Warning:ofensiv, politikaly incorekt post
I flew over from Brazil on Thursday and, as usual, had raydio 4 on the raydio wen I was drivin out of Lundun. One of the subjeks on the program was wether Inglish shood becum fonetik as in sum uther youropian countries (sorry, had to spell that properly for any younger readers!!). Aparently, one in five childrin leeve prymary skool unable to reed or spel propurly. Ther ar lots of reezuns aparantly for this (althow I didn’t hear the wurd stupid menshund too much) and the solushun for this is to simplify the langwidge. If we do this, so I hurd on the raydio, all uther Inglish speeking c(oun)tries will folow within a few munths! Wunderful. Lets change an intire langwidge just so stupid peeple dont haf to feel stupid! Lets go one step furtha and stop uzing long wurdz, no one uses them anyway. Letz just modify -upgrade reely, its about tyme - one of the most wondefuly exprssiv and diskriptiv langwidges in the wurld so that we can avoid making childrin feel stupid.
Oops, did it again. I called some children stupid. Well that is sort of the hidden message in this (yes I’ve stopped the phonetic spelling - was it pissing you off too???). We feel awful that these children are really dense so our solution is to alter the language to accommodate the thickos and ignore the rest of the inhabitants of the English-speaking world who have, due to a modicum of intelligence, a decent grasp on the language.
Ok, I’m being a bit extreme, maybe, but as I’m sure you can tell, I was somewhat riled by this. I think that someone has mixed up two very different words here. There are some children who have a much harder time learning than others and I think EVERY effort should be made to help and encourage these children. This post is aimed at the other children, parents of those children, the teachers of those children and the people who came up with the retarded idea of changing OUR language. I don’t believe that one in five children are leaving primary school unable to read or write due to learning difficulties. Maybe one in twenty, due to legitimate learning problems. I don’t think the rest of these children are thick, dense or stupid. I think they are just plain lazy. They can’t be bothered and is anyone really surprised? The parents can’t be bothered to help (I wonder if they read to their children every night?) and some teachers can’t be bothered (most are too snowed under by unnecesary paper work to worry about a minority of lazy kids at the back of the class).
So, let’s put more money into our education system to enable teachers to have access to, and by default give the children access to, more material to make reading and writing interesting. No.
Let’s try to encourage parents into giving their own children more encouragement in school (something that I personally think shouldn’t need encouragement - they’re your kids for God’s sake!) No.
Let’s stop ‘electing’ illiterate, scruffy uneducated buffoons as role models for children. No.
How about campaigning against the media misspelling words the same way people do when using txt on mobiles. No.
Let’s simplify the entire English language so that we can write the words exactly as they sound with no regard whatsoever to the hardworking, interested children who have no problem in learning how to spell. The majority in fact. YES. That’s the way forward. What genius thinking. Why haven’t we done it before?
Why? Because we’ve never lived in a world where dumbing down has become the norm before. Where it’s considered so un-cool to be intelligent or to take care in your appearance. So un-hip to be seen making an effort to learn to express yourself as eloquently as possible. So extremely old fashioned to have any degree of self-respect.
What incentive is given to children to take pride in learning? They can leave school with little or no education and sign on to receive money from the government for doing nothing - and earn more in some cases than if they actually went out to get a job. It’s an option no self-respecting person would take but that’s just the problem - these children are growing up without any self-respect.
So, maybe it’s about time we stopped accepting stupid ideas to destroy our culture even further and started looking at real, effective and useful ideas to start building it back up.
Please feel free to leave comments agreeing or disagreeing with me.
Tags: children, education, phonetic spelling, stupid people
- May 26, 2008
- Posted under General
- 2 Responses
This post echoes my annoyances and fears so correctly, I am somewhat speechless.
I can understand an error in language if the writer is ignorant. That I can handle. But I often see people who are not only idiots, but also try to pass off their mistakes as being acceptable new age SMSese. It ‘makes things simple,’ they say.
The radio discussion was shocking. Thankfully, in India, that day is still some way off.
You don’t, as we say, know the half of it. I have taught college English to freshmen and sophomores since 1975, and the decline in skills, interest, and analysis is beyond depressing. My students are immensely nice people; they want to get ahead; they want to succeed, which they define as making a great deal of money. But they cannot conceive that the ability to read (that is, to access the data from a page of printed words), the ability to analyze the import of those words, the ability to make conclusions about and from the text, and (finally) the ability to express their own conclusions in correct, pointed, specific prose, supported by empirical evidence from the text . . . has anything to do with the delights they feel are waiting for them. They are sweetly passive, charmingly uninformed, only occasionally ashamed of their ignorance, which (I assume) they take as their birthright because their parents are only slightly better-informed. I assume that their elementary-school teachers had a few more facts or factoids at their disposal, but that is open to question. Of course, this is the lament that every generation makes about the one coming up, but it is no less poignant for its repetitive futility. On a far brighter note, I am looking forward to hearing you play at Symphony Space on this Wednesday (9 PM): THERE’s something to look forward to as the West declines!