BY JOE NUTT
The English language needs its English teachers more than ever
Whether they realise it or not yet, English teachers in this, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, have been burdened with the most daunting, and arguably unique, cultural responsibility in the entire history of the language. It is up to them to restore a tongue not just “listless” and “supine”, as Milton warned in Areopagitica, but one self-evidently suffocating in “servitude”.
How else would one describe the state of the English language today? A tongue so twisted, abused, and distorted by every activist, politician, and now even terrorist familiar with the workings of a keyboard, that lies have become the bread and butter of political debate, in the very parliament Milton championed so fiercely during the last English Civil War. And if we sincerely want it to be the last, then it’s English teachers, above all other professions, who now have to shoulder this monumental cultural burden.
I have no interest in discussing, and too much self-respect to disseminate, the well-documented, deliberate mendacity and calculated deceit that has characterised political discourse in recent years, in either the Mother of all Parliaments or her emaciated offspring in Scotland and Wales. It should be enough for any professional English teacher to recognise that no one can change their sex, and that anyone who uses the language they teach to assert that they can is not just deluded but dangerous. If you disagree, you may be employed as an English teacher, but please don’t kid yourself that is what you really do.
Here is a real-world example of both the delusion and the danger:
As a Lead Writer, I have worked for a range of businesses and NGOs over several decades, on large and extremely complex documents they are required to submit in order to win multi-million-dollar contracts in the educational world. The task, in essence, is to make lengthy, multi-authored documents that answer a series of highly specific, technical questions not only sound convincing enough to defeat all the competition but to convey the impression they have been written by one articulate, knowledgeable, and intelligent voice.
A US client I have worked for frequently employed me on a UK government project which was to deliver a national-scale project to primary-age girls abroad. Early on in the process, the phrase trans children appeared in a draft document. I signalled the grave risk at the first opportunity and was a little surprised that the client’s US team lead dismissed my concerns and assured everyone in the meeting that this would not be an issue as the project developed.
Some time later, when the first full draft of the document reached me, my fears materialised in the most dramatic and worrying form. Remember that this project was for primary-age girls, which biologically excludes any meaningful use of the neologism trans. There simply is no such thing as a transgender child and never has been. It is, in essence, the most egregious and culturally disturbing example of a language in abject servitude. To my horror, there were numerous sections in the final document that discussed, and encouraged the project going forward, to include consideration of trans children.
Although I would have been entirely justified professionally in returning the text unedited with a request that my initial risk warning be reflected appropriately in the full text, instead—because I like to think I am a professional—I took many hours to rethink and reword all the sections affected in such a way as not just to completely remove all risk but to present my client as being an exemplary safeguarding partner. I was delighted with the end result because I had managed to flip a potential disaster into a winner. I returned the text and reminded my client that not to make the changes I had would have been a clear case of professional malpractice.
Within twenty-four hours, I was informed that my contract was terminated. I shrugged and submitted my final invoice.
When the Cass Review called attention to the shocking unethical and medical abuses that had been rife and signalled an end to the “gender-clinic model of care,” noting on the way that safeguarding issues had been overshadowed, I said nothing further. When the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that “sex” refers to biological sex, I said nothing. I even took no pleasure in noticing only very recently that my client has been forced to lay off hundreds of employees following changes made by the Trump administration to the way the US government funds its foreign aid programmes.
If at this point you remain unconvinced that English teachers are today burdened with a daunting professional responsibility, I suggest you read no further. If, however, you find my real-world example troubling, please read on. My belief is that most English teachers I’ve ever worked with will be dismayed to realise that there are extremely highly paid, nominally educated professionals working in the international development world who are perfectly happy to abuse the English language to such a dangerous degree.
This linguistic servitude has tenaciously deep academic and cultural roots. Postmodernist thinking in its crudest, radical form has permeated every stage of education, from the nursery to the university. The BBC itself, the organisation that the entire world looked to for decades as the gold standard of English language usage, has succumbed to the belief that words are nothing more than playthings—a jumble of arbitrary letters which can be made to mean what any individual with access to a pen or a keyboard wants them to mean. It is no accident that the organisation’s preferred voices on all things relating to the English language are David Crystal and Michael Rosen. At the centre of the BBC’s English language catechism, you will find nothing more substantial than an ego. English, it appears, is always and only about you.
The vast and eloquent English lexicon exists, we are told, especially for you, as an individual, to play with. Play is the dominant motif that runs through everything the BBC teaches about the beautiful, inspiring language we all rely on to communicate; to build our families, our lives, and our culture.
No one should therefore be surprised that our current government is seriously arguing that the language of parliament is too difficult for twenty-first-century English citizens; that its modernisation committee is considering ways to control the words parliament uses to design and enact laws intended to benefit those very citizens. This is, as any serious student of literature knows, a well-thumbed, grubby little playbook that demands ever-increasing censorship and abhors free speech. If you doubt me, ask any East European old enough to remember life under Soviet rule, or indeed any émigré Russian.
It is also no accident that in this era of linguistic servitude, the most sophisticated, demanding form of linguistic expression—the form which generations of previous English language speakers have taught, shared, and revered—poetry, is all but extinct. Have a look at the poetry section next time you are in a bookstore, if you can find it, or ask any non-teaching adult to name a contemporary poet, should you doubt me. Contemporary Britain should be embarrassed and deeply concerned that it has reached such a deplorable state of cultural vacuity and enervation.
It is therefore understandable that high up on the list of fads schools find themselves repeatedly subjected to, English teachers will be very familiar with the demand that they teach more of what is often called oracy, or something similar. Plenty of voices, usually ones with no experience of good schooling whatsoever, will insist that in the twenty-first century, children need to know how to speak—to express themselves better. This is precisely what English teachers should not be doing. It is the endgame of Postmodernism; the apotheosis of the ignorant ego. You may have nothing of value whatsoever to say, but we will teach you not just to say it, but to assert it. Because what matters is not the quality or beauty of the words your heart and mind can generate, but the blanket politicisation of all education.
The reason our culture despises poetry is not because people have lost the ability to talk, but because they have all but lost the desire and ability to listen. Why else is contemporary theatre little more than a parade of musical entertainments interspersed with the occasional polemical tirade disguised as drama? What else explains the phenomenon of audiences filming theatrical performances on their phones?
Poetry is quintessentially about sound, about being humanly interested in hearing what someone else has to say. Theatre is just poetry embodied. Instead of wasting time debating or discussing an idea as vacuous as oracy, which in the real world of school classrooms amounts at best to teaching confidence and at worst to basic pronunciation, English teachers should be fiercely discussing how to teach pupils to listen.
They should be routinely teaching children that the words they hear and those they return together constitute a conversation. Without conversation, without the exchange of ideas it stimulates and nourishes, we are all indeed rather lonely and insignificant islands.
Listening, not lying, is the cornerstone of Western democracy and of English culture. Those who love and teach the language can either rebuild, or they can watch it crumble and decay even further.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry and he writes regularly for a number of magazines.