Bonjour, Guten Tag, Buenos días

Today is European Day of Languages, an annual event organised by the Council of Europe to promote "the importance of language learning" and celebrate "the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe".

I can speak fairly decent French and German. Although I studied them both to A Level, up until a couple of years ago I'd have said that I hadn't remembered much of either from my school days twenty-five years ago. When I first went to Germany though I was pleasantly surprised how much came back to me and how much my spoken German improved after a few days there. I hope the same's true of my French, a theory I'm intending to test by going to Brussels and Walloon Brabant next summer.

What does this say then about language teaching in schools? Having studied theories of language acquisition on a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in the mid-90's, I think it confirms the idea put forward by Stephen Krashen that the key to learning a language is "comprehensible input" (i.e. lots of exposure to spoken language) and specifically "i+1", that is language that is just beyond the level the learner has reached.

I know from my younger relatives that they spend far more time speaking and listening in language lessons at school than I ever did and while learning vocabulary and grammar does give you a grounding in a language, copying stuff off the blackboard isn't the most effective way of doing it.

 

The History Man

I've been watching the BBC series The Great British Story: A People's History presented by Michael Wood.

The first series I saw presented by Wood was In Search of the Trojan War in the mid-80's. Since then, I've watched his Conquistadors and the superb In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great that inspired me to read the accounts of his exploits by Greek historians. He has an enthusiastic style of presenting that is very engaging and his approach to English history in the current series suggests that his politics are to the left. Many women also seem to find him quite attractive.

Wood is from Manchester and attended Benchill Primary School (where my grandmother later worked on school dinners) before winning a scholarship to the then direct grant Manchester Grammar School and subsequently a place at Oxford. In a BBC4 programme about grammar schools in the 50's, Wood told how at Manchester Grammar School he wrote a reply to a Sunday Times piece by Field Marshal Montgomery about the Norman Conquest sticking up for the Anglo-Saxons which his teacher - despite being pro-Norman - sent off to the newspaper who published it. He was subsequently invited to visit the Houses of Parliament where he met Lord Attlee, the first time he'd been to London apart from a Manchester United away match with his dad.

To his credit, Wood said that despite being a beneficiary of it he always realised how divisive selective education was and is opposed to it being reintroduced.

Back to O Levels?

The Education Secretary Michael Gove is apparently about to scrap GCSE's and go back to a two-tier exam system, O Levels and CSE's in all but name.

I took my O Levels in 1987, the last year they were sat. Whenever someone says that GCSE's are too easy, I think, "Yes, they are easier than O Levels but O Levels were too hard."  The point about O Levels is that they were designed so that most kids failed them. Their only real use was identifying people who would do the subject to A Level.  That's why raving lefty Kenneth Baker replaced them with GCSE's in 1988.

The other point about O Levels and CSE's is that a two-tier exam system ends up with at least two tiers in schools. I went to a comprehensive which set us at the end of the third year into two O Level and two CSE sets. The top two sets might as well have been at a grammar school and the bottom two at a secondary modern. Almost inevitably, teachers were assigned accordingly so that in the English, history and foreign language top sets I ended up with some outstanding teachers and in the Maths and Science bottom sets lazy and incompetent ones.

A really radical step in education would be to abolish exams altogether.

Private school prattle

The Education Secretary Michael Gove yesterday made a speech to heads of private schools in which he argued that the dominance of privately-educated people such as himself in business, politics, journalism and TV is a problem.

If he were serious about tackling the problem, there is a lot he could do. Most of it would not even need new legislation, such as ending the charitable status of private schools and setting quotas for privately-educated pupils in university admissions equivalent to the percentage of school students they represent (around 7% , compared to a third now and rising to nearly half in top universities).

Of course, Gove will do none of those things, pushing ahead instead with more state-funded but privately-run Academies and "free schools" that may get a few bright working-class kids to Oxbridge but will increase rather than narrow the gap between rich and poor in education.

Peterloo and public school politicians

Along with about thirty thousand other people, I was in Manchester city centre this afternoon for the TUC demo outside the Tory party conference.

The conference is taking place at the Manchester Central Convention Centre (Manchester Central railway station until 1969), close to the site of Peter's Fields where in 1819 fifteen people demanding parliamentary reform were cut down by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry in what is now known as the Peterloo Massacre.

A lot has changed since 1819.  Working-class men and women got the vote in 1918. In 1819, the Tory Prime Minister was the Charterhouse and Oxford educated Lord Liverpool; now it's an old Etonian...

There have been only been three Prime Ministers not educated at a public school or Oxbridge, two Labour (Brown and Callaghan) and one Tory (Major). When will we see the next one?

The photo shows the RMT rail union's Manchester branch banner depicting the Peterloo Massacre, ending with a quote from Shelley's 1819 poem The Mask of Anarchy:

"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you-

Ye are many — they are few"