So I was reading a bunch of blog comments on yet another controversial issue today . . . the subject doesn’t matter for purposes of this post. I started to realize that this kind of harsh language is practically universal when people of different backgrounds or viewpoints are tossed together into a discussion with no one offering any rules for proper politeness.
And then I was watching the Daily Show, and very much to Jon Stewart’s credit, he brought on a Tea Party Senator that he did not agree with, and made a sizable effort to have a civil calm argument with him without resorting to character assassination. I was very impressed with this in part because we rarely hear that kind of thing, and despite my own extensive verbal alacrity, I am not sure I could do that myself without losing my cool and resorting to the more common language of derisive dismissal.
So here is my dumb idea:
Instead of K-12 schools teaching scholarly english, in which one reads a book that may be 100 years old or more, and then writing a paper on it for reading by the teacher, and then of course all that grammar / sentence structure stuff that never has any impact unless you become a professional editor/ author, how about teaching language skills for conversing with someone that you strongly disagree with?
Anyone who teaches languages knows that we learn language better when we are younger. So why wait til we are in our 30’s to teach language skills of negotiation and calm debate? I think this is way more important than pushing our own tastes in classic novels from the 19th century to kids way before they are old enough to really enjoy them.
Part of why we teach “english” every year is, it’s an artifact from when most kids were immigrants who did not speak english. This is still an occasional issue, but systemically it is an obsolete approach.
If we had some general training and experience in conversing with someone, not about the structure of Moby Dick or Tom Sawyer, but how to calmly discuss differences of opinion on a contract or politics, perhaps the stridency of our current political discourse would be lessened. I think that’s a much more useful skill than the heavy emphasis on scholarly english that we teach now, which most kids resist and do not retain anyway.
©) Justin Locke
