Hell in a handbsket time again

Over at the Mail it's that time of year again when we discover that education is being fundamentally eroded, standards dumbed down, English destroyed and that the end of society as we know it is nigh.
Yep, they're on the warpath again about English exams. It's nothing new for them, it's the dreary old topic of texting. Apparently there is a "new English exam*" that includes "sections on texting". It isn't an exam about texting, it isn't an English exam that consists solely of texting, it's an exam that includes a section on texting.
According to the Mail on Sunday they have to "write an essay on the etiquette and grammar of texting, using their own messages as examples". Why is this any different to writing an essay on any other topic? There is no suggestion that they should write it using txt abbreviations (though I'll bet some of the students try) and it seems to me to be a perfectly proper essay question.

I do have a quibble about it in that they will, apparently (you can't trust everything that you read in the papers), be required to use their own texts as examples. Although most teenagers use texting abbreviations not all of them do. Some of them text in whole sentences. With punctuation. They will be at a disadvantage. That's my only slight doubt about it. Otherwise I will say again what I have said before. A text is a text is a text. The skill of reading means the skill of applying appropriate strategies to a text. It would, as I have pointed out in response to one of their previous hell-in-a-handbasket scares, be as ludicrous to read a train timetable from start to finish as it would to read a novel by taking random sentences from it. And it would be just as ludicrous to apply the same standards of creative writing to a text message saying "CU L8R" as to a sonnet or a letter to the bank manager or a diary entry.

The world isn't going to be destroyed because someone writes an essay about the etiquette of texting.

(*It's also not a new exam. It's a GCSE from the AQA - one of the largest exam boards in the country. It just happens to have included an extra bit in the syllabus.)

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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