HAVING left school at 14, with a working knowledge of the English language, I have always appreciated the fact that the teachers at our village school were so diligent in despatching us to the wider world with at least the basics of what would come to be my lifelong trade.
We learned to spell and punctuate as a matter of course and, if I didn't have a complete understanding of grammar and all its terms, I generally knew by instinct when I had gone wrong. That still applies today - and if I happen to slip up from time to time, dangling a participle or, horror upon horrors, splitting an infinitive, then I know there are those of you out there just waiting to tell me!
But at least our teachers knew. So it was all the more shocking when Charles Jones, Professor of English Language at Edinburgh University, came up with the recent suggestion that there are teachers today who need to be sent back to learn basic grammar.
It was not shocking that he said it, merely that there should be any need to say it. And of course he was absolutely right.
As the professor plainly states, the teaching of English in the classroom this past generation has more or less collapsed. He has found it frightening to come across university students who are unable to write decently constructed English prose.
He lays the blame very properly at the door of that 1970s fashion for sweeping away formal grammar and concentrating instead on free expression. As a result, we produced a breed of windbags, bereft of disciplined thought or word, who have grown to plague us on chat-shows, phone-ins, and any other form of radio or television (maybe even newspapers) which arise in this Age of the Gab to offend our ears and
our sensibilities.
But no sooner had the good professor made his point - and sought out the most delicate and politically correct way to express himself - than he was attacked in this modern
manner of viciousness for having
the temerity to raise a perfectly
fair question.
You can, perhaps, understand, if not condone, the teachers' representatives who seek to defend the inadequacies of their profession, branding him with that good old insult of ''reactionary''.
But I find it incomprehensible that some parents' groups attacked him for his ''insult to hard-working teachers''. On whose side are they? Of course there are hard-working, even competent teachers who know their English very well. But if Ms Ann Hill of the Scottish School Boards' Association thinks Professor Jones does not have a point, she is living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
I'm sure he can readily respond to her challenge to produce the evidence. So can any one of us if we use our eyes and ears.
I know a head master who scans the letters going out to parents from members of his staff. He needs to; because the classroom howlers come not only from the children but from their teachers.
The problem is that they, too, came through the system of the seventies when few were taught the formalities of grammar and punctuation. At least one of my own journalist sons is envious of the old man's luck in having a proper training. It is a baggage so easy to carry around for the rest of your life and we did them a gross disservice to withhold it. In a world where you can hardly escape the written expression, punctuation comes into the same category as punctuality. It is simply good manners.
In guiding your reader, you are making it possible to understand at the first reading, instead of having to disentangle the ambiguities.
Nor do you have to be a pedant to take a pride in your language. Within liberal bounds, there is ample room for individual style and expression. But when youngsters don't know the rules, they tend to take refuge in the slovenly, accentuating the glottal stop and deliberately distorting their language in the caricature fashion of ''the boy done good''.
Similarly, in mental arithmetic, the dependence on calculators has reached the point of farce. In his daily quiz on Radio Two, Ed Stewart slips in the occasional question of simple multiplication. Otherwise intelligent-sounding contestants of that under-40s group are lost when faced with ''seven-times-eight''.
That same programme, generally within the reach of most of us, throws up some other deficiencies
in our educational system, particularly with regard to the history of our own century.
In recent times, quite smart talkers had no idea what VE-Day stood for; they had never heard of Sam Goldwyn, or Perry Como; they thought Dr Johnson produced the first helicopter and that George Formby played the trumpet.
Asked about Alamein, the only Monty the man had heard about was the full one! And finally last week: which Scottish poet is remembered on January 25? The lady had never heard of Robert Burns. At that point I went apoplectic.
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