Posted on 11/03/2008 6:08:25 AM PST by Renfield
thanks Renfield.
Town halls ban staff from using Latin words, in case they confuse immigrants[UK]
Daily Mail | 02 Nov 2008 | Emily Andrews
Posted on 11/02/2008 9:01:53 AM PST by BGHater
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2122613/posts
Three Little Pigs ‘too offensive’
BBC | 23 January 2008 | Sean Coughlan
Posted on 01/23/2008 7:26:29 AM PST by forkinsocket
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1958215/posts
Government bans the word ‘obese’ to describe overweight children
Times Online
Posted on 08/04/2008 1:13:20 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2056397/posts
Churchill dropped from England’s history syllabus (”pandering to a P.C. agenda”)
ABC News (Australia), The Sun (U.K.) | July 13, 2007
Posted on 07/12/2007 11:42:03 PM PDT by Stoat
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1865231/posts
Bats about the Attic: Fewer Greek students, but still plenty of devoted ones
The Economist | Thursday, June 26th, 2008 | unattributed op-ed
Posted on 06/26/2008 10:49:54 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2037137/posts
School nativity plays under threat [UK]
Telegraph | 03 Dec 2007 | Julie Henry and Vikki Miller
Posted on 12/03/2007 12:49:19 PM PST by BGHater
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1934111/posts
Fundamentalist education raises eyebrows in Britain
(U.K. Gov’t sponsors Christian schools...)
Financial Times | 1 Aug 2005 | Frederick Studemann
Posted on 08/02/2005 4:46:44 AM PDT by gobucks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1455237/posts
‘At the same time it is important to remember that the national literacy level is about 12 years old and the vast majority of people hardly ever use these terms. It is far better to use words people understand.’
Of course, the alternative - raising the literacy level and actually stretching people’s imagination and abilities - is never considered.
Next they’ll be banning English, Spanish, French and German, and the UK kids will have to learn Hebrew. Every time I see an article like this out of the UK I think back to those horrid days of actually living there - it IS this bad.
^^
Make that “Arabic”.
The roots of modern English are indeed a north german folk language. Over the centuries the influence of many other tongues has been added, to one extent or another. Viking words are fairly common (their, them, skin for example) but Gaelic is surprisingly scant (apart from place names). The Romans did NOT conquer England, as there was no such country when they were in Britain, consequently there is little latin influence from that time. Most Latin words in English were picked up in the middle ages, when Latin was the language of the Law and the church.
The biggest single influence on English (some 20,000 words) is actually French, from the time of the Norman Conquest. They tend to be legal (e.g. justice, jury, accuse, acquit, treason) or dealing with ruling (court, parliament, government are all french words) Also military (e.g. mercenary, battle, fortification) or culinary (mackeral, market, mutton, beef, fruit).
I expect the resistance of the “Education” establishment to actually teaching literacy is intense in Britain, just as it is here.
There is resistance but, to be fair, I think most of it is a side effect of a fear of not making the various “quotas” that the government insists on saddling schools with.
There is an immense pressure (mostly from policitians) being applied to “perform” - to get the required number of pupils past the required pass marks. This, of course, has two effects. The first is that teachers are forced to spend more and more time filling in forms for bureaucrats, as opposed to actually passing on information to students. The second is that there is an increasing temptation to take the easiest options and to “help” the students. The net result is that we have an awful lot of school leavers who are very good at passing exams, but don’t know or understand very much about the actual subject they have passed the exam in.
This is all a corrollory to socialist cossetting and a denial of personal responsibility. If pupils fail to pass exams, then the fault MUST lie with the teachers or the educational system - the darling children cannot be to blame (the facts that all too many of them regularly skip school, fill themselves full of alcohol and drugs, and spend an inordinate amount of time in front of TV’s and “chilling out” are, of course, conveniently disregarded).
Ah the joys of socialism and post-modernism. With BO and the dems now firmly in control, you too will soon be able to enjoy all of this :)
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