If you have no idea what fronted adverbials or split digraphs mean, beyond thinking that they sound unpleasantly medical, then you almost certainly don’t have a small child. For along with expanded noun phrases and the present perfect, they’re all grammatical terms that children aged 11 and under are required to identify and master as part of a new English curriculum in Britain seemingly designed to strangle at birth any love of writing .
These reforms are beginning to look like a recipe for churning out children who can name all the component parts of writing, but barely know how to use them, and see vanishingly little pleasure in doing so. This isn’t bringing language to life, but dissecting its cold corpse. All of which helps explain why I have read few things more enraging lately than an article in the Guardian analysing just how this indigestible stodge found its way on to the primary school menu.
The panel, assembled by Michael Gove when he was Britain’s education secretary to advise on his new English curriculum, had little experience of primary education, and was thus “a bit unconfident” about pronouncing on it, according to Dick Hudson, an emeritus professor of Linguistics at University College London and a leading panel member. Yet, reading this account, one wonders if they were quite unconfident enough. Did Hudson see any evidence that making small children absorb all this grammatical terminology was developmentally appropriate? “No, there was no evidence, and we were guessing.” Just guessing! And while he still believes they guessed right, a groundswell of opinion among teachers, parents and even some of his fellow experts suggests otherwise.
Week before last, the Education Select Committee concluded that the evidence did not show that teaching specific grammatical techniques improved writing ; and it recommended that the new Spag — spelling, punctuation and grammar — tests should no longer be mandatory for older primary schoolchildren. Geoff Barton, the incoming head of the Association of School and College Leaders and another panel member, has described the tests as woeful. Ask around any school gate, and the adjectives are less polite. Whoever is education secretary after June will face growing pressure to act.
I’m all for spelling tests and timetables, and being taught to put a full stop or apostrophe in the right place is hardly the stuff of educational oppression. Nor is it automatically a cause for alarm if children seem to be learning things that my generation never did, or grappling with the value of pi or the meaning of photosynthesis at a rather earlier age. That’s progress for you.
But as a parent and a writer, my gut feeling is that something is very wrong here. It’s not Sats (Scholastic Aptitude Tests) per se that is the problem — although it obviously makes sense to minimise the stress — or even the inevitable “teaching to the test”. It’s whether what is being tested and taught actually does children any good. For what they are learning right now is that if they cram in the right number of semicolons and manage to write tidily they will get the marks, more or less regardless of what they’re saying; and that telling a story or making the words sing from the page doesn’t really matter by comparison.
This isn’t writing but a box-ticking exercise as frustrating for more able writers as it is torture for those who struggle. One anonymous secondary school English teacher in Britain interviewed last week described children breaking down in tears when asked to produce a piece of creative writing because they didn’t know where to start.
It’s a rare child who will become a novelist, of course, and so there’s often an unspoken assumption that creative writing doesn’t really matter — or at least not in the way that Maths or Science does. But if anything, it’s the visible leap forward in Maths teaching since I was at school, and the way Maths has filtered into popular culture, that makes me sad for what English is becoming.
Numbers were never my thing. But watching Hidden Figures, the recent film about three pioneering black women mathematicians working for Nasa, for once I wished that they had been. It showed me that Maths is also a language — one that can be used, just as words can, to describe and push at the limits of the known world.
But that film was based on a book, which in turn needed a scriptwriter to bring it alive for the screen. Scientists will increasingly need ways of explaining themselves to a questioning public while storytelling, creative thinking and communication skills are increasingly important to technology companies. In short, writing matters — even for those who will never make a living primarily from it. Killing children’s enthusiasm for writing is a mistake we will live to regret.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist and former political editor of the Observer.
