Articulation – speaking – is to join reading, writing and arithmetic in the education canon. What has become the mighty struggle against the dictatorship of the screen can begin in earnest. The spoken word, human-to-human communication, must finally be recognised by the gods of reactionary schooling.
The pundits call it oracy. On Thursday, the education secretary, Lucy Powell, called the academics’ bluff. She wants a radical reform of the national curriculum in England to reduce “desktop” working in favour of verbal fluency and practical skills.
For decades, education’s senior leaders have been ramming easily forgotten “subjects”, such as maths and French, into children’s brains so they can be judged and measured in league tables. These tables have grown ever more dominant as ministers seek to climb “global rankings”. After the second world war, an “academic” secondary education was shaped by the increased demand for a university-educated workforce.
Higher education was expanded, but Britain’s technical and vocational schools and colleges were relegated out of sight. Teaching became enslaved to exam quantification and lost contact with the real world. But the act of excluding communication skills from this academic orthodoxy has come home to roost.
Artificial intelligence and mobile phones are progressively distancing young people from adults and each other. I notice gatherings of young people who used to chatter, laugh and banter. They now stand gazing at their screens or they just shout at each other.
Conversation – sharing, informing, discussing, sympathising – seems on the way out. Speaking itself is going out of fashion. Research suggests that in the past two decades the number of words people say each day has shrunk by nearly a third.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
