1999
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Education
One-to-one tuition call from NUT
Every state school pupil should be guaranteed one-to-one tuition, the National Union of Teachers says today in a radical five-year plan.
At a time of falling pupil numbers, it urges the government to use teachers in a more ``creative'' way. It also calls for a shake-up of the national curriculum, an end to selection, targets, league tables and national tests in England and the replacement of the watchdog Ofsted with a less bureaucratic inspectorate.
In its strategy, called Bringing Down the Barriers, it argues that ``short-term thinking and petty political point scoring'' has undermined the development of education, with the government's emphasis on choice for parents little more than an illusion in reality.
As a starting point the NUT urges the government to fund and pilot personal tuition for pupils in a group of primary and secondary schools.
Steve Sinnott, NUT general secretary, said: ''Education must be a service for all, giving every child equality of access to a curriculum that is broad and flexible.
``Social class and low income should not be a barrier to any child. Each should have access to those extras such as trips to museums and theatres which help broaden their understanding of the world and deepen their educational development.
``Each child should have the opportunity to benefit from personal tutoring but in school. Such extra support should not depend on whether their parents can afford it.''
Reviews
A Cloud in Trousers
Steve Trafford's play takes us back to the futurists - specifically, to the attempt to reconstruct poetry and art in the wake of the Russian Revolution. While Trafford's hero, Vladimir Mayakovsky, remains a voluble enigma, the play makes a fascinating companion piece to Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, playing down the road at the National Theatre.
Trafford focuses on the attempt of Mayakovsky and his pals to achieve a revolution in art, sex and politics. In 1917, the noisy poet and playwright, who wears his tie on his shoulder and his heart on his sleeve, meets up with the Muscovite editor, Osip Brik, and his wife, Lili. When Osip uses Lili to persuade the poet to join the Party, a meeting of minds quickly turns into a mйnage a trios. As Lili says: ``We change nothing, if we can't change ourselves.'' But although the threesome works (precariously) and Mayakovsky enjoys literary fame under Lenin, everything changes after Stalin's accession, culminating in the poet's suicide in 1930.
The best feature of the play is that it gives us generous helpings of Mayakovsky's poetry: the title stems from a famous line in which the poet defines himself as, in Peter Conrad's words, ``a volatile spirit materializing on level ground, mystery clad in buffoonery''. But what Trafford
never makes fully clear is how much Mayakovsky was a committed revolutionary and how much an anarchic individualist. You get the impression that his real talent was for lyricism and satire, and that he possessed only the shakiest grasp of political reality.
However, Trafford's play is a lively study of love among the artists and of the recurrence of bourgeois possessiveness, even in a group of self-conscious bohemians. Jointly presented by Ensemble and York Theatre Royal, Damien Cruden's production has a good deal of verve. John Sackville catches much of the hero's manic excitability, and Elizabeth Mansfield's Lili has a bright-eyed fervour that enables her to overcome lines such as: ``Isn't great writing always a response to pain?'' Even if the politics of the time are only briefly sketched in, the play leaves one in no doubt about the failure of the revolutionary dream, and persuades one that Mayakovsky was a considerable poet.
Communication
The world language
India has about a billion people and a dozen major languages of its own. One language and only one, is understood - by an elite - across the country: that of the foreigners who ruled it for less than 200 years and left 52 years ago. After 1947, English had to share its official status, with North India's Hindi, and was due to lose it in 1965. It didn't happen: southern India said no.
Today, India. Tomorrow, unofficially, the world. That is well under way; at first, because the British not only built the global empire but settled America, and now because the world (and notably America) has acquired its first truly global - and interactive - medium, the Internet.
On the estimates of David Crystal, a British expert, some 350m people speak English
as their first language. Maybe 250m-350m do or can use it as a second language; in ex-colonial countries, notably, or in English-majority ones, like 30m recent immigrants to the United States, or Canada's 6m francophone Quebeckers. And elsewhere? That is a heroic guess: 100m-1 billion is Mr Crystal's, depending how you define ``can''. Let us be bold: in all, 20-25% of earth's 6 billion people can use English: not the English of England, let alone of Dr (Samuel) Johnson, but English.
That number is soaring as each year brings new pupils to school and carries off monolingual oldies - and now as the Internet spreads. And the process is self-reinforcing. As business spreads across frontiers, the company that wants to move its executives around, and to promote the best of them, regardless of nationality, encourages the use of English. So the executive who wants to be in the frame, or to move to another employer, learns to use it. English
has long dominated learned journals: German, Russian or French (depending on the field) may be useful to their expert readers, but English is essential. So, if you want your own work published - and widely read by your peers - then English is the language of choice.
The growth of the cinema, and still more so of television, has spread the dominant language. Foreign movies or sitcoms may be dubbed into major languages, but for smaller audiences they are usually subtitled. Result: a Dutch or Danish or even Arab family has an audio-visual learning aid in its living-room, and usually the language spoken on-screen is English.
The birth of the computer and its American operating systems gave English a nudge ahead; that of the Internet has given it a huge push. Any web-linked household today has a library of information available at the click of a mouse. And, unlike the books on its own shelves or in the public library, maybe four-fifths is written in English. That proportion may lessen, as more non- English sites spring up. But English will surely dominate.
The web of course works both ways. An American has far better access today than ever before to texts in German or Polish or Gaelic. But the average American has no great incentive to profit from it. That is not true the other way round. The web may even save some mini-languages. But the big winner will be English.
1999