They know no better
An interview of mine published recently in the
Telegraph
Produced this, rather interesting, exchange of
email:
From: ML
Sent: 03
August 2013 08:54
To:
Sugata Mitra
Subject:
Your latest pronouncement
Sir, (or
is that unnecessary?)
You are
doing the young people of this country no service by your pronouncements.
Whatever
does "writing in a cryptic way " mean, and do you move in such
restricted circles that only people who are like you can understand the code
you are using?
From my
experience, spellcheckers and grammar corrections are frequently dependent on
the writer's understanding grammar and spelling, anyway.
I quote
the experience of my brother in law, whose daughter, albeit extremely
intelligent, was dyslexic. She would look up spellings in a spellchecker,
choose the wrong one and then enter it into the online dictionary. Her
father had frequently to peruse that dictionary and check the spellchecker!
Apart
from practical use, the glory of our language has to be preserved inasfar as it
is possible to do so. I do not know your age, but my husband and I have
been involved in computers since they were enormous machines with a room of
their owm. We know that technology changes very rapidly, and whatever
statements are made will be out of date very quickly.
The
English language is a beautiful thing when properly used. When it is not
properly used, it is sloppy, careless and often incomprehensible. Beware
of making such statements when you really do not know what you are doing.
Even though I believe that you simply want to get your name in the press, it is
dangerous.
Sincerely
(and I am suncere in this)
On 3 Aug 2013, at 09:42, Sugata Mitra
wrote:
Thanks
for your mail.
Of the
various responses I got to the Telegraph article, people over the age of 50
were uniformly rude, in perfect English.
People
below the age of 30 seemed happy with the article. "U R Cool'' wrote one.
The rude
ones want to whip the cool ones into submission.
Interesting....
Sugata
Sugata
Mitra
________________________________________
ML:
I do not think that I was rude. To tell you that
you are wrong is not rude, it is simply a statement of truth. If you
interpreted my email as rude, you were mistaken. I simply think you were
misguided. The younger ones, of course, would agree with you: they know
no better. I well remember, when I was teaching (French, not English),
that the younger members of the English department often, very often, had to
ask me if their use of English was correct, as they were not sure about their
own use of English. I fear that at least two generations of pupils have
been neglected. Perhaps (and please remember, I do not know your age) you
were in one of those generations.
I cannot believe that any French professor would
be so, well, dismissive of the incorrect use of his or her native
language. I wonder if you suffered from dyslexia. If so, it is not
your fault and you can blame those who did not help you.
Should you ever wish me to help you, please
ask. If I have time, I could even proofread for you. I have no wish
to whip anyone into anything, nor yet to make them submissive. You are
not a professor of English usage and can, perhaps, be excused.
It is a fact, not an opinion, that many people
will ignore the skills of a person, if that person's use of language is
defective. I myself, when listening to a speech or presentation, if the
speaker uses language badly so that meaning is unclear, will stop listening to
the gist of what is being said, and start listening for the errors. That,
no doubt,could be because my life has been spent teaching a language, were it
not that my husband, who has never been an educator, is just the same.
Finally, please remember that you have a
successful career. Your students, whether they like it or not, will be
judged not only on their academic success but on their presentation. If
the choice is between two candidates of equal academic value, but one uses
ungrammatical language, it might be the cause of his or her being discarded.
Yes, I am old, but I am not senile.
Good luck. I hope your career goes
from strength to strength.
ML
I was silent and she wrote again.
From: ML
Sent: 04
August 2013 08:58
To:
Sugata Mitra
Subject:
A final note
Obviously, you think you have to have the last word. And equally
obviously, your education has had a bad effect upon you. What a
shame. We teachers should all be sacked and children left to educate
themselves. What point is there in teaching hoi polloi to communicate
effectively with the majority of other people? Why should we learn other
languages when we can communicate by Iphone?
And what
use is history? It is all over and done with!
Let us
abolish geography. We can see it all on the TV set or
whatever follows that.
Surely
you, in your job, must realise that most technology becomes obsolete, relatively
quickly.
However,
reading and writing are lifelong skills that only let you down if either you
have not learned them or you have not practiced them frequently.
I know
that I am one of the relatively few people who glory in written and spoken good
language. In fact, I am part of a group locally, to whom the local NHS
sends leaflets ahead of publication, for correction and the elimination of
jargon (which I detest even more than bad grammar). Why use " going
forward' instead of "in the future"? I was one of those who told the
NHS that the phrase "Liverpool Death Pathway" was cruel and
misleading.
I know
that you will not succeed in your crusade to have grammar eliminated from ths
school curriculum. I believe that you know that and that your aim was to
make yourself better known.
It
worked but not, I believe, to your advantage in the end.
Sorry, I
cannot prolong this correspondence. I must get back to my knitting.
ML
On 4 Aug
2013, at 11:31, Sugata Mitra wrote:
Actually
I quite agree with most of the things you have said.
Its just
that you didn't understand the difference between 'we don't need to teach
spelling' and 'we don't need to learn spelling'. I said the former and not the
latter.
Reading
comprehension is a serious problem nowadays :)
Sugata
Mitra
________________________________________
From: ML
Sent: 04
August 2013 13:49
To:
Sugata Mitra
Subject:
Re: A final note
Indeed I do understand the difference. But children will not
learn in the crowded classrooms of today, unless someone teaches them.
I learned
without being taught because, believe it or not, I have (or rather had) a
pretty intelligent mind and a grandmother who devoted all her time to reading
to me. The result was that I astonished visitors by reading at the age of
2 and by 3, my parents had to hide their letters from me as I could read
handwriting too. I had the library tickets for the whole family and, by
the age of 9, had exhausted the children's library. I was given
permission at that age to join the adult library. So, I had 2 great
advantages.
But
most children do not have a family member whose time is entirely devoted to
them. They come from homes where there are no books and where both parents
work. Indeed, many parents will have a reading age below 11 years.
Therefore, my grammar, comprehension and spelling did not have to be
taught. Would that all children were like that. While the present
situation exists, we have to teach them.
Interestingly, when children were taught French through books, they
hardly ever made spelling errors in that language. In about 20 years I
met only one pupil who misspelled in French. it turned out that she was
dyslexic. And, in time, the pupils also learned to speak French,
too and correctly. I was pretty fluent when I took my exams, yet we had
no particular emphasis on speaking.
Once we
started teaching them through an oral method we threw the baby out with the
bath water. They made spelling errors but were no better at speaking,
because they were in classes of over 30 and 3 forty minute lessons per week are
not enough. Yet, by A Level (I was a senior A Level examiner for
spoken French, so I travelled around schools and colleges) they were truly
fluent. Their written French was another matter. They had not
really been taught that, in written work, bad grammar often causes
misunderstanding.
This
really is my final missive. My knitting is being neglected.
ML
On 5 Aug 2013, at 15:25, Sugata Mitra
wrote:
If you
knew how to search on the Internet, you would find I am trying to get children
their grannies back through technology. Its called the Granny Cloud, and
thousands of children in Colombia, India and other places have spent hundreds
of hours with their English grannies.
And yes,
children can, and do, teach themselves spelling, grammar and general
communication, using the Internet.
Anyway, I
do despise terms like 'moving forward' or 'out of the box' and all one
has to do is ask a group of children if these are good usage or not. No need to
teach, be a granny.
Lastly, I
will remember your phrase 'they know no better' with horror. It is this belief
with which the Victorians destroyed country after country.....but thats another
story.
Knit
away.
Sugata
Mitra
Her last email to me.
ML:
Adieu