As regards fluency and literacy in our own language, to paraphrase Shakespeare: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the kids but in ourselves. With some very honorable exceptions, teachers generally represent the bottom quintile of the SAT scores, and teaching colleges spend far more time on the latest fad, psychology, "methods," etc., and less on the core subjects, or specialized knowledge in the subjects they are going to teach. Much teaching time is wasted in soft, feel-good subjects like "self-esteem," rather than the core subjects whose mastery is essential in this world. Education experts reckon that half the time spent in teaching colleges is pure waste. In many school districts, math and science teachers have no formal qualification in their subjects. The blind leading the blind. And, as I have written before, many - perhaps most - teachers are themselves functionally illiterate. And we wonder "why Johnny can't write." Universities complain that the freshman year is often nothing more than remedial work on subjects that should have been mastered in high school; this probably accounts for the fact that American universities schedule four years for a Bachelor's degree, whereas it is three in Europe.
The main culprits are the unions. They have managed, through their immense political influence, to hinder the "special qualification" scheme, where highly educated and experienced men and women, from the professions and industry, can take a short course and then teach their specialized subjects, such as chemistry, physics and engineering, in high school - subjects where qualified teachers through the normal teaching colleges are rare indeed. The unions have fought, successfully, against incentive, or performance, pay for the minority of teachers who are both highly qualified and dedicated. And here in Pennsylvania, the unions have such sway that we are one of the few states that allows teachers to strike. Bills come up regularly in the state legislature to ban teacher strikes, but get nowhere. In my school district, the teachers struck three times a few years ago, and the school board caved and awarded them a 60% raise over three years. And my school taxes went up by $1,200.
What did we get for the money, or the $13,000 a year it costs for each pupil? Three years ago, Middle School teachers were required to take basic examinations in the core subjects (the "Three R's") and their own specialized subjects. The tests were so basic - a level that would have caused no sweat for an average high school student 40 years ago - that they should have all aced them. The result? 40% failed overall; in some districts it was over 60%. The state education department was so embarrassed that they hid the results until a citizens' Freedom of Information petition forced them to come clean.
Fire an incompetent, or lazy, teacher? Don't make me laugh. I don't know how many stages such a procedure would take in my home state, but in the New York City school system, with its tens of thousands of teachers (and an administrative staff bigger than that in all of Europe), there are 20 stages or appeal, arbitration, re-appeal etc. And it takes between two and three years, during which time the suspended teacher is on full pay. And the last time I checked, fewer than 20 were fired in a year.
Children are genetically programmed, from birth, to absorb languages - a throwback from early man when it was essential for survival for children to speedily learn to understand warnings of danger. This trait disappears before the teen years, just at the time when most school districts begin to try inculcating a foreign language. By then it becomes a chore.
In Europe they begin language instruction in Kindergarten, so it is not unusual to find pre-teen kids fluent in at least three languages. I'll never forget when my wife and I were lost in Holland, being approached in our car by a boy who couldn't have been more than 8 or 9. Not being sure of our nationality, he tried three different approaches: "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?" [blank stares from us]. "Puis-je vous aider?" [An attempt by us to reply, in our halting school French]. "Never mind, sir, can I help you?"
Here, it is unusual for children, unless they have educated and involved parents, to have mastered their own language, much less another. Why? Ask the average teacher (again, I emphasize, with honorable exceptions) to describe the proper use of "lie" and "lay," and their past tenses, or why "so fun" is incorrect, or why "this criteria" is wrong; ask them how to place an apostrophe to show possessive, plural, and plural possessive, and you'll get a blank stare. Ask them when to use "its" and "it's," or where to use a colon or semicolon.
The usual excuse is: "Oh, that's not important so long as the message is clear." We've see it here, on these fora (singular forum, plural fora): "Upper case lettering and most punctuation is unnecessary except in formal writing. It just wastes time." And I say baloney!
So what else could we expect from our kids, receiving as they do little English instruction in school, with illiterate teachers and parents, and using their own shorthand to communicate via email and text messaging?
