Well written. The truth is often so easy to see but hard to get past the gatekeepers of the ‘education system’. I’ll give you an example.
I was a ‘teacher’ a lifetime ago charged with teaching early teens English. Sounds typical? Well, not so when you consider the elements that comprised the classes I had to ‘teach’. I was working in a ‘working class’ community comprised of a mixture of children. Some from English-speaking backgrounds, albeit from families where education was not a priority: education beyond the limits of the basic 3 Rs, sufficient to get a job in the steelworks or associated industries in that region was deemed adequate by their parents. They needed the money.
Others were from migrant communities where ‘english’ was not the principal language of communication. These were migrant families often fleeing the chaos of post WWII Europe. Many of these young people struggled with English at first. It was little wonder.
The syllabus/curriculum, it appears the two are interchangeable today, was firmly rooted in ‘teaching’ the elements of grammar, parts of speech, sentence, phrase and paragraph construction with a bit of comprehension to demonstrate your ‘learning’. When English words become interoperable, either noun, verb, adverb etc that creates difficulties for non-English speakers. You can’t simply say this is a verb, period. Often it ain’t.
Please don’t mention literature! If you have little understanding of the structure of the language Shakespeare as a written format on the page is totally confusing and time-wasting. The nuances of Gerard Manly Hopkins poetry were just a waste of time. Ode to a Grecian urn? What’s a Grecian urn? About $10.00 a day. Local joke.
Most of these youngsters were, as I said earlier, destined for employment in the steelworks or associated heavy industries. The jobs paid well, more than teaching. Jobs like that paid my way through university. They and their families could see little point in learning anything beyond basic communication: enough to get a job working on a blast furnace or coke oven for example.
This point was repeatedly brought home to me by comments such as ‘why do I need grammar or Shakespeare? When I leave school I’ll get a job that pays more than yours and I won’t have to drive a shit old car like you do’. My car was actually a souped-up Riley, but to them it was old. Just like me I guess at less than 30 years of age.
So what did I do? Well, I started teaching what I called functional English. Forget about parsing sentences for verbs, nouns, etc. What I tried to instil in the students was a grasp of how the English language made communication easier, their working circumstances safer and their chances of better employment possible. Did it work? I still don’t know.
When the ‘schools inspector’ came around to assess my performance I was berated for not ‘teaching to the syllabus’ and warned that I would not get certification if I persisted in this rebellious attitude. I argued, in both meanings of the term, that teaching the rigid syllabus was not what was needed or useful to this cohort of students. But when you need the job and the salary what do you do?
Dear reader, I resigned. Shows my grasp of literature.
It appears that little has changed since 1968 in Australia, or the USA. The bean counters are still ru(i)ning the education system.
