Bob Ellis at ABC's The Drum: Stoopidity spells disaster for Australia's future
It has been found that children who are bilingual have more brain connections and do better in exams.
This sounds about right. It explains why Chinese-Australian children, who not only grow up bilingual but master two forms of alphabet, always do well in the HSC, and are usually in the top two or three in New South Wales. They have more brain connections, obviously.
But it also means, must mean, that children who grow up spelling words inadequately have fewer brain connections than those who spell accurately, and therefore less intelligence.
It means, must mean, that children of the present generation and those that grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are stupider than those, like me, who grew up in the 1950s.
For if you write 'you're' for 'your' and 'it's' for 'its' and 'his' for 'he's' and 'threten' for 'threaten' and 'spoose' for 'suppose' and 'vaunrable' for 'vulnerable' and 'writting' for 'writing' and 'boarder' for 'border' and 'wonders' for 'wanders' and 'wonting' for 'wanting' - all examples from tertiary students of a teacher of my acquaintance - you don't know what you're doing. It means you have nine or ten thousand less brain connections than me (or the average Australian Chinese), and the connections between a thought and what follows can be a mystery to you, a Cloud of Unknowing, a jumble of interpenetrative meanings, like the cryptic crossword.
It can explain why more and more people are doing sillier and sillier things. Like eating Christ's flesh on a Sunday in order to get his good opinion. Like aborting babies your Scientology elder tells you 'have no souls yet', and will stop you doing valuable work for the church. Like imagining Afghans coming here on boats are al-Qaeda terrorists keen to blow us all up. Like taking heed of Alan Jones.
Brain connections between a thought and what it portends, or logically presupposes, just aren't there any more and the 'dumbing-down' of the populace is a very real thing. Using a medium available to illiterates, like radio, connections are made that make no sense. That 'people smugglers' who bring boat people to a place of liberty, opportunity and safety are evil. That bombing Muslim villages will convert their 'hearts and minds' to a love of secular democracy.
It explains too why the Americans, whose annual Spelling Bee is like an Academy Award for bright children, are better orators than we are. They are drilled through spelling by tough-minded female sergeant majors and so can form thoughts, argue and, like Obama, speak in masterful sentences that enlighten concepts and uplift the heart. They learn early how words look, and what they mean, and do not fumble through them, blindly grabbing at them, uncertain where a sentence is going. It is why in bureaucratic documents few verbs occur. The avoidance of meaning that is their watchword is a by-product, these days, not just of moral cowardice but inability to spell.
Poor spelling costs us money. Nearly every document written has to be corrected, and this wastes company time. Many job applications that are ill-spelled cost a good young person a job they might have excelled in, improving our economy. And when functional illiterates like Kerry Packer take over big corporations, a lot of ignorant bombast follows. I may not be able to read, they say, but I do know what my newspapers' opinions should be. Functional illiterates are deciding what views media entities should propound, and persuasive kooks like Glenn Beck are taking over human minds, in the millions.
What is to be done about it? Well, a Prime Minister's Spelling Bee with a $20,000 prize wouldn't hurt, nor a requirement in schools that a child memorise a page of a book and write it down while not looking at it, getting the spelling accurate, as part of his or her yearly exams.
This is very serious stuff, especially for boys. Recent research shows girls do better academically, and the gap is widening. This means Australian boys are getting more and more like South Carolinians, whose average IQ of late is 94. And more and more unable to cope with a complicated world.
If good spelling were enforced in the early grades of school, and the reading of a whole Harry Potter before the age of ten, there would be less rape, and armed robbery, and vandalism, and unemployment, and suicide, and drug abuse, and car accidents, and racism, and, oh yes, schoolyard bullying. Bryce Courtney has often said this, and I agree with him.
Because there would be more brain connections, you see, and therefore more grasp of consequences, and a better civilisation in the end, like Scotland's, or Sweden's, or Canada's, where people are drilled to spell accurately, and therefore think wittily and carefully and presciently and well.
Or perhaps you disagree.
