I have recently been listening to the BBC’s centennial tribute to WWI, “Tommies”, a drama series partly based on many letters of real people involved in the war. As always when reading or hearing this material I am struck by the eloquence and clarity of the writers, many of whom were educated members of the English-speaking working class. It is said that our average intelligence has been steadily increasing for more than a century; those letters make me suspect errors of measurement. The writers had very well-functioning brains, I suspect because, unlike those of their age today, they had been thoroughly educated in their own language. They had the kind of language schooling I was lucky enough to receive in the 1950s and 60s. We were first taught to write and to spell, then we were slowly taken through the analysis of language structure, known as ‘parsing’. We had to be able to identify the class of every word in a sentence, that is to say to identify the work the words and phrases were doing. An adverb qualified a verb: she smiled sardonically, or grimly, or broadly. The adjective described the noun: rich, drunk, over-weight, yellow etc. Prepositions preceded nouns, connecting with verbs and telling us more about them: He went into the room, she sat beside the bed, they crowded around the jester.
Have succeeded is the present perfect form of the verb, and has a different meaning from had succeeded, in the past perfect tense or, as we would have called it, the pluperfect.
The educators of today have dispensed with all that as unnecessary; the near-illiteracy of many students entering university has been the result. We don’t need that technical knowledge to express ourselves, they declared, and that is partly true. But self-expression is not the only, or even the most important reason to drill down into language. Most importantly, it forced us to think, and think bloody hard, about what we were reading, writing and saying, because our spoken grammar was also rigorously corrected by our teachers. Thinking about how you express yourself, and how others have expressed themselves on the page, inevitably develops the linguistic powers of the brain and those are the skills that enable us to think coherently about, well, pretty much everything. Of course we also have to think logically when doing maths, or chemistry, or even, if we are properly taught, when studying history. But those are activities that for most people belong exclusively to the schoolroom and the lab. Language we take everywhere and use constantly. We use language to persuade, to defend, and to question the statements of others. We use language to live and thrive.
Now we are in the age of relativism and truthiness. A thing, an action, may be right or wrong, wise or foolish, depending on how we feel about it. A thing may be true or false entirely based on whether we feel it to be so. I feel sure that generations taught to read and write thoughtfully, to understand how thought is prepared and put on a page, would not have fallen into this intellectual abyss. Because receiving that kind of education makes you invest your working hours in thinking analytically to the point that it becomes a personal habit and, importantly, easy to do.
There is a corollary aspect to being taught to parse: a word is an adverb, or it is not an adverb. This choice is correct, that is not. Ho hum. There is no wound, no shame, in making such a quotidian mistake in the classroom. Being told every day, repeatedly, that you are correct, or are mistaken and this is why, breeds a mind disposed to draw distinctions between what is right and what is not. It builds a framework around which to manage your life.
The majority of people now living have not had the benefit of such training. They were led through a grey world, where effort was more important than achievement and distinctions between correct and incorrect something to be avoided if possible, for fear of damaging self-esteem. Now here we are, with the resultant disaster before us, in his orange and vengeful enormity: President Donald Trump, the man who threw truth gaily, openly, out the window and too few cared enough to stop him. The disaster is real; people are dying in their thousands. I may be driving on the last tank of gas I get for some time.
I genuinely believe that if we had continued to educate our children with the rigour with which I was nurtured, Trump would never have been elected because the voting public would not only have seen through his lies, they would have considered them important enough to disqualify him from office.
Play With Strangers 