Don't apologise, Z! But I do think you're being unnecessarily gloomy.

At GCSE level English certainly students answering questions on Shakespeare are not required to have read the whole play!!

- Are you absolutely sure about this? Because that certainly wasn't the case when I left teaching in 2003. To receive a GCSE pass grade, you had to have studied an entire Shakepeare play. The syllabus was quite explicit about that.

Listen to many young people talking on the train, in a café, in the cinema for God's sake!!!!

If you listened to me talking in the cinema you wouldn't get much sparkling or incisive prose, either. When young people talk to their peers in an informal situation, they're going to reach for lower register language and probably superficial, chatty subjects. Not just teens, either: I travelled by train down to Brimingham today with a bunch of women ranging from about 35-60, and all they talked about, loudly, was kids and weddings. (Nearly drove me round the bend!) Smalltalk is no indicator of anything major happening in language.

<Added>

Oh, I agree with you about Big Brother. I find the whole concept of that programme disturbing because it seems to me that bad behaviour is encouraged, and then rewarded and celebrated (and inevitably imitated).

BUT you need to bear in mind that the producers of the programme deliberately choose, after much psychological profiling, contestants who are going to be as abrasive as possible, because the tv execs think that equates to maximum entertainment. Many of the BB personalities are chosen *specifically because* they are inarticulate, and are therefore more likely to resort to abuse and/or attention-seeking behaviour.

It's unhelpful in the extreme, re language, re manners, on pretty much every front.

The only real area of blindness I have with my kids is that they are both into Big Brother.

Isn't the point of another generation that they are different? That's what I tell myself when my children act or talk like an alien species.

It's good to have shared interests- my son and grandchildren were happy to escape the Womad mud with me to go to 'The Simpsons' yesterday because we all like films. There are inevitably family memories but it would be surprising if our tastes coincided much. Didn't we leave home in the sixties because we can't stand our parents' antiquated opinions? Maybe youth was more rebellious then. These days they stay home longer.

Lammi, thank you for your suggestions about YA books. My grandson, aged 14, said his favourite reading was Artemis Fowle(?).At the time he engrossed in 'Take A Break ' magazine at a greasy spoon cafe, which prompted me to ask. I think he's like me and will read a sauce bottle if necessary. My grand-daughters' twelve but has learning difficulties. I had to read '101 Dalmations' to her in the tent, but she always asks me to make up stories for her.

I like 'Big Brother', though.


Sheila

Kate

My wife and daughter are still both teachers. I helped for 5 years as a consultant to a company who put on 1 day ‘A’ level training courses. I worked with the Chief Examiners of all the major Boards. In English they bemoaned first that it was clear that many teachers at GCSE did not require that their students read the whole play; and second that the general standard of answers to the synoptic paper at ‘A’ level was so poor. It was as if having not required students to start thinking for themselves at 16, there was a panic to ‘graft’ this on like an optional extra at 18. Not in all cases of course. But it was a trend. Just as ‘textspeak’ was increasingly appearing in exam answers.

I am not a language purist. I relish, indeed cherish, the fact that language is organic and develops through our relationships in what Wittgenstein called a ‘form of life’. But because this is so, I disagree with you that one should not regard things happening in everyday discourse, ‘smalltalk’ if you will as significant indicators of what is happening in language as a whole. That is precisely where one should look. Not to the authors, intellectuals, highly educated people; they will always read, they will tend to be articulate, though sometimes I wonder. It is the general level of literacy and clarity of thought of the population that is critical. The best example I can think of may be a bit before your time but compare say the Daily Mirror of the early 60’s under Hugh Cudlipp with the ‘comic’ that bears the name today. Under Cudlipp this was a paper that simplified the complex without too much unintentional distortion. Threats to the written word aren’t going to come from the Times, the Guardian of the Independent, or their readers. It comes precisely from the articulacy, clarity of thought and ability to express themselves of the general population. Or so it seems to me.

I’m not gloomy about young people themselves, far from it. I am gloomy about a corporate media that is increasingly held in fewer and fewer powerful hands who then commoditise news and opinion and whose only aspiration is to feed as much unvaried, undemanding lowest-common- denominator pap to the general public simply to make money. I am gloomy about the irony that the predatory, loss-leader pricing of the what should have been a very profitable ‘product’ the last Harry Potter will paradoxically have put another nail in the coffin of independent booksellers. In corporate-speak - diversity = cost so reduced profit; homogeneity = lower costs so increased profit. Do we want the written word to become MacDonaldised?

My point about the talking in the cinema wasn’t that it wasn’t articulate enough but rather that it was there at all! My ironic !!!s were obviously a bit too arch.

Sheila

Well yes of course each generation is supposed to go its own way. You don’t need to tell that to someone who became a teenager in 1956 with the explosion of ‘rock n’ roll’, cinema riots at showing of ‘Rock Around The Clock’; or a student at university through Vietnam, Woodstock, Dylan etc etc. But we do have apply some judgements surely? After all a very significant number of young people are expressing their ‘independence’ by filming on their mobile phones other young people being attacked, beaten up, or even sometimes raped. There is rebellion and rebellion after all.

Too long as usual. But you will keep raising such interesting questions!

(Would still like someone to respond to the link between the written word and thought).

Regards

Z

it was clear that many teachers at GCSE did not require that their students read the whole play

That's damn poor teaching, then, Zettel, to ignore the explicit requirements of the syllabus. Bet your wife and daughter don't take that approach! I would hope the teachers concerned get picked up on it during inspections, or by their HODs. My boss would have hung me out to dry for trying that dodge, and rightly so.

I can't comment on what's happened to The Mirror. I used to read it, and The Sunday People, in the 70s, but even then it was a good deal less formal than Look and Learn, the other periodical that came my way. But my guess is that a great many sections of the media have become less formal and I don't think this is necessarily a death-knell for either language or society. Do we want to go back the the kind of news-spin read out by chaps with accents which could shatter glass, and the attendant attitudes to women, working class people, anyone who wasn't white, homosexuals, single mothers etc?

The rest of your post I can't really take up, because it's a sense you have, a feeling, and if you have it, you have it. I don't. And actually I think it's terrifically important we keep our sense of faith in contemporary society, and that we ignore the doom-laden, inflammatory tripe peddled by some of the more extreme tabloids, because cynicsm renders good people passive and saps their confidence. Then we're all in trouble.


Oh, re cinemas: I was reading Bill Bryson's The Thunderbolt Kid last week, and the behaviour of those kids in the 50s must have been something to behold! No wonder one by one the local picture houses stopped running matinees!

And actually I think it's terrifically important we keep our sense of faith in contemporary society

- I should clarify: a sense of critical faith. Blind optimism's as useless as blanket cynicism. (Not that I'm accusing you of the latter, Zettel.)

I'm mulling over the link between writing and thought. It seems likely that to refine thoughts it's necessary to tease them out on paper. But then I think of history, and how for the vast majority of time the vast majority of people in this country have been illiterate, and I'm saying to myself: none of these people were able to think properly? And what about the current levels of illiteracy worldwide? What you're in effect saying is that, for most of our human existence, almost no one, proprtionally-speaking, has been able to think with any clarity.

But we do have apply some judgements surely?

It depends on your point of view and your area of responsibility, and what else you've got on your plate, as they say in The Archers. How can we take a stance on everything? It would be too exhausting.

It comes precisely from the articulacy, clarity of thought and ability to express themselves of the general population.

'Clarity of thought' raises philosophical issues, and it's a mistake to assume it means anything at all. A.J. Ayer (I think) was the leading proponent of the idea that language is highly contextual. I did an MA (Language and Literature in Society) when I young and keen, and coming across these ideas was epiphanic for me. Have they been overthrown? It seems to me most people express very well their disgust with society. Language is used to shackle the lower classes, and a privileged elite insist 'their' language legitimises membership.

Also 'clear thinking' made me laugh when I remembered a Guardian article with the heading 'Men think with their Balls - Official'. (Present company excepted, of course)Where does that fit in?

Sheila

Kate

No it really isn't a requirement of the syllabus at GCSE that the student reads the whole play. And the questions asked can be answered without having done so. Indeed 'spot' key scenes and work up 'in depth' answers and the student will probably get better marks - which sadly has become the priority of the exercise

I seem to have sounded gloomier than I am. And I really don't care at all about accents etc. I was trying to argue that there is a deep vested interest in profitability terms in homogenisation (MacDonalds etc) and 'commoditisation' of art and entertainment (Hollywood especially) and that the more you make things the same the more the subtleties of expression and language wither. I certainly haven't lost faith in society etc. why we've only just recovered from Atilla the Hen the concept that there is any such thing!

Sheila

Of course people could think clearly through the oral tradition. But in the world of advertising and spin, the written word has a level of clarity and 'commitment' that can be checked post hoc and offers, before the lawyers get at it, some protection against the 'Blie' "when I said....what I meant was...." Mr Blair has managed to re-invent the concept of the 'lie'. In this connection a wonderful but weird piece of dialogue on Newsnight this week. A US diplomat was being asked by JP whether given the normal 'coded' language of diplomacy, didn't Gordon Brown's remark that he and Dubya had had "full and frank discussions" actually mean that they hated each others guts. The silky-tongued diplo remarked "ah but I don't think in this case Mr Brown meant to mean that whereas I agree when diplmoats use that expression they mean to mean...." Alice In Wonderland - must we mean what we say? Or Humpty "I can make words mean what I want".

As for Ayer the notion of necessary 'context' for meaning was a narrow, largely written and spoken language context. Wittgenstein's concept of a 'form of life' runs deeper and is much richer in that it will not a la Ayer, deny menaing to whole swathes of experience human beings cherish.

regards

Z

The silky-tongued diplo remarked "ah but I don't think in this case Mr Brown meant to mean that whereas I agree when diplmoats use that expression they mean to mean...." Alice In Wonderland - must we mean what we say? Or Humpty "I can make words mean what I want".

Sounds to me like a good example of two different cultures operating. Diplomacy has always operated at two levels - what people appear to mean, and what they actually mean. It's about keeping the doors open, keeping talking, not loosing your cool, helping the other country not to lose face while not losing yours either... Just look at 16th cent history. The difficulty is that it used to be a closed system, for the most part, where the only people operating it understood it. Now for better or worse it gets examined by outside people every day. No wonder professional diplomats - ah, what's the polite phrase? - don't get on with journalists: the pressure to make a complex case simple and sound-bitey leads to bad judgements, and the pressure to be seen to be doing all sorts of things publicly that are much better done privately can be incredibly destructive...

Emma

whole swathes of experience human beings cherish.

Well, I won't go into that here.

The argument, or so I thought, is not so much about the existence or otherwise of feelings but of the meanings assigned to words, as if they were fixed and universally understood. (see below) I think it's good thing to question expressions like 'clarity of thought' because they often turn out to be meaningless in any general (or even specific) sense and/or based on out-dated assumptions, in this case that somehow feelings and emotions are separate from, for example, the decision-making process.

I like the example of 'full and frank discussion' as euphemism for disagreement, although an article I read yesterday about setting up some American missile-spotting base in North Yorkshire, announced to the commons just before the recess, makes me think Brown is just pretending to be less pally than Blair was with the US President. I wish they'd be clearer about what this 'special relationship' is supposed to consist of. Another phrase that's bandied about unexamined.

My point is that 'swathes of experience' (i.e.we know we've been lied to in the past) and likelihood are better guides to meaning than words. To illustrate, I had brief glimpses last night of a programme about Prince Charles and Diana's engagement, and some re-interpretation with hindsight of what was said at the time. In the section I watched, four different people gave conflicting interpretations of Charles's (in)famous phrase 'whatever love means'. I think you should have been there at that hour, Zettel, to pronounce it one of the 'swathes of experience that human beings cherish' :-)

Sheila

Sheila

I wasn't being pissy about Ayer. His whole philosophical position from Language Truth and Logic on and which he believed until his death, was that only verifiable propositions, in the strictly scientific sense of 'verifiable' made literal sense; could be true or false. So all proposition of religion, many if not most proposition of ethics and morality, aesthetics and art were either literally meaningless (religion) or somehow second class 'meaning citizens' in language. Those were the 'swathes' I had in mind.

And the habit dies hard, only a few weeks ago I heard a scientist, a cosmologist for God's sake who are off in fairy-land with their use of language compared with religious believers, say with total certainty "if can't be verified, it can't be true." Clearly meaning 'verify' in the scientific sense.

regards

Z

Yes, your apt summary of Ayer's position is pretty much as I remember.

To return to a former topic, I can empathise to an extent with your reading 'hiatus' when you took up PE.When I worked in China there was a mini-gym on the company premises and I was always falling off the tread-mill, book in hand. In your case, you would hardly hang from wallbars clutching Harry Potter ( that's the original topic, isn't it?) but surely you could read in between all the jumping over wooden horses and shinning up ropes? In fact, I'd have thought perusing a book the perfect antidote. Even if you continued your exertions after dark on floodlit tracks fatigue must have set in.

We are always being told that physical exercise is good for the brain but maybe the opposite is true, apart from the increased blood-flow, of course. It would make an interesting subject for a dissertation, based on the hypothesis that the reason so many boys give up reading is they take up football. There could be some incompatiility that's not related to the physical logistics described above, even when the time factor is eliminated. Obviously the two, reading and moving about, can't be done simultaneously, as I've proved, but maybe there's a lap-over effect that stops the brain from functioning in thought-mode for a while after exercising.

Sheila

The NEAB syllabus I've got repeatedly uses the phrase 'related to the whole text' when describing GCSE Shakespeare assignments. It's also a requirement for students to have studied the cultural and historical background of the play they're analysing. As I say, if individual teachers want to bypass these stipulations, that's up to them.

say with total certainty "if can't be verified, it can't be true."

It's arrogant, for one thing. To say that science explains what we experience better than any other system is true. To say that it always will, and we will never come up against something which unarguably exists but can't be verified by such methods, is faith.

In defence of cosmologists, though, my observational cosmologist brother-in-law is one of the clearest explainers and least off-with-the-fairies people I know.

Sheila, I find exercise may make my brain work better in the long term, but in the short term it makes me rather dozy, in a pleasant way - all those endorphins. I used to try to go to the gym first thing in the day, which fitted beautifully in practical terms, but made me completely useless for writing for the rest of the day...

Emma

Lammi, I agree the 'whole text' experience is the ideal, and one to which teachers aspire, but they have to make constant adjustments between what is required/expected of them and their own particular classroom situations. I often heard teachers question whether exam boards ever took school conditions into account. As with the NHS, there's the ideal and there's the reality. A large part of the problem with UK schools, in my opinion, is the diversity, an impression that was reinforced when working as an examiner in English in the UK, and by experience of government-controlled schools abroad(as distinct from private language schools). I worked for several years respectively in both the lowest achieving (poorest) London borough and the highest (richest).I'll leave you to guess where it was easier to apply the 'guidelines'. I found much more homogeneity in China and Singapore, even taking into account the size of the countries concerned.A similar impression was given by colleagues working in European schools. Of course, the history and structure of education in the UK, with its two-tier system, is also very influential.I have no experience of the private sector, so it may overall be just as shambolic (diverse, I mean). :-)

Emma, I found early-morning swimming is good for writing. Not only can you think up plots, etc. but it seems only to relax the muscles, not the mind. I must say, though, that watching the gym people from the balcony after my swim, I'm tempted to take up machine-cycling again. Swimming can be such a palaver . My sister says her gym has screens attached to machines and she often prolongs a session so she can see the end of a programme. I suppose that wouldn't help the writing, though.

Sheila

I take your point, Sheila. My post was a response to Zettel's comment about it not being a requirement of GCSE English to study a whole Shakespeare play, and the implication this meant language as a whole was in decline (was one factor, I mean). But there are classes where it would be very hard indeed to read every single word of the text, and I suppose you'd use a combination of watching the play, watching the film, teacher reading, class reading, summarising scenes etc to get the overall plot fixed in the students' heads. What is significant, I think is that close study of Shakespeare remains a key element of Key Stages 4 and 3 too, and a requirement of the GCSE (whether an individual passes or not!).