IT was very sad to read of the 11-year-olds who had been so overcoached in their English lessons that many of them, apparently, produced identical words, phrases and sentences in the national tests, no matter what the topic was. Prescription has gone mad when anxiety about national test results and league table position drives some teachers to squash children into identical cubes, as if in a 1950s steel factory.
Teaching like this is the ultimate horror: school as production line, teacher as machine, pupil as manufactured product. It is the equivalent of factory farming for children, turning out 21st-century battery hens. Learning to use our language should be alive, dynamic, imaginative, exciting, not mechanical and dreary. Chugga chugga chugga, drip drip drip.
It all reminds me of the kind of brain- deadening exercises I used to do at school. We were given a subject-verb-object sentence, such as “The boy kicked the ball”. Our task was to extend it with three adjectives or descriptors for the two nouns and three embellishments for the verb. “How, when, where and why”, the teacher used to rant. Perhaps he still wanders the streets in retirement, eyes bulging, shouting his mantra at startled citizens.
We hapless junior proles beavered away, producing such literary masterpieces as: “On a sunny day, in Gasworks Boulevard, the tall, blond, left-handed boy kicked the round, brown, leather ball very hard”, as you do when writing about the nation’s favourite game. It was rubbish.
The more sparky members of the class secretly penned their own versions under the desk and passed them round: “On a sunny day, the tall, brilliant, handsome boy kicked the small, weedy, boring teacher in the nuts.” Crude but therapeutic.
The complaint from national test markers that children in the same class are writing in identical terms, whatever the topic, sounds bizarre. What is happening? Does it mean that, if children have had some phrases about spiders drilled relentlessly into their skulls, they will use identical expressions to describe second-hand car dealers, or mortuary attendants? “The fat, hairy, evil-looking estate agent scuttled towards the helpless clients, spinning his lethal silky thread around their desperately writhing bodies”. Sounds apt.
Detaching language from its meaning is criminal, as well as ineffective. I once went into a school in America. “Today’s word is ‘radiator’,” the teacher announced. Pupils had to spell it, slice it, pickle it, put it in sandwiches, swallow it. I wondered whether tomorrow’s word would be “oligarchy” or “photosynthesis”? “If there’s one thing I really like for my tea it’s photosynthesis and chips, with plenty of oligarchy sprinkled on it.”
I used to travel to school with a friend who did A-level history. During the journey, while everyone else played hangman, he would sit clutching a much-thumbed essay, written by his own teacher when at university, desperately committing it to memory. “The facade of Versailles had all the impish wit of Moli re, the pathos of Corneille, the melancholy of Racine, and the cow pies of Desperate Dan . . .”
Of course I may be mistaken about the last phrase. It was pure Pseuds’ Corner prose, but it got him a university scholarship. Unfortunately, crammed to the eyeballs, he ended up with a poor degree.
Good teachers of English are perfectly capable of producing people who can write well enough to engage and excite the reader. The frightened ones, by contrast, are stuffing children’s minds with identical wads of candy floss, doing nobody a service, least of all the poor beggars paralysed for life by the sheer banality of it. Worse, their classes achieve poorer grades than they would have got if writing had been made interesting.
Many newly-qualified teachers say they are too terrified to try anything adventurous. They have been warned to stick like glue to Qualifications and Curriculum Authority work schemes, no deviation, nothing so frivolous as a project. What are we doing to people? Here is the next generation, desperate to innovate, yet some are being suffocated on entry. No wonder nearly half are quitting within three years.
Let us try one more extended sentence. “On a sunny day in Swinesville School, the incandescent, angry, browned-off teachers kicked all the mindless, mechanical prescriptions into the large, round, welcoming wastepaper basket, and then skipped off to the nearest warm, friendly, cheap-and-cheerful pub, where they planned some stimulating, imaginative, home-made lessons, to stop their festering, decaying, over-prescribed brains from finally turning into a fine, spongy, garden mulch”.
I hope the terror-stricken will copy it out and commit it to memory.
