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What you can get from High School | ||
Tags: School Education | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ichiro Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6210 days ago 111 posts - 152 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese, French Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Malay | Message 1 of 4 06 November 2010 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
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In general, I'm of the opinion that things get better and better, not worse and worse; and I scoff at the idea that the world is dumbing down, because in these rich times there's so much more of _everything_, that inevitably there seems to be more stupid stuff alongside all the general improvements.
But I've just picked up, for the first time in a long while, my copy of Anthony Burgess's 'Language Made Plain', his general survey of language and it's rules and tools, and found the following, which made me doubt a little bit about the current direction of our English state school system. Writing in 1975, Burgess could optimistically consider the following. What does the forum think? ---- "One of the incontestable advantages of the British State Comprehensive School is the opportunity it grants for almost limitless choice in the linguistic field - in theory, anyway: we have still far too few teachers of Oriental languages and far too many teachers of French. Any school should be able to offer, in addition to specialist courses in Modern Languages, a supplementary (or even alternative) course in Linguistic Elements, in which the bases of General Phonetics could be started in the first year (the eleven-plus year, that is), gentle comparative work on the Romance languages could follow in the second year, and reading German - and even Russian - could be added in successive years. One could envisage a pleasant elementary paper on General Language, in which questions like the following could be asked - 1) Describe the organic processes involved in uttering the word 'thing' 2) Render your own pronunciation of the following into phonetic (IPA) script - 'Time and the hour run through the roughest day.' 3) Break the following down into its constituent morphemes, describing the function of each: 'John's sister was unwilling to provide him with any financial assistance.' 4) Transcribe the following phonetically: fille (French); figlia (Italian); filha (Portuguese); hija (Spanish). Describe the adventures that the Latin word filla has undergone in changing into these four words. 5) German Zahn and English tooth are cognate with the Gothic tunthus. What processes of historical change do you think the German and English words have undergone since the time when they both resembled tunthus? 6) Write down the following names in a) Arabic b) Cyrillic c) Greek script: Shakespeare; London; New York; Washington 7) Free translation of a passage from a French, Italian, Spanish or German newspaper." Edited by Ichiro on 07 November 2010 at 2:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5848 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 4 06 November 2010 at 7:44pm | IP Logged |
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Ichiro, could you please choose a more meaningful title for your thread? The title of a thread should indicate the topic of the thread, "Oh dear" is not a topic. Otherwise I would make a suggestion, but I think that you have more ideas about your own topic, so please be creative. You can change the title by editing your first post.
Kind regards, Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 06 November 2010 at 7:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5174 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 3 of 4 07 November 2010 at 11:03am | IP Logged |
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Ichiro, I have a great respect for Anthony Burgess, but I think this was very idealistic of him or an example of his tongue-in-cheek humour. Remembering the old British state system, particularly secondary modern schools, I think my answer to what you could get out of it would have been "nothing, other than the desire and motivation to correct the damage to my self-esteem by learning after school" perhaps this is a little harsh as I have little idea on what modern education is like. However I do think the emphasis is still on getting lots of qualifications (I have them in spades!) which are not going to be used and with no system in place to revise or re-learn what you have learnt and so be useful to yourself and the world.
Sorry for such a negative point of view, but I love learning - perhaps by some people's standards I am highly educated, but I owe little of it to school and I am glad it is long behind me. I feel the weakness of most education, certainly the British system is that the teachers view their job as being second best to what they wanted to do and often - in my time at least - appear/ed covertly hostile to the children and the poor careers guidance also means that people like me end up studying for something that is not what they could do best in. I feel I should have been helped into language learning and I feel very let down by my schooling, despite a relatively high level of education. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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