And perhaps, the author's views do add weight to my belief that a well thought-out cultural policy should come before we keep harping about language education, so that we overcome our own shallowness in cultural identity, and see that language is only a part - though an essential part - of culture.
Some things are beyond words
| By Janadas Devan, Review Editor | |
| |  |
It was not till I met the woman who later became my wife that I realised that it was I who was dumb.
It was not that my wife was inarticulate. If anything, she is more articulate than I am.
She can speak faster - and make fewer grammatical mistakes, while speaking with machine-gun rapidity - than I can; and she almost invariably beats me in Scrabble.
No, the realisation that the mental faculties I had assumed were valuable were not the only valuable ones derived from the realisation that my wife possessed faculties that I had not even suspected existed.
The trigger for that realisation was hearing her describe her dreams.
They were, to me, astoundingly elaborate affairs. The landscapes in her dreams were richly detailed, the figures sharply vivid, the narratives complex. Most remarkable, to me, was the fact that she dreamt in colour.
'How do you know the figure was dressed in a green shirt in your dream?' I remember asking.
'Because it was green,' she replied.
'You dream in colour?'
'Of course! Doesn't everyone? I see colours when I'm awake. So why wouldn't I dream in colour?'
I have never dreamt in colour. Indeed, I'm such a poor visualiser - I can't even visualise my own face, let alone the faces of others, including my parents, son and closest friends - the figures in my dreams tend to be vague black-and-white shapes.
I had always assumed that the phrase 'dream-like' meant dim wraith-like figures floating about against equally dim and shadowy backgrounds, for that was what my dreams were always like.
I hear things in my dreams - voices screaming, conversing, whispering - but hardly ever 'see' things.
Where the senses are concerned, I'm all ears. Thus my exaggerated valuation of the spoken and written word, my sensitivity to language and music.
I can recall clearly how people I haven't seen in decades sounded like, or retrieve from memory snatches of music I have heard only once. But I cannot visualise vividly with my eyes closed the person I saw just five seconds ago.
I realised only when I was in my 20s that what I had assumed was a gift - my sensitivity to sound - was as much a disability as it was a gift.
The development of my facility for language - the prolonged training and cultivation of what was probably an in-born inclination to begin with - came at the expense of a great many other faculties, which, in the natural scheme of things, were allowed to atrophy from disuse.
And in the natural scheme of things, I assumed what came naturally to me was the only marker of value.
Societies tend to make similar assumptions. Take the so-called 'classical trivium' that for centuries formed the basis of education in Western societies. Students were expected to master grammar, logic and rhetoric, a trivium that included some music and mathematics but was overwhelmingly linguistic in its orientation.
Poets ought to be banned from the ideal society, Plato urged in his Republic, but in fact poets and other assorted literati defined the content of education for more than 2,000 years.
China's Imperial Examination System - a system that determined for close to 1,300 years admission to Chinese officialdom - was similarly linguistic in its orientation.
Students were expected to master some music and mathematics, a little horsemanship and military strategy, but they spent far more time mastering philosophy, literature, history, law and the intricacies of ritual - subjects all that enmeshed would-be Mandarins in an endless round of words, words and even more words.
Modern education systems are a good deal more balanced, thanks in large part to our recognition that mathematics and the sciences are as valuable, if not more so, as languages.
As Buckminster Fuller once noted - exaggerating his point only slightly for effect - nobody would starve if one threw into the sea all the world's poets and philosophers.
But modern societies would come to a cataclysmic end if we threw into the sea all the world's scientists and engineers.
Wisely, thus, we spend far more money cultivating the mathematical arts in our educational institutions than we do the linguistic arts.
The latter makes life worth living; but the former makes life possible - surely, a priority.
Still, we continue to expend a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy on languages. In Singapore, we argue more incessantly and more passionately about bilingualism than we do the teaching of mathematics.
Many more letters to the press have been written bemoaning the declining standard of English here or the prevalence of Singlish than, say, the visual and plastic arts or the state of musical education.
But which is more crucial: Students effectively bilingual in English and one of the 'mother tongues', or students effectively 'bilingual' in some language as well as the language of numbers?
Would we be better off if our students topped some international ranking in English, Mandarin or Malay - and dropped from first in the international ranking for mathematics, their current rank, to 15th, the current rank of American students?
Would we be better off if our university students were as polished and articulate as Oxford Union debaters - and as innumerate as British students (currently ranked 18th for mathematics by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement)?
Bilingualism is of immense importance. Being able to speak English as well as Mandarin, Malay or Tamil are pure pluses. Being able to express oneself clearly and logically in any language is an absolute good.
We cannot think purposefully, we cannot discuss things rationally, we cannot hit the nail on the head precisely, without a sufficient number of people in society being able to write clearly and elegantly.
But it is possible to exaggerate the importance of a linguistic education to the detriment of a great many other equally valuable faculties.
Some people are simply more articulate visually or musically or mathematically than they are linguistically. An education system should develop such potentialities as assiduously as it does the linguistic.
Thinking and feeling in terms of musical melodies and harmonies can plumb depths as effectively as thinking and feeling in prose or verse.
Someone steeped in the traditions of, say, Chinese landscape painting or Indian music can be as inwardly Chinese or Indian as someone who speaks Mandarin or Tamil perfectly.
There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of linguistically.
The linguistically able do not have a monopoly on culture. They never have.
1 条评论:
what's this?
发表评论