Hugh Reilly: Just say ‘non’ to forced teaching of languages

FOR some unknown reason there were no desks or chairs in my primary school’s “television room” hence we were compelled to sit cross-legged on a bum-numbing cold linoleum floor.

The black and white TV was bolted on to a monstrously high metal stand, clearly part of a cunning plan to maintain discipline by inducing painful cricks in the necks of potentially excitable pupils. A school television set was not like the one at home; for one thing, it had a current TV licence. It was also hidden away behind sinister, wooden, cabinet doors, a ruse that led the awe-filled, short-trousered viewer to believe he was peering into a televisual tabernacle.

My favourite show at that time was Patapouf, a programme that purported to teach French through the medium of a cloth puppet. Unfortunately, the third syllable of the eponymous hero’s name caused so much smirking among les enfants that only the threat of a thrashing convinced us to ecoutez et repetez.

Thanks to my intermittent TV lessons, when I transferred to secondary school I was speaking French like a native, a one-year-old native in a romper suit to be precise. For two years, I and other les miserables endured being taught the pluperfect tense and how to say tu without sounding as if suffering from acute constipation. The end of S2 brought liberty, the first chance to bid adieu to a subject that had given me nothing other than recurring bouts of educational ennui.

Last week, research by SCILT, Scotland’s national centre for languages, highlighted a huge decrease in the number of secondary schools where learning a modern language is compulsory till S4 (down from 61 per cent to 49 per cent). Although Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) guidelines suggest language learning should continue up to at least S3, schools are reacting to dwindling consumer demand. Kids do not like being force-fed German or any other lingua Franca.

In my view, the nation’s education system is merely reaping the whirlwind caused by the misguided decision in the early Nineties to browbeat children into studying a foreign tongue beyond S2. To experienced teachers like yours truly, coercing S3 and S4 kids to spend hours each week idly looking at flashcards or sitting bored-rigid in language labs was doomed to be met with consumer resistance. At S2 option time, children understand why the need for basic literacy and numeracy ensures core status for Maths and English. However, the case for compulsory language learning is flimsy. Proponents unconvincingly put forward the argument that our membership of the EU makes it an economic necessity that our schools produce polyglots by the bucket load. If the ability to close foreign trade deals is to be the driver of language learning, schools should be teaching Hindi and Brazil’s mangled version of Portuguese.

Other cheerleaders for the ignoble cause provide dodgy dossiers citing the alleged benefits of bi-lingualism, chanting, in a manner reminiscent of Animal Farm, “one language good, two languages better!” Tellingly, these lingo experts are unable to explain why the 60,000 Gaelic speakers in Scotland have signally failed to dominate the largely monoglot Morlocks living under the Great Glen fault line.

In my opinion, languages staff upset with the fall of their empire want to have their cake and eat it too. Most of them opposed opening up language learning to the masses, complaining it was nonsense to teach kids French when they couldn’t speak English. For decades these chalkies had enjoyed a cushy existence teaching an elitist subject to intelligent children who had chosen to study languages.

The fact that the majority of learners were generally passive female pupils was a welcome bonus. While monsieur relaxed with a docile class talking about his student days working in a Provence vineyard, in the classroom next door a History teacher’s S4 Foundation section of volatile scamps went about re-enacting the Battle of Agincourt using wooden rulers and elastic-band-powered ballistae. On being struck on the head for a third time by a paper plane, Sir’s protests that the pupils’ use of an air force was a tad idiosyncratic for a 15th-century war fell on deaf ears.

Learning a language should be a matter of choice. In some forward-thinking schools, kids are offered taster courses in conversational Spanish, French, German, Italian and even Mandarin. This revolution in the way languages are taught will not be televised.