Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't the only ones who have lost the ability to speak and write with vigor and eloquence. Folks of all ages are reading less -- especially the classics, whose authors wielded our language most powerfully. As a result, our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can't draw on their example for inspiration. ... "Today, our common cultural reference points come from the visual culture: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez," [Diane] Ravitch [who just compiled a collection of important English texts] told me last week. ... Our schools could help remedy the problem, but often don't, she says. That's because "'relevance" is now the watchword in education.

In textbooks, teens tend to find countless stories about young people much like themselves, according to Ravitch. … Norman Fruman, an emeritus English professor at the University of Minnesota, agrees. “Good literature deals with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior,” he says. “It records our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations.”

Aside from being more or less predictable nonsense this article and views reported in it raise several reasonably interesting questions.

On language (and its variability): Language here is presented as reflecting complexity of thought and emotion. However, the language discussed is written or formal spoken language and contrasted with informal spoken language. This is a very typical feature of mavenry (I use the term language maven from Pinker’s Language Instinct) and it shows that these people really know very little about language if a bit more (though not a lot) about grammar. However, there are some underlying issues here that should be discussed, however. Is there such a thing as complexity of language? It is already accepted by linguists that individual languages all have the same level of grammatical complexity This is an issue that may need revisiting as the lines between grammar and vocabulary blur, but it is clear that all languages (from creoles up) can roughly express what is expressed in all other languages (connotations and misaligned categories being the most difficult to make into an equivalent). But what about the ‘systems’ contained in individuals’ brains? There is certainly a great deal of variation in how well individuals deal with the subtlety of linguistic expression. What is the nature of this difference? None knows or is even, as far as I know, researching this. Let’s accept for now that there is such a thing as a lower complexity language speaker (I suspect that there will be - and it will have something to do with ability to do certain kinds of conceptual blends). What would happen (the author of this screed implies) if all the individuals in a group had this hypothetical lower complexity (such as a pigin)? Would the language of the entire group deteriorate and cease to be a language? Most possibly but this would have to be a result of an evolutionary biological process rather than poor educational standards. Not knowing what Shakespeare said does not mean not being able to express oneself. Of course, the new language will have different means of expression and variability that may be erased in one place will appear elsewhere. This is amply demonstrated in the relatively well-understood process of creolization. Of course, there is also the issue of language decay and language death but those are always associate with a decrease of prestige of a language as a whole and a reduction of the number of native speakers (leading to reverse creolization - e.g. decrease in number of categories, etc.). English or no other language with a million or more of native speakers is in any immediate danger. Unless we mean English as spoken in 2007. That of course is in imminent danger and there is a good chance that English as spoken in 2207 will be significantly different to the degree that mutual intelligibility will be impaired or a refragmentation will occur (of course, like with Latin, academic English may prove to have remarkable staying power and its prevalence may still be in its ascendancy). On historical perspectives and anachronism: Part of this problem is the tendency of all historians to ignore the level of magnification they are dealing with when making these comparisons. The author contrasts giants from the history of verbal expression with randomly (and anecdotally) chosen subjects speaking in an informal context. Had she done such random eavesdropping two hundred years ago should would have heard exactly the same issues (I’m sure that there are a number of texts out there bemoaning the decreasing standards of education and expression). Conversely, if she looked today’s world of English expression from far enough she would see about the same (if not greater) proportion of luminaries read by about the same number (proportionately) of people. This goes for almost all ‘it used to be better’ rants.

On modality of perception and social cognition: The author makes another assumption that might bear investigating. Namely, that there is a fundamental difference in the modes in which we perceive language (and that written is the superior one). Of necessity, there are important differences in how we process written and spoken word cognitively at the moment of perception. However, are there also enough differences in the cumulative learning of language and improving the ability of self-expression? Homeric and Vedic poetry would beg to differ (the ahistoricism again). Reading in general is a relatively new thing and silent reading by the population at large is barely a century old. So we can hardly expect the educational system to have much to do with the complexity of language otherwise there would never have been any. Furthermore, the supposedly ‘visual’ symbols of culture such as Britney Spears come with a significant linguistic baggage much of which is written (just look at fan sites and fan fiction).

Then, there is the fact that reading and language are not merely matters of encoding and decoding emotions or information. They have a significant social component to them so we can hardly expect a group of socializing teens to be articulate beyond the standards of their community. Simply because it would be disruptive to that community.

On literature: Connected to that is the assumption that there is only one thing called literature and that there is a standard for good literature, particularly for the purposes of public edification. For some reason, the author chose to forget that Shakespeare wrote plays and those were put on in extremely visual ways including lewdness frowned upon by the makers of American Pie. I already pointed out that much of the great classics were not in fact written or transmitted in written form (or not in the form we know them today - e.g. serializations of Dostoyevsky or Dickens). So having problematized the notion of literature, we need to cast our net a little wider. And what do we find: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Sopranos, Veronica Mars, West Wing or even Friends or My Name is Earl. All of these are exhibit the highest levels of narrative and linguistic sophistication that easily measure up to the best in Shakespeare (we must not forget that while good, Shakespeare’s reputation as the greatest is mostly due to nationalistic propaganda of the 1700s). And if somebody thinks they don’t deal “with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior” or don’t record “our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations” they just plain don’t know what they are talking about.

On cognition again; and literacy: However, there is a potentially valid point hidden in here. While it is impossible that humans would lose the complexity of language as we know it. It is not inconceivable that they would give up writing and reading, particularly, as technologies such as speech recognition and AI develop beyond what presently seems possible. It is impossible to live without some system of graphical representation of language but the complex and powerful alphabetic systems may fall into disuse if certain conditions are fulfilled (I vaguely recall a sci-fi story that suggested it). I am not suggesting that it is likely or that it would happen due to a poor educational system but it may certainly happen over many generations. One possible way I can imagine is if technological solutions designed to deal with illiteracy or ‘analphabetacy’ in most of the world today became so successful and the developing world became socially prestigious enough to make this ‘getting information without reading’ a popular thing. There undoubted advantages the written text has over spoken text as a transmissive device but I can envision these to ignored once the key need for textual representation has been met by other means.

On learning, the effects of education (and a bit of cognition again): It is interesting to see the assumption that the effects of education are so straightforwardly causal. When the author claims that less reading of classics results in that “our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.” She assumes that language is learned purely by mimesis (or some other principle such as Chomsky’s LAD). This brings us back to the question of how different individuals process text. Some may benefit from extensive reading to increase their own expressivity and others won’t. What principle is involved here is anybody’s guess but it most certainly doesn’t bode well for the assumption that schools “could help remedy the problem” (assuming, of course, that there is a problem). And furthermore, that the cumulative effect of thus helpful schools would be the changing of levels of expressivity in the population at large. As it stands, we don’t have anything exceeding a folk theory about how this would happen. (We do have a lot of data suggesting that it almost never does, though.)

On relevance and motivation in education: Finally, not to simply disagree, Diane Ravitch makes a point which is very important for contemporary debates about education. It has been a trend for some time (or at least an aspiration that goes back to Comenius and further) to try to make learning materials “relevant” to the students to engage them in and motivate them for better learning. The problem with this is twofold. First, it assumes that cumulative effect of and within education I mentioned above. More importantly, though, it rests on our confidence that curriculum developers and textbook authors can determine what is relevant to students and preserve that relevance. Instrumental relevance, in particular, is of little use. Two diggers of holes or two trains going in opposite directions make the solution of mathematical equations no more appealing and probably not much easier. They are certainly of no relevance to most learners. It is also not certain that instrumental relevance will lead to the kind of motivation that enhances learning (even if we knew what learning really was and how to tell if it is enhanced). We know a little more about motivation that improves results of test taking (much easier to measure and much less necessary to motivate for). So Ravitch is broadly right to imply that the attempts to make everything be exactly the same to what the students already know, it is more likely to impoverish rather than enrich their learning (although, I suspect that the overall effect is less pronounced than she seems to assume). She also relies on the probably incorrect assumption, as we established earlier, that all students use these texts in the same way. But she is right to raise the question of relevance as a basically blind alley in the pursuit of motivation. The problem with motivation is that we know that it is probably the most reliable predictor of success in learning (baring mental disabilities and differences in learning styles, and lots of other things). However, we have know idea how to produce it (certainly not uniformly across populations) and we don’t even know what kind of motivation works when. Ultimately, all we can say with any confidence about motivation in learning is the tautology that the kind of motivation that produces successful learning is the motivation that has produced successful learning. (It’s usually even hard to describe the complex interplay of different kinds of motivations and dismotivations.) We don’t have much in the way of predictive tools to look at somebody who appears motivated and say how well they will learn but we can usually say that someone who was a successful learner was motivated in one way or another.

End. (Who would have thought that such innocuous article can encapsulate all that there is about language, cognition and education.)