The other day, I was at Starbucks meeting with an education psychologist who had long-ago graduated from USC, now retired. We discussed the challenges of our schools with regards to language issues. Interestingly enough, he’d recently had a stroke which centered in the language part of his brain, and he’s been working to better his ability to speak again. He explained to me that to overcome the challenges with ESL (English as a Second Language) kids we must concentrate on “Simple English” – What’s that you ask?
Well, you see, he told me that Charles Kay Ogden, a linguist and philosopher, wrote a book titled; “Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar” in the late 20s and published it in 1930. He also explained the need to keep it simple and get these kids to speak at least Simple English as a bridge to help them understand so that they can learn in our school system, otherwise how can they ever graduate, being unable to read and write?
Today, over 24% of the world speaks English, and it is both the business and computer language of the world, it’s an essential skill for living and doing business with the first world. There was an interesting article in Futurist Magazine in the March-April Issue of 2012 titled “From the Three Rs to the Four Cs – Radically Redesigning K-12 Education” by William Crossman – where the author also contemplates a totally new concept that;
“The battle against non-literacy has focused on teaching everyone to read and write text. But new technologies that facilitate more holistic learning styles, engaging all of the learner’s senses, may open the locked stores of global knowledge for all. Instead of reading, ‘riting, and rithmetic, we’ll move to critical thinking, creative thinking, “compspeak,” and calculators.”
Okay, this is intriguing, but why not a combination of sorts? Why not teach “Basic English” the Charles Kay Ogden way – and then move to a new way of learning forward from here, holistically so to speak as William Crossman suggests? And it’s not as if this is a new concept, in fact, you might like to read “Education in Crisis – A Sociological Analysis of Schools and Universities in Transition” by Ronald G. Gorman (1974).
It seems, we have so many folks talking about all this, so many research studies, and conferences, committees, and debates, that we are failing yet another generation of kids merely because we fail to make a decision and to take action. If anyone can learn English, at least Simple English then surely we ought to concentrate on the minimum and then accelerate what works and teach in a way in which genetically human brains are formatted to learn and utilize the information imparted. Anyway, please consider all this and think on it.
