This isn’t the exact instruction issued to teachers by the regulator Ofqual. But it’s as near as… well, damn.
Exams, says the regulator, shouldn’t “demotivate” and “disadvantage” pupils, especially those who come from the families of migrants or council estate dwellers. And exposure to difficult words could lead to just such undesirable ends.
Difficult words may be complex, uncommon or abstract, such as “bravery” and “sarcasm”. Or else they may confusingly have two meanings, such as “present” (actually, it’s more than two, but who’s counting?). Exam papers containing such devilish traps compromise “equality”, defeating the real purpose of our education.
It’s not just texts but also contexts that may scupper the egalitarian project: “Contexts such as those related to particular types of housing, family arrangements, or social, travel or cultural experiences may advantage or disadvantage particular groups of learners.”
Chief regulator Dr Jo Saxton said exams should “enable every student to demonstrate what they know, understand and can do. It is crucial assessments are as accessible as possible for all students”.
A singular antecedent followed by a plural pronoun makes me wonder what Jo’s doctorate is in. Equality studies? Dumbing Down? Patronising Techniques? Not English, by the sound of her. And Jo? British schools, unlike American ones, have pupils, not students.
Our educators seem to lose sight of the real purpose of education. Expressed schematically, it’s to guide pupils from Point A (current knowledge) to Point B (desired knowledge). Applying this self-evident truth to language, it’s to move people from the way they speak to the way they should speak, from the words they know to those they should learn.
Many groups of pupils do express themselves in a patois of desemanticised interjections and derivatives of four-letter words. But surely any teacher worth his salt would seek to broaden their lexical horizons? And how else can that be done if not by exposing pupils to the unmatched treasure trove of English vocabulary?
Words aren’t divided into difficult and easy, Dr Jo. They are divided into right or wrong, precise or ambivalent, elegant or crude. And English is perhaps the best language for such distinctions, what with its lexicon being much bigger than in any other European language (three times as big as in Russian, to take one random example).
The wider the vocabulary, the firmer the grasp of nuanced thought. For words designate concepts and their endless nuances. Hence teaching a pupil new words makes his mind more agile and complex, his knowledge broader, his sensibilities more honed.
The same goes for those supposedly demotivating contexts. A pupil whose quotidian reality is underpinned by crushed beer cans, discarded syringes and gratuitous violence can and should be taught to aspire to a better life, one of beauty, intellect, good manners and emotional continence.
Such aspirations won’t always be realised. Yet each time they are, our society becomes better for welcoming another member fit to live in it.
When I was a child, I and my Russian classmates lived in squalor compared to which a British council estate would have seemed a paragon of luxury. Most of us knew our lives were unlikely to change no matter what we did. They wouldn’t become freer, more interesting or less ugly.
But so much greater was the ardour with which we gobbled up books about faraway lands of knights and their fair ladies, cowboys and Indians, musketeers and cardinals, exotic animals and plants, voyages and flights. We’d then pester our nonplussed parents to tell us what all those unfamiliar words meant.
Asparagus? Parliament? Claret? Judiciary? Tuna? Abbot? My poor mother often didn’t know what some of those words meant either, but she always made a point of trying to find out for my benefit.
As a result, I’ve retained to this day a sense of gratitude every time a writer uses a word I don’t know. By either figuring out its meaning from the context or looking it up, I learn not just a new word, but a new concept or perhaps a new nuance.
That’s how pupils should be taught. They should learn to love learning, to rejoice at feeling their minds growing broader and sharper. They should pick up thousands of new words at an age when their memory is at its most grasping and retentive.
Granted, that’s no easy task for any teacher, school or regulating body. But nothing worth having ever comes easily.
Instead our educators find it simpler to turn schools into dumbed-down laboratories of social engineering, battlegrounds of egalitarianism and wokery.
That’s where the zeitgeist is blowing, and resisting it takes moral and intellectual courage, rare commodities these days. Acting as the zeitgeist’s weathercocks is easier and, in today’s climate, more rewarding.
That’s why our education doesn’t educate. It churns out herds of Mowglis unable to use or understand human speech. They communicate not in full, perfectly parsed sentences but in social media acronyms, such as LOL or FML.
The last two letters in the latter stand for My Life. The first one explains what our educators are doing to education.
How I wish I could disagree with you, Mr Boot. But once again you hit the nails squarely on their heads. Alas!
Hmm, but don’t most well educated people vote Labour?
Do you consider the graduates of our universities to be well educated? I don’t.
I don’t either, although I do know a couple of welcome exceptions.
Are your welcome exceptions capable of thinking for themselves, or do they merely agree with you? Do they read Homer and Plato in Greek, or Virgil and Seneca in Latin, or Pushkin and Dostoyevsky in Russian, or are they limited to the shrunken little world of the English language, which has become even more shrunken now that Geoffrey Chaucer and his successors have been replaced by Maya Angelou and her successors?
In my experience, young conservatives are almost as scary as young marxists.
They can be, just look at Nick Fuentes…
I myself can’t pass such a rigid test. Some Virgil in Latin, yes. Pushkin and Dostoyevsky in Russian, obviously. But Seneca, Homer and Plato in English only, I’m afraid. And I don’t even know who Maya Angelou is, which by the sound of it, may be my saving grace.
The author who most often requires me to grab my dictionary is the author of this article. I usually mention it to either my wife or sister and then lament the fact that the USSR taught English better than American schools. (And perhaps Mr. Boot was a better student than I.)
Teaching proper English is not easy, as children are beset on all sides with poor examples. I asked the principal at my youngest son’s school if there are any books written at his level (first grade at the time) that contain proper English? All of them that we read were (and are) filled with sentence fragments, split infinitives, misplaced modifiers, and of course (your personal favorite) a singular antecedent followed by a plural pronoun. She replied that all modern books are written this way. We discussed some of the worst. The conversation did not leave me feeling better, but I came away knowing that at least one respected educator understood the issue.
After coming across this site in 2018, I read through all of the old entries. I was most happy to come across “postprandial” not once, not twice, but three times! My lunch hours spent solving crossword puzzles were finally vindicated.
Let’s not give Soviet schools more credit than they deserve. I was professionally trained at a university, where we had some 30 hours of practical English a week (students of Russian at Oxford have 4). Then there’s the small matter of the almost half a century that I’ve lived in an Anglophone environment, making a living as a writer. But there was an interesting book on the comparison between Russian and American schools, What Ivan Knows of What Johnny Doesn’t, written in the 60s by the American pedagogue Thorpe (if memory serves). He wrote that, while Johnny reads about a bunny rabbit going hop-hop up the hill, Johnny pinpoints the coordinated of the hill and analyses its chemical composition.
That is actually a very good point, one I was just reading on Wednesday: our primer books have no worthwhile content. In fact, the only books that have a message are those that are pushing the sodomite, transsexual, Gaia, or Marxist agenda. Such books no longer have subtle (if not subliminal) hints, they openly state their case.
My wife has often pushed me to write children’s books, something with proper grammar and moral lessons. Maybe in retirement (if the Biden administration allows such and does not so devalue my savings that I have to stay at my current job – and pay rate – until three days after I die).