The English syllabus in secondary classrooms is often a forensic analysis carried out in parallel with a politically correct fashioning that makes a virtue out of indoctrination.

I blame the English syllabus. I taught it often enough.

In the build up to the English Civil War there was an explosion of cheap printing. Any clown with an axe on his shoulder or a chip to grind could get his message, however confused, exaggerated or blatantly untrue, onto the streets, through easily distributed paper pamphlets. Remind you of anything?

Now unlike others, I’m not going to indulge in a frenzy of hand-wringing, wailing or placard waving, in response to ”the flood of toxic populism and nationalism that is sweeping the world”, the words used by one teacher in a recent TES article.

Or because we now live in a world tumbling into unstoppable confusion, according to another, also writing here last week.

I hate queuing. I’m far more interested in how we appear to have reached a state of play where Humpty Dumpty has replaced Dr Johnson, where words appear to mean what anyone chooses them to mean.

The legal, politically legitimate and democratic outcomes of two electoral processes, Brexit and Donald Trump, have become, according to history teacher, ”a world where none of the normal rules seem to apply”. Funny, I thought those were the normal rules.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck: it’s a duck. What all those so energized, appalled and outraged by Donald Trump’s election should be asking themselves is, why did millions of US citizens vote for a duck?

When politicians torture the English language to suit their ends, or even journalists, it’s just naïve to object.

But when teachers and heads mimic them, it really is time to yell “foul” and reach for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Crossed words

The articles I write here sometimes simmer for a long time before they become palatable. This one certainly did.

But they also benefit from seasoning and this one received a sudden and powerful dose of salt when I read that the American singer, Idena Menzel, famed as the voice of the ice princess Elsa in the movie Frozen, had been bitterly attacked online for making a comment about slitting her wrists.

Ms Menzel was answering a question from an interviewer about songs that moved her to tears, and in an attempt to stress how one particularly sad song had made her feel, she opted for wrist-slitting as a metaphor.

Now I knew that. I’m sure Menzel did too, and possibly even her interviewer did, but without any doubt the online mob that attacked her for insensitivity about mental illness did not.

So poor was their understanding of the way the English language works, they were incapable of accessing her poignantly dark humour, never mind the degree of exaggeration Menzel sought, even when she spoon-fed it to them via a cliché.

What on earth have these people gained from their English lessons all those years?

It’s difficult to imagine how constrained their experience of English as a school subject must have been, for them to exhibit such an impoverished grasp of language usage with what was probably in most cases, their mother tongue.

Menzel, of course, is only one example in a morass of linguistic naivety that characterises so much language use, online, in social and anti-social media, even face-to-face, as the 21st century struggles fitfully to get itself intellectually in gear.

I genuinely blame the English syllabus. For decades language has been taught to children as though it is as fluid and malleable as poster paint, a pliant substance just waiting for anyone to come over all Jackson Pollock.

Forensic analysis

Look at the uproar caused by Sats exams that dared to place a value on grammar, punctuation and God help us all, even that appallingly cruel imposition on skipping children everywhere, spelling.

With luck, most children entering secondary education in the last few decades have done so possessing sufficient grasp of the English language to be able to decode fairly simple texts. But what happened to them next is where I find most fault.

I have never met a teacher of English who didn’t relish, nurture and thrive on intelligent, frank discussion and debate between students in their classroom. If a text, however mundane or erudite its source, doesn’t stimulate debate and discussion in an English classroom, it doesn’t belong there.

Yet how ironic, that instead of a well-informed, scholarly study of language use in the widest range of genres and texts possible, children have been taught to take little gobbets of the language apart under a microscope, as though they were studying biology and fed a diet of frequently insipid, politically correct literature.

And let’s be honest, for the majority all that means is a cursory encounter with To Kill a Mockingbird.

The English syllabus in a secondary school classroom is so often a stultifying deconstruction, a forensic analysis carried out in parallel with a politically correct fashioning that makes a virtue out of indoctrination.

For any student, literary criticism should be an exciting and creative act, not a destructive disassembly.

The price we have paid for that crudely utilitarian attitude towards education, education, education, besides ignorance and rampant intolerance, is a bread and circus mentality which increasingly infects creative endeavour in literature and visual media, even that aimed at children and adolescents.

Over the Christmas vacation I watched the movie The Hunger Games for a second time, but this time I found myself wondering how anyone could possibly think that watching children and teenagers hunting each other down and slaughtering each other, one by one, is entertaining.

And before a “mockingjay” or any other kind of fan objects: Lord of the Flies it is not. 

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue

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