Another oldie by Dalrymple

Is there a zeitgeist that affects the West as a whole? Theodore Dalrymple finds very similar debates in France and Britain on the best methods of teaching children to read - yet neither debate refers to the other

Posted by Theodore Dalrymple

The same debates about teaching children to read are rehearsed in Britain and France, finds Theodore Dalrymple. Within weeks of each other the British and French education ministers made very similar policy pronouncements on the best methods for teaching literacy. The same vested interests opposed these pronouncements in both countries. Yet, listening to the debate in either country one would not hear references to the debate in the other. Theodore Dalrymple asks, is there a zeitgeist that affects the West as a whole? And what might this zeitgeist be?

The first time I realised that there was something profoundly wrong with the British educational system – which is not, of course, the first time there was actually something very wrong with it – was when I returned from a prolonged sojourn abroad.

I had taken a job in what used to be called a slum, but was now called an inner city. In fact, from the purely physical point of view, the slum wasn't too bad, though it was still said to be one of the worst in the country. The problem was not raw poverty, certainly not of the kind to be seen in the Third World countries from which I had just returned.

I became interested in – perhaps appalled by would be a better way of putting it - the educational and cultural level of my patients, more particularly the younger ones. I took to examining their scholastic accomplishments very briefly, for it seemed to me that some of their problems, at least, arose from their incapacity to deal with the exigencies of modern life.

Perhaps the most memorable answer I ever received was that given by a young man, not of high intelligence but not subnormal either, to the question of what three times four made. "We didn't get that far", he said.

Eleven years of compulsory education - and they didn’t get that far! No doubt someone would pipe up that if only we spent £40,000 per head instead of £20,000 per head (or whatever the amount is), all our children would reach at least the six times table.

As to reading, I found a population less good at it than the Tanzanian peasantry. Asked to read something, most of the young people would squirm as if straining at stool, and then deliver themselves of a few words tentatively. When asked at the end of the sentence, a good proportion – the majority – would say, "I don't know, I was only reading it." Reading for them was a kind of ritual performed to get the teacher off their backs, and perhaps the educational inspectors off the teacher's back.

Even more remarkable was the fact that when they came to a long word, they would struggle over it for a time and then give up, saying – and pointing to it with their finger – "I don't know that one", as if English were not written alphabetically, whose admittedly irregular orthography gave some clue to pronunciation, but in ideograms or hieroglyphs.

I long suspected, and subsequently had confirmed, that the new methods of teaching children were responsible for their incapacity. I could think of no greater disservice to children in a modern society than to leave them semi-literate and innumerate, and began to conceive of teacher training colleges and the Department of Education as an evil conspiracy to ensure that there were a substantial and sufficient number of dependents and hopeless cases to justify an enormous bureaucracy of welfare. No doubt an exaggeration, but a possible interpretation.

Well, the other week the French Minister of National Education issued a statement in which he said that to continue to use the global recognition method of teaching children to read would be criminal in the light of its established failure, and that it was his duty to suppress it. Never mind that the very same minister, over a decade previously, had put his signature to a circular to require the global recognition method: this time he was speaking sense, even if purely opportunistically.

Now of course, we in Britain had recognised the failure of the method only a week or two before, and the Education Secretary more or less promised a return to the traditional methods.

What was interesting was that the same vested interests in the failed methods came to its defence in France as in Britain, and the same stories of teachers clandestinely using the traditional method as if they were engaged upon a criminal activity were told in France as in Britain. It was discovered in France, more or less at the same time as in Britain, that the pupils of schools whose teachers had defied the educational establishment, were much better at reading than the pupils of schools where the injunctions of the establishment had been obeyed. And even the statistics were the same or similar: it has been found that 25 per cent of French children reaching secondary school cannot read, at least with facility, the same proportion more or less as in Britain.

What is so striking about all this is that the British never referred to the French experience (at least as far as I know), nor did the French ever refer to the British experience. Both treated their national cases as isolated or sui generic, yet the very timing of the decisions to adopt and abandon a teaching method that, to a person with a minimal amount of insight, would have seemed a very bad idea from the outset was very similar.

Is there then a zeitgeist which affects the West as a whole, almost irrespective or independent of the individuals who live there? Not long ago in Australia, I shared a panel with a woman described as "a social entrepreneur", who had won awards for her pioneering thoughts and efforts. She, too, was part of the great bureaucratic drive to create a substantial class of no-hopers, though she went further that the global recognition teaching method, which at least acknowledges, in theory, that it is desirable for children in modern societies to learn to read. She said that reading and writing were almost obsolete "technologies", and that voice recognition systems were now so advanced that they would be redundant. She said she spoke on behalf of those minorities for whom the culture of reading and writing had never been very important: though to my ears, it sounded like the sovereign method to keep the Abos down.

It is tedious to have to argue against this nonsense, which triumphs by boring its opponents into submission. But my question is, what is the zeitgeist that, like the sleep of reason, has brought forth monsters? It is frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness: in short, decadence.

I didn't think this sort of crap (which is very dominant in primary schools in the United States) afflicts the schools of the U.K. and France as well.