Lost for words

If my conversations at the school gate are any guide, most seven-year-old boys today are more interested in metaphorically bashing the h*ll out of each other with the best-selling toy of 2008, Gogo's Crazy Bones, than in reading 'boooooooooring' books. Those who are worried about these little monsters (the toys that is, not the boys) should reap educational opportunities from the fact that they are based on a 2,000-year-old game played by Greek and Roman boys, when they had contests with real bones. Boys will try and read the bizarre and funny names given to these bones toys but reading books for so many of them is just not cool. Oxford University Press is trying to address this, as Alexandra Frean reports today, with a series of new books from 'Project X'.

The characters in the new books are Max, Cat, Ant and Tiger, pledged to fight the 'evil' plans of a Dr X. Dr X has great little spider robots called X Bots. Who would a real boy rather be: Max, who 'loved charity shops', Tiger, who makes a 'noiseless' drum kit out of bottle tops or the evil Dr X.

It is already bad enough that you can only buy Darth Vader light sabres when some boys actually want Luke Skywalker, without a leading children's educational publisher offering yet more indoctrination into the coolness of being 'evil'.

And then there is the art of creative writing itself.

Here is a sample paragraph from one of the books:

'CATCH IT!' he shouted to his X-bots. 'STOP HER YOU FOOLS!' he screamed at Plug and Socket.'

It seems like most of my life has been spent waging a campaign against unnecessary capitalisation, against exclamation marks, and in favour of 'show not tell'. Would a child taught to write like this pass the Oxford University entrance exam? Ha ha would a child educated in the many state schools likely to use these books ever get the chance to try for Oxford in the first place.

Here's another paragraph from another book, It's Your Call:

'You've been out in the park playing ball games with your friends. It was great fun, but the ground was really muddy and you're filthy from head to toe. Now you're home you need to get yourself and your kit cleaned up.

'You decide you will need

*The hosepipe to rinse off your trainers

*The washing machine to wash your clothes

*A nice big bath to get yourself clean.

How much water will that use? And does it really matter?'

When you've spent seven years persuading a typical boy that baths are good, you just don't want some idiot author giving them yet another excuse never to have one. 

Worse, beneath this is the hidden assumption that: 

*the child lives in a house with a garden big enough to need a hose,

*there is a non-working mum in said house with time enough to get out soap suds and a mangle to do a water-saving handwash as in days of old,

*that your house has more than one bathroom and the second one is equipped with an ultra-pricey water saving power shower.

When my dear son comes home from his next football match covered in glorious mud, he's going straight in a big, hot steaming bubbly bath. I don't want him reading a book that will make him feel prematurely guilty about his tiny presence in the world while over our heads fly aircraft after aircraft on their way to and from Heathrow, an airport likely soon to be augmented by a third runway, with each single aircraft sending more carbon into the atmosphere than any one of us could do in our entire lifetimes by having hot baths after football matches.

When reading comes to be associated with cackhanded attempts at indoctrination, with guilt and fear, with the nature of evil, is it really something we want our children to be doing in any case and is it any wonder if they find it repellant? Does anyone wonder that they prefer to enhance their hand-eye coordination skills instead with muddy football and Crazy Bones games?

However, I admit my judgement on these things is not always the best. What do I know about the nature of evil, or the evils of environmental profligacy?

So I've just nicked all the new books from my colleague, a very non-Max Cat Ant and Tiger thing to do, and am taking some of them home tonight to try out on said son to let him be the final arbiter.

Some might have read the warning signs already from OUP with its earlier Junior Dictionary, slammed today by both Jeremy Haselock, Precentor at Norwich and in Country Life Magazine for removing many traditional words associated with Church and countryside and replacing them with politically-correct terms seemingly chosen with the aim of putting anyone of any age off reading for good, never mind 'junior' boys.

This is what Agromones says in Country Life:

'Explaining what goes on in rural areas is an important feature of the curriculum on the Continent, whereas it plays practically no part in teaching in Britain. Never has this fact been as dramatically highlighted as by the publication of the new Oxford Junior Dictionary. Edited by one Vineeta Gupta, it is besotted with ‘relevance’.

'As a result, this latest revision removes a significant number of the words that are redolent of the countryside. Thus, catkin and conker, buttercup and blackberry, brook and beetroot are among the many rural words that have been thrown out as not being relevant to today’s young. Instead of these have come database and analogue, dyslexia and citizenship, biodegradable and endangered.

'You can see what is happening. The living words of the countryside are being displaced by the language that Miss Gupta thinks suitable for the young. There is a real degree of political correctness at work here. The argument is that we are now an urban nation and we see things through urban eyes, so the young really don’t have the need to know about willows or conkers....

'To exclude the countryside from the vocabulary of urban children is to deny them the richness of their heritage.

'There’s hardly a nursery rhyme, a classic children’s story, or even a modern children’s bestseller that does not contain the words that Miss Gupta has thrown out. Without stoats, weasels and ferrets, who can read The Wind in the Willows? This is not editing, but campaigning. So, it’s no wonder she also denies children their religious heritage. Altar, aisle, bishop, and sainthood have all gone, as have Whitsun and Pentecost. Excusing it with twaddle about ‘multiculturalism’, she has cut most readers from their religious roots—to diminish them both spiritually and culturally. The Press of Oxford—a university that owes its very existence to the Church—should be ashamed of putting its name to so partial a ‘dictionary.'

This is similar to what Canon Haselock says:

'Can you believe it but the latest edition of a leading children’s dictionary, published by the Oxford University Press no less, will no longer contain the words: abbey, aisle, altar, bishop and chapel, monastery, monk, nun, minister, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil and vicar; gone too are carol, cracker, holly, ivy and mistletoe, not to mention dwarf, elf and goblin. Instead, the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary introduces children to the grey world of today’s charismatically-led Britain with the more ‘relevant’ words: database, export, curriculum, classify, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, committee, compulsory, bullet point, voicemail, citizenship, dyslexic and celebrity.

'Leaving politics and religion aside, the list of omitted words is almost a pastoral poem in itself: gone are the colourful and evocative words of the childhood imagination: fern, moss, buttercup and marzipan, adder, heron, kingfisher, lark, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren, acorn, blackberry, bluebell, bramble, brook, chestnut, clover, conker, ivy, pasture, sycamore, vine, violet, walnut and willow. The head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press is quoted as saying: “Many children once lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multi-cultural. People don’t go to church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multi-culturalism.”

'When you have digested the full implications of this quote and become even more deeply depressed than you were when you read your credit card statement or projected mortgage repayment scheme, I suggest you console your self with the following thought. In my experience, children do not want to own, let alone use, a dictionary — they are worthy books that are bought by well-meaning relations only to sit upon shelves rarely opened and gaining dust while the children for whom they are intended are busy getting on with real life — or else sitting in the corner entranced by the world of JK Rowling or Philip Pullman in which words like elf and moss and conker tumble out from every exciting good-versus-evil page.'

The Times blog At The School Gate has a list of books that some children might actually want to read.

By the way, one of the new X Project books, Pirates, is actually quite good. I'll update this with my son's verdict on more of them in the next few days.

Comments

[J Pearce]

"It is already bad enough that you can only buy Darth Vader light sabres when some boys actually want Luke Skywalker, without a leading children's educational publisher offering yet more indoctrination into the coolness of being 'evil'."

Ruth! Calm down! Darth Vader is the story of goodness corrupted and eventually redeemed. He's a baddie, but we know that eventually he's actually a good guy gone wrong, who saves the day. I don't see much difference between that and any number of Biblical fables which bang on about redemption.

"When you've spent seven years persuading a typical boy that baths are good, you just don't want some idiot author giving them yet another excuse never to have one."

Err..you've never experienced a hosepipe bans and water rationing then Ruth? It IS a bad idea to have baths when you're in the middle of a drought, as we were as recently as 2005. I think you need to be persuading your boy that washing is good - how he does it is essentially irrelevant, isn't it?

Frankly, I'm amazed at the Luddism in complaining about the contents of a childrens dictionary. It is an inescapable fact that an increasing majority of the UK population lives in urban districts. Nary a stoat to be found for miles. Children will grow up in that environment without a requirement for an exhaustive knowledge of rural landscapes.

Therefore, I can easily see a rationale for excluding particular vocabulary, especially if - as I suspect - the dictionary has to be limited to a certain amount of defintions. The English language expands everyday and the editor of a specific dictionary has no choice but to include language that reflects the experience of the majority demographic of its intended audience. That by defintion means excluding certain vocabulary. Its not rocket science, is it? To divine some PC conspiracy from it is just good old reactionary paranoia.

And its not as if there aren't bookstores chock full of tomes on the countryside. They even have pretty pictures!

As for Canon Haselock - what is that idiot on about? He whinges like a good 'un about the omission of words which funnily enough, are all relevant to his own religious and political beliefs - but then contradicts himself entirely by claiming that children don't read dictionaries anyway!

I think Canon Haselock needs to look up the word "consistent".

Finally - Mr Gillibrand - the television has an "off" button (unlike the Brussels gravy train you happen to inhabit and mores the pity). TV programmers have no control over who chooses to watch their output. It is entirely the choice of the consumer as to whether they choose to use the TV. We have Cbeebies channel in this country - I've not heard anyone decry it as a method for alienating a child from its parents so far (although no doubt some dimwitted theist will probably divine some tenuous link to Satan in Postman Pat before long).

And from a parental interaction viewpoint, please explain to me the difference of plonking a child down in front of the telly and plonking a child down with a book or toy? Either a parent interacts with their child or they don't. TV or no TV.

[Chris Gillibrand]

In Germany, they are about to launch a TV station aimed at babies from six months to three years old.

The next step after cutting children off from history, is to cut them off from their parents.

[Chris Gillibrand]

In Germany, they are about to launch a TV station aimed at babies from six months to three years old.

The next step after cutting children off from history, is to cut them off from their parents.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Some enteprising publisher should reprint the boys' books of G.A. Henty - not fantasy or funny but solid gripping historical novels. It is no wonder the American story-teller Jim Weiss has started publishing CD readings of them.

[jan]

My three boys in their younger days all read avidly Brian Jacques' "Redwall" series - "unfortunately" the abbey of the title is in a rural setting with a wide variety of animals as protagonists and great emphasis is placed on describing the quality of food in their fabled feasts! It's an excellent series for younger readers and is stuffed full of the words no longer deemed necessary in a junior dictionary. Just as well we lived on the continent and had an old fashioned dictionary to hand to help with any unfamiliar vocab!

[John Richardson]

Reading through this, and following up some of the links, I get this "not quite right but can't quite put my finger on it" feeling about these so-called 'books for boys'.

One thing is that there seem to be a lot of women driving the reading agenda, writing the books and even featuring as the main characters. That may not be a problem - I happily read the 'Famous Five' series at the age of seven - but it is a feature.

Another is that there seems to be a heavy reliance on humour (everything must be fun or funny to get boys' attention), fantasy or magic. The real world or the serious world don't seem to be trusted. I am struck by the contrast with stories in the early 'Eagle' where 'super powers' were deliberately avoided on the grounds that they didn't exist and that boys needed to learn that you could only deal with the problems of the real world with real abilities.

(In case anyone should point to Dan Dare as fantasy, science fiction, which is what it was, has the advantage of combining elements of imaginary worlds with the rootedness of 'science' in this world.)

In short, although they may be selling to schools and libraries, I wonder whether these are really 'books for boys' or books of what people think boys ought to read.

Indeed, isn't the core-assumption 'boys should read books' something being imposed on the basis of what someone thinks a boy should be like, rather than perhaps on the basis of what boys are like?

It is all very thought-provoking.

[Jenny]

Dumbing down, and exploiting children's education to indoctrinate them is wrong, and those who are attempting to do this need to be taken on, aggressively.

It's disrespectful of our children's rights, and an attempt to deprive them of their futures as human beings. There should also be a boycott of this children's dictionary, and parents should buy only older versions or other dictionaries, being sure to to write letters to the publishers, cc'ing copies to the media on why they are boycotting it.

As a mother in the US, I was shocked to learn how education had dumbed down, especially reading lists, when my daughter started junior high school. I had to be proactive and supplement her reading. I made reading lists, from memories of what I was required to. Don't give up the fight, your children are depending on you.

[Bishop Alan Wilson]

Oh dear. I find the dictionary story very discouraging. One always needs to ask "Relavent to what?" Harry Potter proved that intelligent playful language, strong characters and stories, words that intrigue and tease the imagination, do have a future. I'm sure you're right about general redundancy of basic dictionaries anyway... I still feel a bit grumpy and depressed if our children are all being turned into morons at school by their dictionaries. They deserve better.

[Paul Maurice Martin]

Educationally, a key missing ingredient for many children today is that they don't get an early start on reading. I can't tell you how many parent-teacher meetings I sat in on as an elementary school counselor where teachers tried to get parents to spend time at home reading with their children.