You speak-a my language?

According to a recent report in the Baltic Times:

"Many primary school and kindergarten teacher can’t speak Estonian well enough to teach." [sic.]

Apparently, this is a shocking state of affairs that requires redressing, and all bar eight of the tested kindergarten teachers will be expected to lift their game in time for another test in a year.

They should come to Australia. We have high school English teachers whose English isn't that good. The kindergarten teachers leave you in tears.

When I was studying for my Education Degree, I came into most of my courses with a firm grounding in English grammar and a strong love for language, linguistics and communication. Most of my classmates were hard-pressed to explain what a noun was - and they didn't see that as a problem.

For some reason, over the last twenty or so years the powers that be have come to the conclusion that learning "correct" English is a) elitist, b) pointless and c) discriminatory. After all, expecting a high standard of English communication implies that any other dialect or discourse of English is somehow "below standard" and inadequate. Heaven forbid children be told the way they speak at home is "not good enough" for their assignments and essays.

"English is a vibrant language", they say, "It changes all the time - and so it should." And thus they justify having entire cohorts of students graduating year after year without a basic grasp of sentence structure.

Not only have we created a culture where a high standard of English is neither taught nor expected, but we now have a culture where the very idea of a "correct" or "better" English is bitterly rejected.

"How dare you suggest I could be doing better? Who are you to decide what is and isn't good enough?" seems to be the prevailing attitude. Oh, and that's just the kind of response one would get for pointing out that bizarre and bazaar are two different words, and they've used the wrong one. Wait to you see the kind of reaction you can expect for pointing out that "been", "seen" and "done" require the word "have" in front of them. The common man will have none of your auxiliary verbs, thank you!

I've lost count of the amount of times I've tried to correct someone only to have a raft of other people rush to their defence - even though they were clearly wrong. Apparently it is far better to express yourself by any means (even if you have used the wrong words in the wrong order and have, therefore, said something rather different to what you intended) than to pause for a moment and think about how you are going to express yourself. It's up to the listener or reader to determine your correct meaning from your expressions. I don't know about you, but I think this could be rather problematic at times.

Then again, I've also lost count of the amount of times I've been corrected and found myself wanting to react just as poorly. Even though I know great benefit can be had from noticing a mistake and correcting it, I still don't like being told I am wrong and I could do better. I guess I'm a child of this culture after all.

On the other hand, I know what a noun is. That puts me well ahead of many of the English teachers educating our children today.