School’s out for summer. Anyone who pays attention to the education statistics may wonder if it was ever in. Every year we see another report on the failures of basic education, and every year it gets worse. The latest bad news, published last month, showed a steady, relentless decline in reading and math scores in schools from 2015 to 2025.
I can’t boast about my own educational achievements. I was an indifferent student, and a dropout at one point in my school career. My mathematical abilities don’t reach much further than adding a restaurant bill – although the same was true of Beethoven. But I don’t really believe we need more mathematical geniuses to invent more apocalyptic computer programs and weapon systems. It’s language that concerns me. Language, not arithmetic, is the thing that makes us human, and the best language we have - I speak without prejudice - is English.
The English language has always been in decline. Scholars have been complaining about it for five hundred years, ever since the translators of the King James Bible finished their masterpiece, and Shakespeare put down his quill and went into retirement. But the decline has speeded up. We seem to be losing our ancient language in several different ways.
Perhaps the least important danger is the collapse of grammar. There have been too many pedantic books about grammar and punctuation in the last few years. Frankly, most of these rules are trivial. If I hesitate over “I” and “me” or “him” and “he,” I can check the grammar book, which says: “Any pronouns that appear in an appositive are assumed to have the same function as the word the appositive refers to.” Fine, I can live with that, whatever it means. But who really cares about fine distinctions between “less” and “fewer,” “that” and “which,” “may” and “might”? Who can figure out “who” and “whom” in the proper case? Not I (or me).
My own education was grammar-free. We had a splendid English teacher, Mr. Thomas. He taught us to appreciate fine literature, which was no easy task in a school for unruly boys. He didn’t teach grammar at all. He believed that grammar was learned by reading good writers and imitating them, not by following a set of rules. [We never parsed a sentence, or discussed the difference between adverbs and adjectives, and we never even suspected the existence of the subjunctive tense, even though it may have been the case that we used it all the time.] So I am not qualified to correct anyone’s English grammar, as long as I can clearly understand what they are trying to say.
There’s the rub, as Shakespeare himself might have pointed out. It’s not grammar but meaning that gets lost as language declines. Whatever the secret of good writing or speaking, it is certainly not grammatical perfection. It is all about the game of words, meanings, metaphors, and mystery. But plain old words are losing their meanings faster than we can reinvent them, in a process of simplification, the infantilization of the language.
I think we all understand perfectly well what’s going on. It’s not the fault of the teachers, who have an incredibly difficult task, or even the students. They are all up against the most powerful enemy of learning ever invented, and it is carried into every classroom – the triumphantly ignorant, irretrievably illiterate, irresistibly entertaining smartphone.
