22 May
2021
22 May
'21
2:33 a.m.
On Friday 21 May 2021 18:39:02 J Leslie Turriff wrote:
On 2021-05-21 19:08:36 Gene Heskett via tde-users
wrote:
And a sort of "hotel English" is being taught in universities all over the
world now; I began to see the influence of the business schools and the STEM
disciplines in universities back in the early 1980s, but the agenda was
already being set in the 1960s or earlier.
A friend of mine is a professor in a comparatively small Russian university,
and she sometimes hits me with questions about usage. When I respond, about
half the time she tells me "But that's not what it says in my book!"; and
the
overall trend is towards a kind of simplified English, suitable for business,
but leaving such persons unprepared to interpret old-fashioned English turns
of phrase, or to appreciate subtleties of literary usage.
It's not an unimportant question. People are always citing Orwell these days,
but they forget that, at the core of his views, he always stressed clear
direct expression. Sloppy usage led to sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking
is what got us into the mess that we are into these days.
Also, it's worth noting the parallel in the late Classical world. To all the
nations conquered by Alexander the Great, the Greeks brought a simplified
version of their language, the Koine (or the common speech), with a view to
making civilized Greek-speakers out of the barbarians (non-Greek speakers).
Their aim was explicitly to educate the conquered people well enough to make
them good servants. And the British did the same in India.
So yeah, I believe that the Humanities still matter; and maybe now, more than
ever, we need that side of education even more than the STEM subjects and
business.
Here endeth my rant.
Bill
And that is indeed the crux of the matter.
Problem solving is not on the
agenda, the dregs of it vanished along with teaching phonics back in the
40's.
Which is one of the reasons that we see so many foreigners here on work
visas. It's always a bit disconcerting to me to see all those foreign
names in articles about technology and engineering, but I look at it as the
same sort of thing as immigrant farm labour: if the domestic labour force
won't/can't do the work, more power to those who will/can.
Leslie