Education reform must include English competence

y attention was drawn to a letter in another section of the Press, submitted by Professor Michael Howard, titled Education reform must focus on standard English. He asserted that Barbadian young people should learn to speak and write standard English if they want to secure higher paying jobs as well as compete internationally in global markets.

The late Leonard ‘Lenny’ St Hill once remarked that “the money paying out in standard English”. He, like Professor Howard, was making the point that students need to have a command of the grammatical and syntactical rules of the English language. He would have agreed that conversing in the international marketplace must be conducted in formal English.

My own concern is less with high-paying jobs or how “the money paying out” than with the broad goals of education as a mechanism for total national development. It is for this reason that I concur with Professor Howard’s assertion that the Barbados education reform must of necessity focus on standard English. We inhabit a region that is increasingly in a state of intellectual and cultural retreat in the more meaningful sense of those two terms. We are inhabiting a state of intellectual and cultural attrition, if you wish.

As a professor of economics at the UWI, Howard has himself noted a decline in language competence both in the spoken and written forms. He noted that some of his university students “refused” to contribute to class discussions or ask questions because they were afraid to speak standard English. Presumably, this applies to tutorial classes where students are required to speak up and express their points of view. Language communication is vital to the educational process at all levels, from nursery to post-doctoral. Increasingly, students at all levels are prone to retreat into the dialect to articulate their opinions. Many do not know or understand the appropriateness of language use. In some cases, they seem not to care. A student who passed CXC English Language in fourth form remonstrated when he was told to repeat the subject in the fifth year. As far as he was concerned, “I passed dat a’ready.”

There are three factors that are influencing current trends. The first is that much of education has lost its soul. Students no longer value education for its intrinsic value because, like so much in the culture, it has become transactional. One is forever making the point that formal schooling functions within the context of a culture. A Ms Kelly from Champlain, Illinois called Down to Brass Tacks on Monday. A teacher of chemistry, she complained about the work ethic of her students. She noted that her students, generally speaking, want less work, more time to do that work and higher grades for increasingly modest performance. Any criticism of submitted work is seen as the teacher’s dislike of the particular student.

The attitude to language competence is one that became obvious in my last years as a teacher. I returned a piece of work on which I had to make a number of corrections. On receiving the essay, the female student quite loudly and quite crudely asked: “What is all these red marks on my paper?” The truth was that the spelling was poor, the sentence structure or syntax was weak and the thought process was imprecise and non-sequential. I once had to tell a class that they thought that they could write anything that passed as English. They realised that one could not add two plus two and reach five, but that it didn’t matter in the use of English. The teacher was expected to guess their meaning. I was aware that many in that generation were losing the feeling for language and the desire to write and speak well.

That brings me to the second point about literacy. Declining literacy standards are a consequence of the move from the book culture to a visual culture that has eroded the efficacy of the written word. Attention spans have also diminished, not only in children but in adults as well. The TV screen, the cell phone and the tablet have replaced the written text. A vast entertainment popular culture has tended to erode the gravitas of disciplined learning.

Thirdly, decades ago, we moved away from teaching grammar in schools and a whole generation of teachers and students have only a fleeting acquaintance with the rules of English grammar as teacher John Goddard used to instruct his pupils. A young moderator on Down to Brass Tacks, when he first took to moderating the programme, it was clear that he had no knowledge of the past participle of any verb. I observed that he should be supplied with a copy of Nesfield’s English Grammar if it still exists. In the meantime, we have exalted the Bajan dialect to the sanctity of a creed. My former teacher and esteemed Barbadian poet Edward ‘Kamau’ Brathwaite consecrated it with the imprimatur of a ‘Nation Language’. Nothing wrong with that; it has its usages. If I am writing the great Barbadian novel, I can’t have my working-class protagonists speaking with an Oxbridge style and accent. Verisimilitude is required, but Professor Howard’s point still holds.