Here we go again (providing we can look up the times)

Well, the Daily Mail do just love their hobbyhorses, don't they? Once again it seems that the foundations of our language are under attack from the forces of evil. What, I hear you ask, is it this time? Is it children texting? Is it misplaced apostrophes and split infinitives? Is it the President Elect using the word "enormity" to mean "extent"? No, it's none of these things, though I'm sure that editors at the Mail fume regularly about all of them.
This time it's the dumbing down of A-Level English exams by including such reading fare as tram timetables.
If there were any suggestion that the tram timetables were being used instead of other texts, perhaps as a replacement for Romeo and Juliet, then I would certainly be in whole-hearted agreement, but there isn't. They are simply being used as one of a wide range of texts. I teach English for a living, albeit to students for whom it isn't a first language. One of the Governments skills descriptors says the following at the lowest level (complete beginner)

"Rt/E1.2 recognise the different purposes of texts at this level"

and this, at the highest level (pre-University entrance)

"Rt/L2.2 identify the purpose of a text and infer meaning which is not explicit"

Examining the latter more closely we find "identify the purpose of a wide range of texts, whether inferred or explicitly stated" and later, under a different code "use organisational features and systems to locate texts and information".
This, remember, is how we teach high level foreign language speakers but apparently it isn't a skill that native speakers require.
That's plainly nonsense. Reading doesn't just mean reading the very best of English literature, it doesn't even mean just reading books be they good or bad. It means reading everything. It means locating information on bottles of aspirin, tomato ketchup bottles, Government information leaflets and, yes, tram timetables.
Texts are different and have to be approached differently. It would be as ludicrous to read a tram timetable from beginning to end in order as it would be to read Oliver Twist by taking random sentences from a few disparate pages somewhere in the middle of it.
One of the great skills of reading, that becomes instinctive over time, is knowing how to approach a text. A tram timetable is just as much a text as a newspaper article or a sonnet and knowing how to read it is just as important a skill, arguably a more important skill, as knowing how to read them.
As ever, in its rush to defend Victorian values, the Mail has chosen to make a sensationalist article out of something very trivial and ignored the true heart of the matter.
Of course another important reading skill is judging how much trust you can put in the things you read. I wonder if they'd consider that to be dumbing down.

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