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OF course languages change all the time, with new words entering the lexicon and others quietly fading out. One of the factors that can play a role is the users’ experience. But then, others argue, words that are available for use can also recursively shape the users’ experience.
This, in a nutshell, is the crux of the row that has recently brewed up. It has been decided by Oxford University Press that the new edition of the 10,000 entry Oxford Junior Dictionary, aimed at seven-year-olds starting on the Key Stage Two reading level, will feature changes that some have found objectionable: “A”, say the naysayers, should remain “is for acorn”, as it has been traditionally, with “B for buttercup” and “C for conker,” not attachment, blog or chatroom.
The group of upwards of two dozen authors who have raised the objections include Margaret Atwood, Helen Macdonald and Sara Maitland, and they call the decision “shocking and poorly considered”.
Students today face terrains that weren’t envisioned before.
Their reservations are not unfounded, and stem from the reasonably well-documented deleterious effects of the urbanised experience of childhood. The current generation of children, they point out, has significantly diminished access to and experience of nature and the countryside.
While the word ‘conker’ is for the most part entirely outside the experience of Pakistani children, for example — unless the child has thoroughly studied his or her Enid Blyton — it is also unknown to many children now growing up in the UK (where it was once used very widely), since they have no experience of going looking for dried-up and hardened acorns and playing the game that takes its name from them. (For reasons of trivia, let me say that a version of the game of conkers used to be played in Pakistan’s villages and towns as well, not so long ago, using not acorns but walnuts; for all I know, it still is.)
The OUP’s new dictionary for young children will lack some 50 words that are related to nature and the countryside, and will include instead words that perhaps have, in today’s world, more traction with children: words to do with computers and modern technologies. This, however, has alarmed people because the new words chosen are “associated with the increasingly interior, solitary childhoods of today”.
Changes to this dictionary have been made earlier. The 2007 Oxford Junior Dictionary moved almond, blackberry and crocus aside for analogue, block-graph and celebrity (along with a number of religious words), and the current 2012 edition maintained the earlier changes while added cut-and-paste, broadband and analogue.
The group of authors, who have written to the OUP calling on it to reverse its decision, feel that the connection between the loss of a ‘natural’ childhood and the new dictionary words was understood back in 2007 when the first changes were made, but “less well-publicised than now”.
This might to some feel like quibbling over minor issues — the OUP has pointed out that this particular dictionary, as well as others intended for older children, retains very many ‘natural’ words. Others take it as nostalgia for a pastoral past that is, well, mainly past in the industrialised West, a resistance against the high-tech realities of the modern world.
There is no denying, certainly, that new sets of knowledge are having to be learned by students, and in some cases are being accommodated while other, more traditional knowledge-blocks are quietly falling by the wayside. In 2013, for example, some 45 states in the US adopted new curriculum standards which included focus on developing students’ analytical and computer skills, but omitted cursive writing, which is no longer taught compulsorily.
Certainly, though, today’s students will face professional and academic terrains that earlier generations never envisioned. And it’s for this reason that last year primary students in UK state schools started having compulsory lessons in computer coding (and foreign languages from age seven) under the new national curriculum. Children aged five upwards are learning to create and debug simple computer programmes, part of a set of moves to stop the UK student body falling behind their peers in comparable countries. They are also being taught about the storage and retrieval of data, the use of internet search engines, and children’s safety online.
Such is the direction in which the developed world is moving. Sadly enough, the challenges of education in Pakistan are altogether different, with the unspeakable events of Dec 16 having added yet another layer that takes us in an opposite direction to progressiveness.
At a time when the very presence of students in schools is under discussion, is it rational or legitimate to point out the need for curricula that prepare students for modern realities? Perhaps not, when more urgently needed reforms include removing divisive content from textbooks. Nevertheless, at some point, Pakistan will need to address the issue — assuming, of course, that there is a future to be looked towards.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2015
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