Ghana's Economic Problems, Anyone?

Bill George, Germany

Bill George was born in Dagenham in 1947. Despite an intensive selection process, he was permitted to go to a grammar school in Ilford. After first renouncing any degree course in a fit of pique when Aberystwyth turned him down for a course in Welsh, he changed his mind and went to NELP, ending up with a B.A., in London, in English, French and History. For over 30 he has been based in Minden, Germany. E-mail: go@ratsgymnasium.de

I hate to offend people, that's always been a weakness of mine. But sooner or later I'm going to have to get this off my chest, so here goes.

Learning languages should be a basic requirement in any worthwhile education system. Absorbing the fundamentals of the language, so that one can communicate with native speakers or with others who use the language as a lingua franca, seems sensible. Avoiding serious errors should also be given priority, especially as regards mistakes which hinder effective understanding. I would even go so far as to encourage giving better grades to those who are able to speak and write with few or no errors. A certain amount of competition usually promotes learning. (Not always, but that's another article!)

So far so good. But what does reality look like? In a German “Oberstufe” students were recently faced with a lesson or two about “Fighting social imbalance in Ghana”. When we consider how much the average 17-year-old student would be able to say about the socio-economic problems of African (or indeed any other) countries, even in his native tongue, it seems a little daring, to say the least, to expect him to discuss causes and solutions in a meaningful way with others who are not only equally ignorant of the subject-matter but also linguistically incompetent, to put it bluntly.

Before stepping into a racing Ferrari, drivers will usually get some experience with a normal vehicle: those who prove unable to master overtaking on a motorway or changing lanes in busy traffic will be well-advised to go back to riding a bike. But those students who have survived the selection process (despite its tendency to throw people away like banana skins, the system still keeps a lot of students in business who are relatively incompetent in major subjects) will keep crashing into the barriers of syntax and semantics, causing the few competent “drivers” to get snarled up in the traffic jams of “I think ..er...” or “...and so.”

Before I am accused of chauvinism, elitist tendencies and the like, let me point out that this is a general educational trend: in the heyday of Classical scholarship, students dissected Latin and Greek texts and discussed abstruse topics, given that there wasn't much else to learn (science and mathematics being considered somehow unworthy of a gentleman's education). Schools with such names as “grammar school”, ”Gymnasium” or “lycée” were logically bound to keep up the tradition, even when they were later forced to adopt a more modern canon of subjects. So children who cannot play any instrument learn “about” music, students whose idea of French grammar is limited to a few pronouns and some irregular conjugations dissect hundred-year-old novels (or worse!), and, as we have seen, extremely heterogeneous students of English are asked to analyse the economic problems of a country which they know practically nothing about, and in a language which very few of them would be able to use competently if they were dumped in New York, let alone Accra.

The web pages of the New York Times or the Guardian (from which the article about Ghana was taken) also contain many themes which students would be able to relate to more easily. Surely it is more useful to future generations of world citizens if they can communicate fluently? Hardly anybody really understands economics in their own language, much less so in English. This underlines the basic problem of relevance in education: German English teachers are also taught to translate passages from “Beowulf” but not really how to teach basic speaking skills. They are, to reiterate a classic example, instructed in the physics of how an acrobat stays on a monocycle, instead of learning how to get their students to stay on a normal bike and ride from A to B.

Something's gotta give!

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.