“Every uneducated person,” according to Friedrich Schlegel, “is a caricature of himself.” Many of us have relatives, particularly older relatives, who did not get the education they deserved. One of my elderly relatives, now dead, was an uneducated caricature of me. Perhaps in turn, I am a caricature of a much better read, more accomplished and refined version of myself, a version that I keep in the attic. One who knew that the quotation was from Schlegel without having to google, and one who never sniggers at the word knickers. Or vice versa.

Schlegel or not, google or not, there is truth in this apophthegm. Education is liberating and empowering, if only because it enables you to see what a dreadful word “empowering” is. It makes you the equal or superior of people much wealthier and better connected than yourself. More importantly, you can share in the fruits of civilisation, and engage with minds, past and present, far superior to your own.

When people miss out on education because they are poor – because they must leave school at fourteen to work in a cotton mill or down a mine – that is regrettable. But if they miss out because of deliberate policy on the part of those who govern these matters, that is deplorable. I cannot post about education without mentioning the destruction of the grammar schools, but I mention it only in passing, for I have discussed it at length here. The main purpose of this post is to draw attention to an excellent article by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on “the gift of language”, surely the most important gift an education can give. The article should be read, and savoured, in full. Here are a few extracts:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion…They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them. In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs…

All this, it seems to me, directly contradicts our era’s ruling orthodoxy about language. According to that orthodoxy, every child, save the severely brain-damaged and those with very rare genetic defects, learns his or her native language with perfect facility, adequate to his needs. He does so because the faculty of language is part of human nature, inscribed in man’s physical being, as it were, and almost independent of environment…It follows that no language or dialect is superior to any other and that modes of verbal communication cannot be ranked according to complexity, expressiveness, or any other virtue. Thus, attempts to foist alleged grammatical “correctness” on native speakers of an “incorrect” dialect are nothing but the unacknowledged and oppressive exercise of social control—the means by which the elites deprive whole social classes and peoples of self-esteem and keep them in permanent subordination.

The locus classicus of this way of thinking, at least for laymen such as myself, is Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct….When it comes to linguistic form,” Pinker says, quoting the anthropologist, Edward Sapir, “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.” To put it another way, “linguistic genius is involved every time a child learns his or her mother tongue.”..

In fact, Pinker has no difficulty in ascribing greater or lesser expressive virtues to languages and dialects. In attacking the idea that there are primitive languages, he quotes the linguist Joan Bresnan, who describes English as “a West Germanic language spoken in England and its former colonies” (no prizes for guessing the emotional connotations of this way of so describing it)…

The contrast between a felt and lived reality—in this case, Pinker’s need to speak and write standard English because of its superior ability to express complex ideas—and the denial of it, perhaps in order to assert something original and striking, is characteristic of an intellectual climate in which the destruction of moral and social distinctions is proof of the very best intentions…

Everyone, save the handicapped, learns to run without being taught; but no child runs 100 yards in nine seconds, or even 15 seconds, without training. It is fatuous to expect that the most complex of human faculties, language, requires no special training to develop it to its highest possible power.