There is general alarm, here and worldwide, about the inability of people who have not yet reached middle age to express themselves in clear English (or French or Arabic.) But nobody seems to face up to the question of why the standard of English in particular has declined, in the USA and Britain as well as here in Lebanon. Why was it that thirty years ago standards here in Lebanon were so much higher? Why is it that young people graduating from good francophone schools (Brothers, T.-Ss-Coeurs) write much better English than those from anglophone schools? (As shown, for example, in the case of the Longman Poetry Prize.) How was it that in medieval times the immediate descendants of weird barbarian tribes from the steppes learnt excellent Latin, Greek or Arabic when there were no printed books, cheap writing materials, typewriters, computers or photocopiers? Incidentally, more than a decade ago, the world-famous American broadcaster Alistair Cooke remarked that whenever he received a letter in good English he knew that the writer, whether educated or uneducated, must be over the age of forty. One might think that such a person as His Royal Highness Charles Prince of Wales would have swarms of distinguished people craving the honour of working for him. Yet, said he, he had to personally read every single letter that left his office because he could find nobody that he could rely on to write correct English.

It will be useless to add courses of English if methods are used that do not pass the test of giving good results. The last fifty years have seen theories of teaching that claim to be scientific whereas in fact this claim is founded more on pseudo-scientific verbiage than on the truly scientific experimental test of producing educated people capable of thinking clearly and expressing themselves with logic, lucidity and reasonable elegance. This of course supposes a mastery of grammar, syntax, idiom and even the music of the language.

The Behaviourist principle of developing reflexes should have given excellent results. Unfortunately, with its claim to make an exact mathematical science of psychology, Behaviourism went off the rails. Multiple-choice questions were supposed to provide an exact measure of progress. But unfortunately they only provide a measure of one’s ability to answer multiple-choice questions; they do not measure one’s ability to compose readable English with logical ordering of ideas, vocabulary, grammar, idiom, spelling and punctuation all correct at the same time (one wrong comma can completely change meaning.) When teaching les classes intermédiaires, I certainly used Behaviourist methods; when my pupils had constructed sentences and I had corrected them, I made the boys repeat them aloud by heart with rather exaggerated intonation and tonic accent (little lesson of yoga breathing). But I also explained grammar – very clearly and concisely, for after the age of about 12 the human mind always wants to know why – Please, sir, why isn’t there an s on “several sailing craft”? In this I was helped by the boys having already done French grammar. If I said, “You never use the future tense in a subordinate adverb clause of time or condition,” the boys never made the mistake again. Later on I would give the boys précis-writing, an excellent exercise in vocabulary, conciseness, clarity and logic. But of course, for ultra-Behaviourists such as J.B. Watson, who so influenced language-teaching in the USA, starting with the need for battlefield interpreters 1942-1945, consciousness, perception and mental processes do not exist (quoted by David Stanford Clark, Psychiatry Today, Pelican Books, p.63). So in that case learning language is a waste of time and one might as well teach one’s pupils to quack like a duck. Some people will fly in the face of all evidence in order to deny any spiritual faculty in man and therefore any moral obligation.

Pace Watson, we agree that we need clear thinking and expression. Sometimes one feels pity for students. A professor who possesses elegant French and Arabic and very good English and German, as well as reading Latin and Greek, once showed me a textbook for first-year Economics students. He himself had a doctorate in Economics from a highly reputed American university. Yet, he said, it had taken him half-an-hour to understand the first page because it was so badly written. Part of my own work is checking articles and speeches for publication. I have received texts written by native English speakers with doctorates in English or Education that I and university instructors have found simply incomprehensible. Sometimes the whole train of thought needs to be rearranged.

I heard on the BBC how a North England education authority had decided that children should not be bothered with grammar when writing but simply allowed free rein to express themselves. But what is the good of their expressing themselves if nobody else can understand them? English is an international language offering vast possibilities of employment, but these poor children in the North, however brainy, will be condemned to working-class jobs in the district where their street dialect is understood. The intellectuals who insisted on descriptive rather than normative English, must have thought that everyone spoke like their fellow scholars; they failed to recognise the variability of language even in a small circle. When I was in the Royal Air Force in the Middle East, 1946-8, airmen arriving from UK were completely lost with “Shai up and get a shwai igri on (Bring me some tea and get a move on.)”

I must say that I have a suspicion that some of these theories of education are really excuses for overworked, underpaid teachers. harassed by ill-disciplined children and obstreperous parents, being saved the tedious labour of careful correction. The Ancient Romans employed slaves as pedagogues and sometimes the children flogged their teacher. Maybe we are moving in the same direction.

I know two cases of Lebanese girls preparing doctorates in Britain who have been put in charge of Remedial English courses for local native English students. The reason is simply that, having received a French education, they know their grammar and can explain the language. One of these young ladies tells me that native Nottinghamshire girls preparing a BA English ask her what a verb is! When a Lebanese student of English literature was preparing his doctorate at Baylor, USA, he too was put in charge of Remedial English for Americans because the native American university professors of English had never learnt any grammar!

As I see it, one trouble is that for an English degree one has to learn psycho-linguistics and socio-linguistics and Chomsky and Popski, etc., which is all very interesting, but there seems to be no point between kindergarten and doctorate at which one learns English! – unless one goes to Germany or Russia. In fact, West Africans in Britain are sending their children to school in Ghana and Nigeria, because there one learns good English and there is discipline in the classes and homework to do in the evening. Indeed, one sees that the best English authors now, with a feel for the beauty of the language, are Africans and Indians and other Commonwealth citizens. In my time one learnt grammar in Latin class. Latin disappeared from schools but for a time was replaced by a study of English grammar. Now both have gone by the board. I remember my surprise when in France I found a little girl reciting the future tense of the French verb aller. I said to her mother, “Mais elle est française!” Now, converted by the rubbish one hears and reads these days, I understand the need to study one’s own language.

A refined and cultured young Englishman with a BA English from Cambridge told me that he had never known the names of the tenses in English until he went on a British Council course for teachers of English as a foreign language. Yet any young Frenchman with secondary-school education used to be able to replace his military service by teaching French abroad as a coopérant, having himself studied his language systematically. It is worthwhile looking at the French textbooks used in schools and comparing standards. I was stunned when in a book for American university students I saw both participles and gerunds described as “-ing words”, an expression which gives no intimation of their respective uses and functions in a sentence.

I once saw a leaflet advertising a language school attached to Oxford University, evidently composed on the principle that one should not use once clear, simple word where one can use a phrase of a dozen long, vague and pompous ones. Certainly not a good advertisement for the language school! Examples:

*to offer participants a range of opportunities for developing further their linguistic awareness and improving their performance in English at an advanced level. (Translation: to help advanced students improve their English.)

*to provide information and insights into recent thinking on approaches to the teaching of English as a foreign or second language. (Translation: to explain recent ideas about teaching English as a second or foreign language.)

From a leaflet issued by a Michigan university about courses for international students (query: how can a student be “international”?):

The writing component of this class emphasizes development of fluency and increase in comfort level in expressing one’s ideas in written English. (Translation: students are taught how to write with ease and fluency.)

American university president quoted by Alistair Cooke on the BBC:

We hope to weave a seamless interface between the conceptual aspect of education and its implementation in action. (Alistair Cooke’s translation: We hope to practise what we preach.)

Unfortunately, Anglo-Saxons (not Scots!) suffer from anti-intellectual prejudice and laziness. If an Englishman is intelligent, he has to hide it in conversation. To say that somebody is an intellectual is a compliment in France, almost an insult in UK or USA (“egg-head”!). Culture has lost its original meaning of refinement and superior mind in English. There is no exact equivalent in English for the French word esprit. For the Anglo-Saxon the word philosophy means either history of philosophy or empty talk rather than critical thinking as in French. There is no English culture in Lebanon comparable to the French culture existing here – can any Lebanese write English as Charles Helou writes French?

I hope that I have not bored you. I admit that I have a bee in my bonnet about my language. I am fighting to save it before the British and Americans murder it!

Kenneth Mortimer, January 2004