Dumbing down spells trouble for our students
THE dumbing down of Britain continues: the latest barminess is that universities are saying that correct spelling and punctuation are elitist and students should not be marked down for mistakes. This is supposed to be to help people from deprived backgrounds but it clearly hasn’t occurred to anyone that future employers might not take such a liberal view themselves and turn down job applicants who can’t even spell their own names. University used to be a means of helping people to better themselves, which included correcting their mistakes; now, clearly, it means shoving everyone into the gutter and stamping on them to keep them down.
And who will the beneficiaries of this bright new policy be? Privately educated students, of course, who have had access to schools that actually teach them how to spell.
One very good way of keeping people down is to keep them illiterate: the early Catholic Church did not want the masses to be able to read the Bible because they might come to their own conclusions as to what it meant. Instead, the priests told them what it said, with little challenge and the people got on and did what they were told. Is that what the universities want?
No guesses who this is aimed at: the poor immigrant communities but neither does that make any sense.
We all know some immigrant communities do better than others and I can’t imagine, say, ambitious Chinese parents being too happy about this one. (And given that there are more than 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, I should imagine they think English speakers get off pretty lightly.)
This is just increasing problems for those who don’t do so well. People should be taught to aspire, the stretch upwards, to try to achieve and that includes writing correctly.
This one is destined to end in tears.
IT’S similar to the times when middle class children pretend to be working class – and no, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being working class: my grandfather worked in a factory. But it is not aspirational. I remember my father’s astonishment when I introduced him to a friend whose father worked for BT, which did not chime with his claim to be working class. Nor did his own profession, as a financial analyst.
“When I was a child,” said my father, “we wanted to get out of the working classes.” He succeeded and after grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge (yes, it did let in working class boys even then, not that you hear much about that), he became the Fielden Professor of Mathematics.
Could that happen today? Could being able to add up properly count as elitist too?
PRINCE ANDREW is demanding to be allowed to wear an Admiral’s uniform to his father’s funeral, despite technically being an honorary Vice-Admiral. He’s forcing his mother to make a decision about this at a time you’d think she might have other things on her mind. Frankly, if Andrew had any of the “honour” he boasted about in his TV interview, he’d resign from the lot of it right now. why