My eye was caught recently by a headline in the Daily Mail: UK pupils of 8 forced to sing in Lithuanian [Thursday 11 July 2013]. Apparently parents have petitioned the Cambridgeshire primary school after their children came home in tears ‘because they were being forced to learn songs in Lithuanian and Polish.’ Naturally I thought of my own primary school days when I was forced to sing in Latin. I was forced to do a lot of other things too – run around a muddy field shivering in rugby shorts, learn large chunks of the catechism, eat liver and onions. When it came to classes, I was so mentally absent that most of what we studied might as well have been in Lithuanian.
In education, as
in most things, I have liberal inclinations. I wouldn’t go as far as Summerhill
School in Suffolk, founded in 1921 by A.S. Neil, where children are free to attend
classes or not as they choose and where, in the words of their website, ‘you
can play all day if you want to’. For eight-year-olds
some element of compulsion might be necessary, though I tend to be in favour,
where possible, of inducing children to learn by making it interesting, rather
than forcing them, whatever form that forcing may take. This may sound
idealistic, but it’s an ideal based on experience, first as a disaffected
pupil, irrationally resistant to fear-based forms of compulsion, and later as a
teacher.
The Daily Mail takes
a surprisingly progressive line on this Lithuanian singing question, seeming to
support the rights of eight-year-olds to opt out of uncongenial school activities.
The word ‘force’ seems somewhat strident, hysterical even, in this context. Had
I refused to sing in Latin at the age of eight, play rugby, or eat liver and
onions, I might have incurred the ultimate sanction of corporal punishment, which
is now happily against the law.
Over the
centuries, children have been forced to sing in languages not their own, under
threat of even greater penalties. No doubt some of my own Irish ancestors were
forced to sing in English. I don’t know how education was conducted in Eastern
Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, but I suppose it’s possible
that my wife’s grandparents were forced to sing in Lithuanian and Polish
(paternal and maternal respectively) rather than in the Yiddish of their homes. In this context, the Cambridgeshire children haven't much to complain about.
On the question
of compulsion and how children are to be encouraged to tackle difficult tasks,
the Mail story has nothing to say. Neither does it shed any light on the
question of what, exactly, our children should be learning, though this is a
question of topical concern in the light of Michael Gove’s radical shake-up of the
National Curriculum. Since the British government decided to involve itself in
setting the curriculum twenty-five years ago, modern languages have been argued
over – from what age, to what level, by what means, and for what purpose should
they be taught?
When I was a
teacher in Wales, for a while there was debate over which language
should be offered in addition to French, Spanish and Russian. Should it be
German, the language of Goethe and our largest European competitor, or Welsh,
the ancestral language of a sizeable proportion of our students? Ancient Greek
was constantly under threat, mainly from the encroachments on the timetable of
newer forms of learning, such as Information Technology. When I taught in
California, French seemed to have higher status in the school than Spanish,
though Spanish was clearly the more useful locally and internationally. In such choices, utility confronts culture,
and the meaning of culture itself is disputed.
Should we be
learning the language of our ancestors, of our neighbours, of our trading partners,
of our enemies, of our nannies and construction workers, or the ones with
the best books? And if learning languages is principally about mental
development, does the choice matter that much anyway?
The Mail isn’t
really interested in any of these questions. As usual, it has smellier fish to
fry. This is, of course, a story about immigration. As the article reports, ‘The
area has a large population of East Europeans and a third of the school’s
pupils are from migrant families’. As a comment on education it exhibits the
same kind of thoughtless ignorance that David Cameron revealed when he casually
sneered at Indian dance as a form of physical exercise.
In the end it’s just
another jab at ‘political correctness’. That tired old phrase isn’t used in the report, but
you never have to look far in the Mail to find it. It’s there on the same page,
in fact, in a story about a ‘bonny baby contest’ in the Wiltshire town of
Devizes that has been cancelled by the carnival organisers as ‘unfair to the
children deemed less than bonny’. Political correctness gone mad!
