Here’s a very interesting quote from “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner (1969).
Pages 54-56:
“Now, if the “subject” is what is called “English”, the list of possible relevant problems is literally endless. For example, if one accepts the rather obvious fact that language is almost always produced by human beings for human purposes to share human meanings (the one exception to this is when two grammarians have a conversation), then the study of language is inseparable from the study of human situations. A language situation (i.e., a human situation) is any human event in which language is used to share meanings.
…in studying about how language works, one has available all the possible forms of human discourse to examine. So what do you think the focus of the “new English” is? Grammar. So help us.
Of course, we earlier alluded to this fact. But the question is, why is this so? Why have English teachers looked to grammarians for their opportunities? Why, of all the relevant and even critical language problems under the sun, have English teachers selected grammatical ones as the terrain for their students’ inquiries? In answering, one must try hard not to be libelous. But the fact is that many teachers of English are fearful of life and, incidentally, of children. They are pompous and precious, and are lovers of symmetry, categories, and proper labels. For them, the language of real human activity is too sloppy, emotional, uncertain, dangerous, and thus altogether too unsettling to study in the classroom. It was Kafka, we believe, who remarked that he could not understand why some people were so disdainful of “everyday” life since that was the only one they had. He must have had in mind the kind of English teacher we are describing.
Grammarians offer such teachers a respectable out. They give them a game to play, with rules and charts, and with boxes and arrows to draw. Grammar is not, of course, without its controversies, but they are of such a sterile and generally pointless nature that only one who is widely removed from relevant human concerns can derive much stimulation from them. Browning’s line that grammarians are dead from the waist down captures the sense of what we are trying to say about them.
What we are complaining about is the incredible fact that the exotic interests of these men have been put at the center of the “new English,” by teachers who are afraid to go where the feelings, perceptions, and questions of children would take them. You see, there simply aren’t any children who would have any possible reason- now or for the rest of their lives- to care about how a noun is defined, or what the transformational rules are for forming the passive voice, or how many allomorphs there are of the plural morpheme. And as long as we have English teachers who think there are, the “new English,” in its effects, will be virtually indistinguishable from the “old English.””
One of the things that I really love about teaching with Comprehensible Input and TPRS is how we celebrate everyday life. Not only that, we take everyday words, objects, and actions and elevate them by using our imaginations and playfulness. It’s like how a child can find a million and one ways to play with a box.
It also made me think of how the impressionists and post-impressionists celebrated the quotidien. After that the surrealists look(ed) at surpassing everyday life and attempting to reach our dreams / a reality that is more real than what we perceive to be our everyday reality. I think that has something to do with what we’re trying to do in our classrooms (and hopefully our lives).
A little food for thought...
(This is not an apple)
