In another era precision in language was recognised as important for comprehension and clarity of thought and as a means of unifying the country. No longer. Correct English, it appears, is a tool of cultural oppression.
A number of universities have decided not to dock marks for spelling mistakes because requiring good English could be seen, in the words of Hull University, as “homogeneous north European, white, male, elite”. More prosaically, the aim is to narrow the gap in achievement between white and ethnic-minority students and reduce higher dropout rates among those from poorer backgrounds.
As critics have pointed out this is deeply patronising towards these students as it assumes they are incapable of reaching the same level of communication as everyone else. Lowering the achievement bar for them will undermine standards in general and render language increasingly incomprehensible.
The attack on precision, like the general lowering of standards to pretend that below-par students are making the grade in ever-increasing numbers, is far from new. The move away from the concept of “correct” answers goes back at least to the 1980. The teacher’s red pencil lines were often replaced by encouraging remarks in the margin. So that no pupil should feel they had fallen at any hurdle, the hurdle of the incorrect answer was often removed.
Hostility towards accuracy, however, went much deeper than this. Some educationists viewed precision as an attack on children’s autonomy and creativity. During the 1990s a primary school head told me: “We try to get across that exactness in maths is not the right answer but the process by which we play around with numbers.”
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Whatever merits that approach may have had it didn’t produce mathematical exactness but the opposite. Requiring precision was regarded by many as oppression. One lecturer around that time wrote: “Any conception of accuracy in the teaching of reading will be based on unequal power relations between the reader and the arbiter of accuracy” — that is, the teacher. Such ideologues therefore claimed that reading failure was evidence of success.
Since that period ministers such as Michael Gove have made Herculean efforts to cleanse the education stables of such destructive idiocies. However, the attack on accuracy, precision and the “correct” answer has morphed into a weapon deployed by social justice warriors. It derives from the post-modern replacement of objective truth by subjective opinion. As a consequence no hierarchy of values is permitted. So any such differentiation, such as between correct and incorrect statements, can be claimed as proof of discrimination or bigotry by an oppressor class.
In education the potential oppressors were teachers. In the West more generally oppressors are deemed to be white people. Now education and race are being spliced to identify a racist pedagogy based on the cultural crime of precision.
In the US Rutgers University’s English department claims that correctly spoken and written English is racist. Its graduate writing programme emphasises “social justice” and “critical grammar” and offers an internship entitled “Decolonising the Writing Centre” to make writing “more linguistically diverse” — in other words, unintelligible.
Oregon’s education department has promoted a toolkit focused on dismantling racism in maths teaching called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction. This handbook says maths teaching centres on “western, Eurocentric ways of processing and knowing information”. White supremacy shows up in the classroom in various ways, including when “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer”. Mistakes should be termed “miscommunicated knowledge”. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers merely perpetuates “objectivity” (horrors!) as well as “fear of open conflict” — even though the handbook admits on the same page: “Of course, most math problems have correct answers.”
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According to Carol Swain, a black former Princeton and Vanderbilt political science professor, this is itself racist. “Saying teachers can’t correct math problems,’’ she says, “means that you’re training people who cannot be engineers, scientists, pharmacists or even cashiers.”
Serving the interests of minority children, however, isn’t the point. The Oregon toolkit tells teachers to challenge the ways in which maths upholds “capitalist, imperialist and racist views” and to “provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance”. Rochelle Gutierrez, an education professor at the University of Illinois, has stated: “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.”
In George Orwell’s 1984 Winston Smith is tortured for insisting that two plus two equals four. Yet on Twitter Laurie Rubel, a professor of maths education at Brooklyn College, wrote that the 2+2=4 equation “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy”.
But why? The connection is baffling. The only explanation appears to be a ludicrous syllogism which goes like this. Accuracy and precision are at the heart of science and rationality. Western society is the apogee of science and rationality. The West is white supremacist, patriarchal and bad. So accuracy and precision are white supremacist, patriarchal and bad.
The rationale for attacking the “correct” answer doesn’t even pretend to any coherence or logic. It’s simply a cultural wrecking ball. And the reason this weapon of destruction is swinging so damagingly against its targets is because the custodians of our culture are either giving it a push or looking the other way as it brings the West’s masonry crashing down.