Longrider

Leg Iron draws my attention to this cack – in, what I might add, is a delightfully witty piece of prose.

A high number of “inconsistencies” in the way basic words are spelt makes it much harder for children to read and write at a young age, it is claimed.

Rubbish. Pure nonsense. Generations of people – natives and foreigners alike have learned to master the English language. It is not “too difficult”. It is a rich, evocative language capable of subtlety and nuance that may be used to convey humour, pathos and undercurrents of both concurrently at the hands of a gifted wordsmith – in a manner that other languages lack. This mongrel language derived from the Latin tongues of the south and the guttural languages of the Germanic and Nordic countries peppered with influences from every immigration since, is so rich and expressive because it is such a complex pot pourri.

Masha Bell, author and literacy researcher, will tell a conference of English teachers on Friday that sweeping reforms are needed to the spelling system to improve children’s linguistic skills.

No! No! No! No! And thrice, no! Our spelling may be odd at times, it may lead on occasion to confusion, but a word’s spelling betrays its linguistic roots and from there you can see similar patterns in other languages. Change the structure of spelling to make it easier – or, as I prefer, dumbed down – then those roots are lost.

But in Finland – where words are more likely to be pronounced as they look – children can read fluently within three months.

So? I was a fluent reader by the time I started school at the age of five. I did not find it “too difficult”, despite those oddities. I simply learned the rules – that wasn’t “too difficult” either. Since then, I have used the oddities to help me when learning French – I can see straight away where a word has come from and it helps me to remember the French equivalent. Of course, if we were taught grammar and usage rules, learning French would be easier still, wouldn’t it?

What this risible little proposal tells us is that teaching standards have fallen. It is not “too difficult” for children to learn, rather it is “too difficult” for piss-poor teachers to teach.

“It is difficult to learn any subject, or even to train for a trade nowadays, without learning to read and write first, but roughly 20 per cent of all speakers of English leave school with very poor literacy skills,” she said.

“The antique, inconsistent spelling system of English is probably the main reason why the UK has a far longer tail of educational underachievement than any other European country, why more of our young people are Neets (Not in Education Employment or Training), why many end up in jail, and why improving their chances of re-offending while in prison is much more difficult too.”

Er… The failure has nothing to do with the antiquities of etymology as previous generations have managed to cope perfectly well with it, but everything to do with poor standards of teaching. People like Masha, for example who seem to think that people in jail should be re-offending… Shome mishtake shurely?

This insane idea gets floated every so often and on each occasion it needs to be robustly resisted – along with a healthy dose of ridicule.

This story is the kind of thing seen regularly over at JuliaM’s.

Lorretta Cole says she was trying to teach her neighbour’s children a lesson after she claims the ball repeatedly landed on her property and even damaged her car.

The 47-year-old retrieved the £3.99 ball from land in front of her home in Baddesley Close, North Baddesley, Hampshire, and refused to give it back when asked by the father of the children.

I can remember incidents like that from my childhood. There would be a little argy bargy and the matter would be forgotten; apart, that is, from the kids remembering not to do that again. Which, of course, was the point. Not in our wonderful 21^st Century.

Mrs Cole was then visited on three occasions by police who attempted to persuade her to return the ball.

Yup, the police got involved. And, yes, she was arrested, had her DNA and fingerprints taken and was questioned for five hours. And none of these cretins thought to consider that this might, just might, be a tad over the top. It’s now gone to the CPS, who, if they had a grain of common sense will tell the police what they can do with it, and to attend to real crimes in future, please. Unfortunately, this has all the hallmarks of prosecution written all over it.

Every so often, I wonder what happened to the Peelian principles.