RONAL Brown’s letter (November 1) on the education ethos of the past brought back many memories and certainly gave cause for some reflection. An unremitting diet (I was a pupil in the 1940s and 50s) of parsing and analysis which I happened to enjoy could scarcely be adduced as justification for the inordinate amount of time spent on the activity, the paltry four marks awarded in the English paper of the day scant reward. Perhaps of more significance is the fact that research on the subject shows little or no transfer of learning – you became proficient in something called “grammar”.
Clichés abound in teaching and learning; it’s more of a tree than a ladder, ludendo docere (teach by delighting); if you can’t measure it should you teach it, and of course the rote learning antithesis; as someone observed stage-managed heurism is no more valid than rote learning if it is going nowhere.
Which brings me back to the original letter. My experiences were very similar even down to the poems and extracts, but there the similarity I think ended. The weekly round-the-class individual recitation was really an arid exercise in class control – no discussion of content, style, language, and so on. Was the main purpose then simply to remember these pieces – if so it certainly succeeded and my own attitude, increasingly ambivalent as the years have passed, has to acknowledge the (unintentional?) positive with The Daffodil still standing the test of time and remaining in this jaded memory when many other experiences have long gone. For the record, my own time at school was enjoyable.
Not very long ago I came across a reference to an education report in which some of the major businesses of the day, ICI, Rolls Royce, and the like, complained about the level of literacy among their new recruits – lack of agreement between subject and verb, etc. The report is dated 1922, proving very little but certainly giving some perspective to the Golden Age theories.
W Dickie,
12 Cumbrae, Glasgow.
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