Copyright © 2019 Henrietta W. Hay

"Why Can't The English (er, Americans) teach their children how to speak?"
July 25, 1997

"Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? This verbal class distinction by now should be antique."
Professor Higgins in "My Fair Lady" sang about the lovely but grubby and ungrammatical flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. I ask the same question, although not in song.
I would never be so unrealistic as to suggest that all high school graduates meet Professor Higgins' standards, but I do believe that an 18-year-old honor student should be able to speak clearly and write a simple sentence.
It is also a good thing for a high school graduate to have learned to think in a straight line and it seems logical to me that thinking and writing go together.
Einstein did it one way. He had an idea and he communicated it clearly and succinctly: E = mc2. Of course, only physicists and mathematicians understood it, but it was very clear to them.
A more universal means of communication is language, and that is where our young friend from Montrose blew it.
An essay written by Earl Christensen, an 18-year-old Montrose high school honor student has been the subject of endless discussion on the western slope. What happened between the author and his state legislator makes interesting reading, but is a side issue. Of course Senator Alexander should not have called the kid "a worthless piece of ____." He would have been better off had he had quoted from that master of invective, Shakespeare:" "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."
If any specific ideas were floating around in that rambling essay on -- "why government is like interfering with like his rite to be a bigot and like smoke pot and how are freedoms have like ben taken away and like we need to start complaning" -- they were lost in his writing.
But there are those who say that in the electronic age it is not necessary to speak or write well.
They would have us believe that correct speech is a lost art, no longer important. No need to write well, they say! You communicate via e-mail and it gets erased as soon as it is read. No need to spell; computers have spell checkers. No need to think; you can't communicate your ideas anyway.
Fortunately, there are those of us who believe that the written and spoken word are, if anything, more important in the information age than in centuries past, who believe that clarity of language is essential to civilized living.
Over a third of the freshmen in most colleges nation-wide lack the writing skills to do college composition, but it is not a new problem. We had Dumbbell English when I went to C. U. in the dark ages. For the record, I didn't have to take it.
And still, after all these years, "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taught their Greek."
It's hard to learn to write well, very hard. Carl Bowman, who is a middle school teacher in Jefferson County and writes for the Denver Post, says, "First rate education demands a major commitment of time, a lifestyle really, and young people at every age and grade level bear personal responsibility for what they learn... Good writing skills demand hours and hours of time."
If Earl Christensen wants to be a revolutionary, which I think may have been the point of his essay, he needs to be able to communicate his ideas. If he wants to be an American politician, he certainly needs to know how to use words to sound convincing. If he only wants to sit and gripe about the government, I guess he is adequately prepared.
He and all the other 18 year olds are bombarded every day by poor English -- but they owe it to themselves and to the rest of us to hang in there and try to preserve our language.
It can be done. Professor Higgins finally succeeded with Eliza Doolittle.
"By George, I think she's got it. By George, she finally got it."