English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just throttles the supply of mournful Yeats-quoting burger-flippers but I think it’s a concern. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s worth studying English and only some of them are being able to quote Yeats.
A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love
In response to this crisis, there seems to be consensus among teachers that GCSEs need to change. A report for the OCR exam board last month, endorsed by the former Education Secretary Charles Clarke, called for a radical overhaul of the curriculum. Now an umbrella group of experts, the Common English Forum (CEF), has offered a modest proposal for how to go about it. It is modest. They say they’d like to see a ‘thorough-going review of the qualification’ but recognise that’s unrealistic in the short term. So they offer some easy and effective tweaks for starters.
The most eye-catching is the recommendation that the exam stop demanding students work with a 19th-century text. They further suggest that the field of study expand to give attention to the so-called ‘transient texts’ – blogs, newspaper articles, and social media posts. I think we should, if possible, resist viewing these ideas through a ‘young-people-today/barbarians-at-the-gates/woke-mob-gone-mad’ prism. These are sensible recommendations.
The CEF makes clear, for instance, that they’re not suggesting the removal of Victorian writing from the English literature curriculum. You can’t understand what happens in poetry or fiction in the 20th century without understanding what happened in the 19th. But in a paper designed to teach modern usage – which is the express rubric of the government’s mandate for English Language GCSE – Victorian usage is no help.
Global trade and empire accelerated linguistic change; industrialisation and 20th-century mass media accelerated it further – and the arrival of the internet and social media gave it rocket boosters. Idioms, registers and usages, islands of dialect and communities of slang, now bloom and die in fruit-fly generations. Not only does the English language change faster than ever, but its users are code-switching between multiple versions of it more freely than ever before in its history.
Hence the irrelevance of formal Victorian prose and the value of those transient texts. The CEF seems to want to question the exclusive focus on Standard English, and they’re right to. We use many nonstandard forms, and being able to recognise how those forms differ and how to navigate them on their own terms are useful skills. Like it or not, a huge part of the English language that most of us deal with takes the form of transient texts, and a lot is nonstandard. Sure, Standard English should still be front and centre. If you can’t master it, you are at a huge disadvantage. But schools need to recognise that it isn’t the only game in town.
As well as being useless, the 19th-century prose is putting students off. Should learning English be enjoyable? The Common English Forum evidently thinks so, and so do I. But don’t take our word for it. John Locke was onto this in 1693 with Some Thoughts Concerning Education: ‘a child will learn three times as much when he is in tune, as he will with double the time and pains when he goes awkwardly or is dragged unwillingly to it.’
For the same reason, it’s proposed that video games might usefully have a place in English teaching. A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love – be it walkthroughs, message boards, or in-universe fan fiction. Four in five read and three in five write text related to video games at least once a month. Why not work with that?
The ideas proposed by the CEF go further and hint at something much more interesting and important: which is that the practical purpose of a command of the English language includes participation in public life. ‘In an age of social media, blogging, fake news and the sharing of misinformation, it is vital that a GCSE English Language qualification offers opportunities for discussion and analysis of such texts.’ Getting to grips with these texts is more than a linguistic exercise: it’s an opportunity to develop critical thinking.
Our public sphere requires people who know how to read tone and context, to understand how transient texts relate to each other, to parse emotive language and metaphor, and to understand how even the most apparently offhand of such texts work on their audience. They further argue that oracy – i.e., spoken language – needs to be a central part of the curriculum rather than a bolt-on extra.
All this is nudging, I think, in the direction of returning rhetoric – the study of how power operates through language – to the classroom. It was, after all, one third of a standard grammar-school education for several hundred years. Being the author of a book on the subject, I’d wholeheartedly applaud such a thing. But we’re getting a little way from the modest work of a plain old English Language GCSE.
I see it this way: it’s time to overhaul the narrow parameters within which we consider the teaching of the English language. If we’re not to be hopelessly at the mercy of the rhetorical supertornado that gusts through everything from YouTube and TikTok to the pages of magazines like this one, we need to educate young people to be critical consumers of public language, both political and commercial.
Is there not a case for making what is sometimes called ‘civics’ – which might, among other things, take in rhetoric, oracy, statistical literacy, and aspects of law – part of the curriculum too?
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