The One With Aldacron

Twenty years ago I spoke much like everyone around me spoke. I had the southern drawl. My speech was littered with ain’t and y’all. I wasn’t quite as bad as most. I only spouted double negatives when I wasn’t thinking. And I knew the difference between “I couldn’t care less” and “I could care less”, a distinction lost on most people. During my time in the Army, my drawl faded away. Somehow, the ain’ts and the y’alls disappeared. My vocabulary expanded and, instead of sounding like a semi-backwoods hick, I actually started to sound intelligent. When I later wormed my way into a gig as an English instructor, I improved even more (though there was an embarrassing moment once, when in front of some well-spoken coworkers I pronounced the word queue as kyu-yu).

At some point over the nearly 13 years that I’ve been helping Koreans to improve their English, I’ve come to a disappointing realization: too many native English speakers can’t speak English. It’s true. I have Korean students who speak English much better than the average native speaker. My fellow Americans are particularly horrid. There are examples of it all over the internet in message boards, IRC chat logs, blogs, and videos. In addition to abhorrent spelling, there are a great many people who misuse certain words. For example, it is all too common to see the word loose used where the word lose should have been. I’m not talking about typos. We all overlook those. I often catch errors in my older posts. I’m talking about a basic lack of knowledge. Too many people actually believe that lose is spelled loose. That one irks me, but what really gets on my nerves is seeing should of or could of instead of should have and could have. I had a friend once, a guy who had gone through six years of college to get a Master’s degree, who insisted that prolly was a word and probably was not.

So what’s the problem? Are our schools failing us? Are average people just ignorant? The truth is more likely that people just don’t care.

Korea’s education system is tremendously stringent. The parents make it more so, sending their kids to one or more private institutes every day when school lets out. School vacation is no vacation at all. The private institutes often run special programs during that time, so most parents enroll their kids. Additionally, the children often have “vacation homework” that must be turned in when vacation ends. I have heard many adults complain about the state of things, saying that they have to spend too much money on education. They feel they have no choice though, as the entire education system is geared toward preparing children to pass the university entrance exam. Where a child goes to college has a tremendous impact on where they can get a job. Go to a no-name school and you likely won’t work for Samsung, no matter your major or potential. So the children spend twelve years learning through memorization just so they can have a chance of passing the entrance exam for a good university.

When parents complain to me about the situation, they often tell me that they wish the education system could be more like that of the West. There’s very little free thinking in Korean schools. There aren’t any lively discussions or debates. It’s all memorization. I feel a great deal of sympathy for the children. Their social lives are stunted by the constant emphasis on education. It’s no wonder so many of them try to avoid studying by hanging out in the PC rooms to play Starcraft, where they can both socialize and blow off steam. But what I usually tell the parents when they complain is that they surely don’t want an education system like America’s (I can’t speak for other Western countries).

The American education system is the polar opposite of Korea’s. In America, not enough emphasis is placed on education. Oh sure, people tell their children it’s important. Good parents will make sure their kids have done their homework. But it seems that what everyone overlooks is that too many kids don’t retain what they study. Retention is the key to good education. Without retention, you don’t really learn anything. If the average American’s ability to speak and write English isn’t enough proof, just quiz some people on basic geometry. How many people are able to tell you what the Cartesian Coordinate System is after they graduate high school? That’s something they study in middle school and forget all about a year later. Of course, the typical response to such a question is, “Who cares?”

Every subject we study in school is important. History is important to know so that we can learn from past mistakes (a lesson lost on the idiot sitting in the Oval Office at the moment). Math and science are going to become increasingly important as technology advances. The number of jobs that require a solid math education is much, much higher now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Americans use the English language every single day of their lives. So why is something that important so poorly understood?

The Probabilist has a good post on the 10 Most Misspelled Words in Blogs, where he talks about words that are often misused rather than actually misspelled. If you are a native English speaker, you owe it to yourself to read that list. Don’t just read it, retain it. Most Koreans I know don’t need to read it, since they already know the difference.

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