of teaching us to engage in rote learning. How dreadful! Rote learning has nothing to do with developing understanding or training intelligence we have been told for decades – since I was a pupil and student.

Numeracy is not just addition and subtraction; it is also multiplication and division. We are not always accompanied by a loyal calculator and, even when we are, we must make a mental calculation to test whether or not we have placed the decimal point in the right place.

In our day, we were taught multiplication tables by rote, which allows me to this day to carry out calculations in my head. Then some clever person thought that learning those tables by rote was a form of child abuse and the practice was discontinued. Children (and I have seen the product of this) had to substitute addition for multiplication. If a figure had to be multiplied by eight, it was written down eight times and added!

Ah, I hear you say, they have returned to teaching tables by rote. Not quite. They recite the answers to each table but without preceding them with the questions. The result of this is that if they wish to know the answer to 6×8, they have to work through the tables until they arrive at the right answer.

And now we shall come to grammar. Please forgive my starting a sentence and a paragraph with a co-ordinating conjunction. I am a victim of modern practices as much as the next man (or woman).

Words are not just random animal sounds; they are vital pieces of a mechanical device. The rules of grammar are like the workshop manual for the mechanic. They should be known to perform a particular function in a piece of writing. If  they appear in the wrong form or the wrong order or the wrong words are used, the ‘machine’ will not work: the meaning and the argument will not be clear.

In my younger day, the rules of grammar were taught or they were sometimes. We were taught how to analyse clauses and distinguish between (say) subordinate adverbial clauses of cause and subordinate adverbial clauses of purpose. “Why?”. I hear you ask, Well, it is because they distinguish between the different responses to that very word, “Why”. A grammatical misunderstanding is often a logical misunderstanding.

When I taught ‘A’ level law, one student, whose name I have forgotten, wrote an essay with the following ‘sentence’, “Whilst it is true that people given custodial sentences are more likely to re-offend and people given non-custodial sentences are less likely to re-offend.”  I said to him that he had provided two subordinate clauses but no main clause. He replied that I was employed to teach him law and not English. I responded by pointing out that his sentence was an incomplete argument. I could have said that it was a logical syllogism with two premises but no conclusion. I decided that it would be pointless.

It was a classic example of a grammatical error leading to a logical error.

G.K. Chesterton, who was once flavour of the month in the Nationalist movement, said that it was important for words to be coins, with an intrinsic value, and not just counters, with none.

There was a school of thought that children did not need to be taught grammar, because they would know it intuitively. What an optimistic and calamitous assumption to have made!

I have asked students if they knew when ‘shall’ should be used and when ‘will’ should be used. I also asked students to tell me when the adjectival subordinating conjunction ‘that’ should be used and when ‘which’ should be used. The only students able to provide me with the correct answer were; one Russian; two Czechs and a Spaniard. The only people to have been taught English grammar were foreigners who had learnt English as a second language. If a reforming government should decide that grammar should, once again, be taught, it would be necessary to employ foreigners to carry out that very necessary task!

I am sure that many will ask why such a difference should be so necessary. It is because they convey quite different meanings: simple future in the first example and emphasis in the second. The second distinction is between defining clauses and non-defining clauses – a very real difference.

If real differences are blurred, we lose clarity of meaning. Intelligent thought requires precise distinctions. If our language should lose the capacity for making those distinctions, our language and our thinking will be the poorer.

Spelling is an early victim of linguistic liberalism. However, changes in spelling and meaning create a barrier against understanding between generations. They also disguise etymological origins.

Sometimes errors in the language reveal more fundamental misunderstandings about the function that each word fulfils in the linguistic machine. I remember one student – an able and conscientious student in every other sense –  who used the expression, “could of”, done something instead of “could have”, done something.  Does this error really matter? It shows a misunderstanding of the functions of the words used. The use of a preposition instead of an auxiliary verb would show that the person did not understand what he or she was saying.

We are told that language changes naturally and that we should not try to stop it from doing so. Some changes are functional in that they facilitate clarity of meaning and precision of explanation. The use of the apostrophe,  originally a printers’ mark, was a functional development in our language. Neologisms for new inventions or concepts are clearly useful. The invention of words without meaning but with a corresponding amount of opprobrium, like ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ are rather less so.

The colleague, Syme, of Winston Smith, in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, was entrusted with reducing the language with the intention of making heretical thought impossible.  I am not suggesting that everybody who uses words in their quaint Afro-American sense and finishes each sentence with, the words, “init”. is a conscious conspirator against reason and exactitude. However, they are certainly unconscious facilitators of the process.