I am often inspired to write this blog by a headline on the BBC news website, which I use as a home page on my browser. That is the case today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8500108.stm
It’s a story about the ‘Tragedy of Dying Languages’. My first language is Cantonese, but my most fluent language is English. I usually think and dream in English although I can do those things in Cantonese. Problem is, my education has been in English, so I am illiterate in Chinese (ie I can’t read nor write). Worse, I have lived in the UK all my adult life and have little opportunity to converse in Cantonese. The Cantonese translations of all modern English words such as email, website, spreadsheet, word processor are entirely unknown to me. My Cantonese self is an adult with a child’s grasp of language, frozen in aspic from 1976.
The BBC article caused me to reflect on what I would lose if I lost my Cantonese language altogether. I can point immediately to two categories of conversation- food, the importance of rice, the need to ensure that your friends and relatives have actually eaten and are not hungry before carrying on a conversation. And Tragedy. The Cantonese word for tragedy or calamity maps perfectly onto the English, but when you say it, or other phrases about tragedy in Cantonese, you feel the meaning deep in your soul. These are words and phrases that carry with them the tragedies of generations, and together with the interest in food, are the result of a history of flood and famine and war. When the Cantonese speak of ‘wun fan sik’ (to look for rice to eat [meaning employment]) or ‘chaam’ (sad, tragic) or ‘jow naan’ (running from calamity- to be a refugee), the words have the meaning of personal experience (even if the speaker has not experienced it). I cannot express myself in English on these matters as powerfully as I can in Cantonese.
The article tells of Johnny Hill, the last speaker of one of the native American languages in Arizona.
Johnny has tried to teach his children and others in the tribe. “Trouble is,” he sighs, “they say they want to learn it, but when it comes time to do the work, nobody comes around.”
Although I struggle to find the right language for it, I am forming an increasing belief that in education, some things can only be learnt if one actually expends effort in learning it. Playing musical instruments come to mind- one seldom achieves excellence in music without hour upon hour of practice. I worry about the introduction of computer facilities into educational systems which make it ‘easier’ for students to learn. The fact that students take naturally to computers, play games and visit social networking sites at home, does not in itself mean that the curriculum should be increasingly delivered by a computer medium. If I play a Mozart sonata on the piano, I immerse myself in the music and have a physical connection to the composer because I have to move my fingers in exactly the same positions and order that the great man did when he played it. If I was assessed purely by the noise I was able to make, I could obviously make a better noise by pressing a button and getting a computer to play the same sonata as an MP3 recorded by some wonderful pianist. This example is clearly ludicrous; I am not suggesting that any exam board would ever assess in such a way. But how different is that to a student conducting research for coursework at home, selecting and clicking in order to paste paragraphs from the web into a word document, instead of writing it themselves in their own words?
There is seldom anything to be lost by using technology to make a teacher’s life easier. But whenever a learner’s work is made easier by technology, there is a danger that the richness of the intended learning actually depended on the difficulty of the work itself. One could argue, for example, that the introduction of the calculator reduced the understanding of arithmetic because it reduced the actual calculation load for the students, or that predicitve text and text language on mobile phones have reduced the ability of students to analyze and construct language that has deep meaning.
Unless we ensure that technology is only deployed to make it easier for students to do more ambitious work, rather than to make existing work easier, we may be in danger of losing a lot of pedagogical babies in throwing out the bathwater of traditional teaching. The investment of millions could, in some cases, do more harm than good. It would be an understatement to describe that as a tragedy, but it’s the best I can do in this language.
