Falling standards of literacy

When I first got into television – which I'm shocked to realise was 25 years ago – I was signed up to be the MC on the first series of 90-minute weekly programmes on American television. It seemed madness then. There was a 'Theatre of the Air', or some such title, which ran an hour but that was considered the limit of human endurance. After all, the great, though egotistical, architect Frank Lloyd Wright called television 'chewing-gum for the eyes' and, I suppose, the assumption was that if you went on for more than an hour, you'd get some form of visual lockjaw or a perpetual stammer of the eyelids.

Anyway, in those days, nothing was pre-recorded. There was no videotape, you did everything on camera at the time it was happening and if a slab of scenery fell over you had to put it down to an act of God and go on talking. However dead the material, it was always live. 

Our programme was what we liked to think of as an intelligent, middle-brow variety show, that's to say, inside the 90 minutes there'd be a 20-minute play specially written by somebody like William Saroyan or Maxwell Anderson or William Inge. There'd be, say, a ten-minute ballet filmed in France or, I recall, José Limon’s now classic version of 'Othello' danced by two men and two women. And then, say, an interview with a man who'd just gone to the top of Mount Everest, the first of four 20-minute pieces on the history of trial by jury, capped maybe by a potted version of Gilbert and Sullivan's curtain-raiser of the same name. 

We always had four or five solid items in there, an orchestra playing the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the first version he put down in his notebooks and then the finished version we all know. We did everything, from the birth of the American Constitution to the birth of a bee. However carefully we plotted the main segments of each show, there were always nasty little gaps of one, two, three minutes, with nothing in them. One time we rammed in a 30-second – 30-second! – film of two women, two heads talking over a garden fence. We were told at the time that that's all there was of the film. If it had been longer, it would have been dangerous for the talking heads because the film was an X-ray film, motion picture X-ray, and it's gruesomely vivid to me to this day. One of the women, I remember, was chewing on an apple and once you've seen bits of apple dropping slowly past the uvula and down into the oesophagus of a skeleton, it's something you don't forget, I can tell you. 

Well, what I meant to say was that we had a producer who was what you might call a hectic optimist. He was hectic because we always had these bothersome two, three, four minute bits to fill, he was an optimist because he was always sure we could fill them, that I could fill them on 30 seconds notice with a thumbnail or a tip-of-the-tongue history of the income tax or the Crown Jewels or the way the brain works. I should explain that while we often had time to dream up these little inserts while we were rehearsing the main features, more often than not we had no notice at all. In other words, the play on the programme, say, ran short in the playing because the actors rushed it or somebody skipped four pages of dialogue and when it was all over they'd make signs or put up a little card saying, 'Four minutes to fill'. 

Once the crisis came on us with only 30 seconds notice and the only thing I saw at hand was a dog-eared book of quotations. So I picked it up, went on camera and instead of just reading improving bits, I made the mistake of deliberately misreading, in other words, saying, 'What's wrong with this quotation? Tomorrow, to fresh fields and pastures new.' Well, since fields are pastures of a sort, something must be wrong and is. Milton wrote, 'Tomorrow, to fresh woods and pastures new.' And then I thought of misquotations from famous movies. Did you know that Maureen O'Sullivan, or whoever, never said, 'You Tarzan, me Jane'? And Bogart never said, 'Play it again, Sam!'? 

Well, the incoming mail was furious. People didn’t want to know the correct quotation. They wanted to stay with the legend. Correcting them was a mistake. Well, now I see from a recent survey of college entrance examinations that this feeling of pride in one's ignorance is now a universal thing. There was a time when children who failed examinations sighed and decided to work a little harder or cursed and went off to what used to be called 'a crammer.' No longer, it seems. 

There is an actual protest movement among failed high school students and applicants who failed to get into college. They feel, and they say so, that they're being discriminated against on account of their ignorance. They want automatic high marks, otherwise, they say, it's not fair, it's not democratic. Everybody should go to college if he or she wants to. Requiring you to qualify is a form of snobbishness. 

Well, the latest national survey of how graduating high school students stand scholastically – scholastically? I'm thinking of the ability to handle a simple English sentence to say what they mean when they mean something in a straightforward and articulate way – the standard is dropping disastrously. In more and more colleges, first-year students are not taking a literature course that used to be called 'Freshman English', they're actually taking a course in remedial English. They're trying to learn to read, to write in a manner that 30, 40 years ago would have been normal for an average 11-year-old and, may I hasten to say to anybody who's shaking a head over the decay of literacy in America, that this is happening to an alarming extent also in Britain. The Americans simply take more surveys, grit their teeth and add yet another to their pile of social problems. 

I can't help it if I'm accused of being a fuddy-duddy in feeling that this is not a sign of health or human progress. I still get what, for want of a better category, we'll have to call fan mail from listeners who begin by apologising for having had only an elementary school education and then go on to write perfectly articulate, simple, even eloquent and often charming letters. Whatever their trade – a farmer, a clerk, a carpenter, a grocer – their age is the giveaway. They're always in the fifties, sixties or seventies. And I also get mail from not only recent college graduates, but from doctors of philosophy who stagger through a jungle of jargon with their elbows. They can't write, they can't think except in clumps of ill-digested long words. I don't mention spelling because spelling is a trick, a form, as the late Archbishop Temple put it, 'of low cunning'. Either you have it or you don't have it. 

Well, if my response to this horror is that of a fuddy-duddy, I'm happy to tell you that the United States is developing more and more legions of fuddy-duddies in the shape of parents outraged to find that while their children are graduating in such courses as Ethnic Conditioning, Nude Photography and Interpersonal Familial Relationships, they can't read or write. I know a charming young man, 18 and now in college, who wrote me a letter that in all its grotesque illiteracy could just as well have been signed Tarzan or King Kong and when I next saw him, I put this to him as delicately as possible and he said, 'I'm not interested in literature, my interest is in the visual arts'. He is a good photographer and he watches between eight and ten hours' television a day. 

It takes me back to a shuddering memory and I'd be awfully grateful to anyone who can discover the where, when and what of this quotation. Years ago, I read about a certain pope. It was at the time, the beginning I suppose, of the Dark Ages. He wrote a letter to, I think it was the Bishop of Winchester, and a fair translation of it would begin, 'My dear bishop, greetings, brother! What I mean is these words is coming to you from a man which is sorry for what I write on account of I don't know no better since the language ain't taught no more the way it used to.' 

All right, exaggerated I have no doubt, but it was an apology from the pope for having been brought up in an age when ordinary Latin was crumbling all around him. He knew no better and there seems to be a lot of evidence that we are going down the same slope. 

But, not to end on this melancholy note, I ought to mention the sudden rush, or heartening eruption, of some astonishingly bright children who've come into the news in the past week or two. I don't know whether or not to include in this rousing little list of whiz kids the 19-year-old Princeton student who has made a nuclear bomb though all the top physicists say it couldn't be done without access to absolutely top secret material. But there's the 12-year-old New York boy who took an Advanced Maths test and then told the Board of Education that they had the answers all wrong. He was right. 

And the other night we saw on television the angelic face of a boy who looked about ten, was actually 16. His name is Steve Cauthen. He's a jockey. He's been riding ten months and he's won 355 races, which would be a preposterous lifetime record for another jockey. Steve was on a horse at aged one, was showing and breaking horses at four, and to placate your natural fear that such a boy wonder might be in all other respects a moron, let me quote his own, amazingly mature explanation, 'I knew I was going into a man's world and I worked at it for a long time so that when I got there, I was able to cope with it.' 

And as for the brutalising of tender minds by television, listen to this letter to Newsweek, the magazine, from one Kate [Spivak] of Port Washington, New York, 'I'm nine years old and I don't think you should criticise us about how much TV we watch if the average adult watches much more TV than the average child. We aren't imbeciles, we understand that most of the commercials are not true and our parents are smart, too. They don't let us eat that junk and if they did, we wouldn't touch it.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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