PERSONAL COLUMN •
Illiteracy as she is taught
PATRICK COSGRAVE
Last week nearly all the children went back to school; and a large number started secondary education. What their parents don't realize is that a large proportion of these children will end their schooling illiterate, in the simple sense of being unable to read and write their native language.
Only in a climate in which the crucial importance of the detail of the matter being taught goes unnoticed and undiscussed. and in which, therefore, the purpose of teaching language and literature is ignored in discussion, could a report published earlier this year by the National Foundation for Educational Research, 1,000 responses to English literature, have gone without fundamental controversy. The conclusion of its authors, Messrs G. Yarlott and W. S. Harpin, was that "for a majority of fourth and fifth forms it might be better if the study of poetry were made a voluntary or occasional, rather than a compulsory activity." Why? Essentially, because the children did not appear to care for it very much. In other words, the criterion for deciding whether to teach a subject or not is not to be its excellence, nor the excellence it can impart, but the immediate response of untutored minds.
The Yarlott-Harpin report was somewhat cruder in its approach than the substantial bulk of research work in the same field on which the authors drew. It is the body and main principles of that research into the teaching of English literature to which I want to draw attention. In its totality, emerging in the main from Colleges of Education and the education departments of the universities, it has substantial influence on what happens to our children in their schools. And it seems to me to be almost unfailingly pernicious, both in the attitudes it encourages and in the ignorance that it manifests of the true nature of language and literature.
Once — and this was especially true when the classical languages formed a substantial and living part of a curriculum — the central purpose of teaching literature was to educate the pupil in the use of the language, and hence in the use of the culture that language embodied in itself, by means of studying, not merely chosen texts, but also the living structure of the language — its grammar, syntax and poetic metres. Teaching the use of the language, the use of the achievements of the past, and the use of culture itself, was the end of education.
By 1965, when education had been spread to all, the Schools Council produced a statement of the nine aims of reading. Five of these were subjective in character in that, allowing for the indeterminacy of the prose, they could be regarded as arising from inside the child himself and the society in which he was reared: they were, extension of knowledge, sharpening of sensitivity, acquisition of sound attitudes and values, knowledge of the literary heritage, and education of the aesthetic response. Four, however, related to more general aims that might, or might not, have something to do with literature more abstractly conceived: extension of experience, preparation for what ' has ' (sic) to be met in life, release from tension, and understanding of the role of man in the world. Timidly and elusively though the first five aims were expressed, they drew the fire of Mr Yarlott in a 1968 article C "Aims " ' in teaching literature '). "This," he wrote, "is a time of rapidly changing cultural values . . . and perhaps the minority view which has for so long exerted pressure on current discussions about literature may yield to a fresh set of objectives more in accord with the needs and interests of the majority of pupils." From here the line leads directly to the conclusion that poetry should no longer be taught to fourth and fifth formers. For here is the statement of the principle that the mere impulses of children (in no other sense are ' needs ' ever defined) are the proper arbiters of literary value.
The situation we face, as a result of a powerful body of academic study which influences every teacher in the land, is one in which the study of our greatest literature is abandoned for the greater gratification offered the immature instincts of the young by the popular adult reading of our own day: the James Bond novels are a favourite example in the 1971 report. Of course, various more or less complicated and meaningless structures have been erected to cover the retreat. Mr J. N. Britton, for example, has produced an extraordinary article on 'Evidence for improvement in poetic judgment' (1954) which sought to argue that a preference for ' complex ' over ' simple ' poems manifested the ' improvement ' he had in mind. The striking thing here is that, though an effort is made actually to erect some sort of critical structure (in complexity vs. simplicity) in this study, the decisive factors in its judgment are still the response of those examined.
Britton was, in turn, dependent on a simplistic study published in 1940 by H. J. Eysenck. When Eysenck found a response psychologically interesting (interesting, that is, to his own very primitive psychology) he presumed that the literary experience which provoked that response was also interesting, and therefore good. The investigative methods (not to mention the prejudices) of educational psychologists are so primitive that they detect only crude emotional response, and cannot measure intelligence. But there is no need to confine the argument to abstractions : for there is a massive body of English poetry, freely and almost universally acknowledged to be great, which is not at all complex emotionally, in the sense that Eysenck and his followers understand the adjective. This is the English Renaissance lyric, perfected by Nashe, Wyatt and Shakespeare : it is truistic in its argument, direct in its emotional impact, and complex only in its metre.
Metre — which is merely the technical word for language as used by the poet — is wholly ignored by the educational psychologists; as it is increasingly ignored by teachers. Metre is a superior, poetic, development of grammar and syntax in prose. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that the most influential educational thinkers also eschew any investigation of the capacity of the pupils they study in the use of English grammar, syntax and metre. For one thing, they are either psychologists, psychologists by derivation; and therefore interested in emotion, not intelligence. For another, they have been able to devise no methods for analysing either intelligence or the relationship between intelligence and emotion. Finally, it is easier to record one's own responses to the emotional reaction of children to experience, than to judge the capacity, either of oneself, or of the children. But parents ought not to be under any illusion about the effects in later life of this powerful current of educational thinking — if one may use that word. It means, first, that children taught under this aegis will have less and less command of the resources of language, less and less literacy. And, second, it means that, as the crude emotional responses of childhood are encouraged, so childhood and childishness will be prolonged, until more and more young adults arrive into responsible life as children; only responding to experience, never understanding it, nor grappling with it.
This is the illiterate future facing the children who went back to school last week. If the promise which universal education implies — to share the best with all — is to be kept, then the energies futilely expended by the educational psychologists should have been spent, not in the by-ways of psychological consumer research, but in properly appreciating the heritage of literature and literacy and finding out how to spread it. The fundamental starting point is the realization that an appreciation of language and literature, and their use, is not something elicited from the emotional responses of children, but something taught to their emerging intelligence. Finding that starting point will be difficult : the grain of educational research is set the other way; and the State cannot intervene, for the Department of Education and Science has no say in curriculum construction. A beginning can only be made if the parents of the children who went back to school last week realize that there is a real and dark prospect that their children will grow up illiterate; and that that prospect will darken year by year, as long as the present fashions in educational theory continue their sway.
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