The more I think and write about how English literature and language is taught to teenagers, the more I’m convinced these twin pillars of the secondary school curriculum is cracked and crumbling under the massive weight of the cultural change it is being forced to bear. If we wait for credulous politicians or appointed regulators to act on pupils’ behalf, we’ll be bitterly disappointed because, as recent history has repeatedly demonstrated to us, Silicon Valley exhibits all the ethical caution of a tsunami when it comes to stemming the tide of social media malpractice. Cultural climate change can be just as devastating as the real thing.
Fearful politicians demanding more censorship and tighter government control of social media merely demonstrate how little of this kind of thinking they’re capable of. The hypocrisy is glaring. Their willingness to abandon profoundly important democratic freedoms and weaken civil society is a cure far worse than the disease. It’s the selfish, shallow response of Luddites throughout history, who fail to do the hard thinking necessary when technology threatens their existence.
The English curriculum as it stands was the product of a more civil print era: an age in which mail was private and it was assumed that integrity was, if not a necessary quality for a leader in any walk of life, at least a desirable one. As all good English teachers know, the past is indeed a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Teachers following the English curriculum don’t nourish pupils on a reading diet of lies and deceit. They teach Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and The Go-Between, for the truths they tell, just as much as the artistry employed in the telling. A few lessons exploring persuasive techniques or analysing obviously biased writing in newspapers or magazines, are only ever a minor counterweight in a curriculum built around texts and authors selected for their sincerity, insight and truth.
More cultural misalignment happens when teenagers are taught to write. Since the Seventies, personal expression has completely overwhelmed any kind of English teaching that relies on rules or structures. The idea that teenagers needed strong levels of knowledge about semantics, etymology, rhetoric or basic grammar rules before they could express themselves effectively or well was completely usurped by a belief that self-expression mattered more. The thought that it might be useful to know that a sentence really does require a finite verb was unceremoniously buried beneath mountains of mawkish doggerel about animal rights and eating disorders.
I vividly recall a training session in the Nineties where an examiner displayed a pupil’s GCSE creative essay, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, which she then proceeded to award marks to, on the basis of “what the child was trying to say”.
In the US, this kind of curriculum has led to some university teachers setting aside time to teach basic writing skills to new undergraduates. A report published by the US National Center for Education Statistics as long ago as 2011 concluded that “only one in four [high-school seniors] can construct an essay that is coherent and well structured, with ideas presented clearly and logically”.
I have previously argued for a reduction of the 50 per cent GCSE English writing requirement to about 25 per cent, and have suggested that boards set only tasks that were genuinely age appropriate. Perhaps what that 25 per cent should be devoted to is just this one, vital and age-appropriate skill: how to construct a coherent, articulate, logical essay.
I have also argued that the roughly 50 per cent of English teachers’ time and effort that goes into teaching pupils how texts work and how to convince an exam marker you’ve learned all that, remains a sound investment, just about. Add to that the 25 per cent of time gained if you reduce their writing to just one essay, and 75 per cent of every GCSE English pupil’s curriculum time could be spent preparing them much better for the chaotic world of English usage shortly to confront them.
A new English curriculum would devote time and thought to scrutinising how English is actually used on screen as well as in print. It might seem a daunting task but at least someone, somewhere, would be shouldering the responsibility of explaining to teenagers that almost every encounter they will have with the English language as adults, in work and in play, will be hugely influenced by the increasingly wide range of technologies used to deliver it to them. They can learn how vital it is to research the source of the things they read; how best to feel informed, not misinformed. They can learn to estimate the crucial, personal risks that inevitably now accrue about what they write; about where they write it, who gets to read it, judge it and now, thanks to those same Luddite politicians, even police it.
More time can be spent looking closely at real-world examples of online threads, debates, arguments and disputes, so that some socially healthy guidance and principles can emerge that will prove invaluable in work and in the family.
I’m far from alone in expressing concern about the way texting has replaced speaking on the phone, or social media tools militate against articulate writing - trends that seem to have led, inevitably, to the widespread substitution of emoji for words.
Anyone who thinks that emoji aren’t a substitute for words and even whole phrases, that they are some special, amusing case or nothing more than visual enhancement, is being naive.
The emoji is nothing more than the crudest, most inane and obvious product of one of the technology industry’s most successful sales pitches: saving time.
For example, in reply to a carefully worded and thought-through formal business email I sent recently, all I got back was a rosy-cheeked, yellow, smiling face, a thumbs up and the single word “thanks” placed inside a box, which, of course, means even that hadn’t been typed.
And social media tools have gone even further than that, weaponising the English language itself so that single words have power in isolation, not as part of a sentence. Why bother to debate or argue with anyone when simply spitting out the word “fascist” into the social ether is enough to exclude someone from the wider community - a practical and efficient means to brand them untouchable.
Increasingly people care less about the sentence and more about the word. Aided by the breathtakingly foolish notion that you can categorise hate, slowly and steadily, a handy mini-dictionary of insults is being collated so that instead of thinking before you write, instead of reflecting on what you wish to say, you can just spit out the single word knowing it will do the same destructive job it’s done so effectively before. That is how a social media mob behaves, hurling simple words and phrases like grenades: “gammon”; “remoaner”; “fake news”.
That technology businesses are sensitive to these criticisms is evidenced by their creating a countermessage, the entirely specious idea of “digital literacy”, just as, more than a decade ago, they used exactly the same approach to push the seductive lie that there was such a thing as a “digital native”. Marketing techniques such as this work well when you’re selling a laptop: not when you’re selling ideas.
It’s no accident that what much of this new technology does is to automate tasks for us and simplify decision making. A mail service scans your email for key words so that it can offer you a choice of pre-written responses: clichés on command. A social media site points you to like-minded folk on the basis of what you share and “like”.
Even the act of admiring something has been debased by that simple four-letter word; that “like” is technological currency, valuable data to be traded.
When you look back through history, automation is so often the core benefit that any new technology offers. The printing press, the steam-powered loom, the robotic factory assembly line - all of these physically automated and accelerated repetitive manual labour. Now, computer algorithms replace individual traders making decisions for financial institutions; translation software replaces translators.
The direction of travel is clear. Automating language itself is next. Prepare yourself for a lot more of those bizarre voices telling you where your train is going to stop next; voices where you can actually hear at what point the audio file has been cut and pasted.
One of the most convincing arguments for the importance of art, particularly literature, is its capacity to refresh our view of the world that behaviour has rendered stale, almost invisible.
And yet we are walking blindly into a world in which language formulation and exchange is increasingly being automated - a world where technology will negate the life-enhancing purpose of art, of language itself. The rather noble idea central to English teaching for decades, that the curriculum empowers teenagers linguistically, is as outdated as the nobility itself.
Despite this, ironically, my proposition will not be as radical a change as it sounds for English teachers, who are used to dealing with essential human truths. After all, if you want to empower teenagers today, you need to tell them some harsh truths about technology.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author
This article originally appeared in the Tes magazine issue of 25 January 2019 under the headline “Love all, trust few, send emoji to none”
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