Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

Childhood Falls Silent:
The Loss of Speech and How We Need to
Foster Speech in an Age of the Media
by
Rainer Patzlaff
In civilised nations it is taken for granted that every school graduate
can read and write. But the reality is different. Especially in the highly
developed, rich industrial nations of the world, a new form of illiteracy is
spreading more and more. It is called functional or post illiteracy because it
concerns people who, in spite of having finished school, have not learned or
have forgotten how to read and write. In the USA it 1994 it was estimated
that 70 million people (28% of the population) fell into this category. Added
to this are millions of so-called alliterate people who can read but don’t like
to, or simply don’t. Altogether, according to international studies, this group
of non-readers today represents a third of the population of most OECD
states. In 1995, Barry Sanders impressively described the catastrophic social
and cultural consequences of this development in his book “The Loss of
Linguistic Sophistication”. These consequences affect us all.
When the problem of declining ability to read and write was just
beginning to be recognised there arose another, until then unimaginable,
degeneration of human cultural faculties: not only the command of written
language is lost to large parts of the population, but gradually the relation
to the spoken word as well. As unbelievable as it may sound, speech falls
silent!
Joachim Kutschke found some bitter words for it in the magazine
Spiegel (38/1993): “Whether at home at the dinner table or in the car on
the road, in German families, (what’s left of them), people don’t converse.
At most functional instructions are still in use: ‘Don’t be so late!’; ‘Leave
that!’; ‘Hurry up!’; and the binary answers of the little ones: “Yes”. “ No”.
“Yes”.. ..end of conversation. Those who have as children been spoiled and
tranquillised by the baby-sitter called television evidently fall silent later on
as well. Do the mass media silence us more and more; do they produce a
generation of mute zombies?”
Konrad Adam reported in 1993 that experienced primary school
teachers expressed dismay about the inability of first graders to deal with
speech at all: “The children have great difficulties understanding instructions,
executing them and recounting events. Those who have grown up in
healthy circumstances (which are no longer typical) would be astounded to
discover in how many families today, days and weeks go by with hardly a
word spoken.” (Reported in the German newspaper, FAZ, 18.6.1993).
This problem has grown to such an extent that in Great Britain,
according to a press release in 1996, emergency programs had to be set up
“where first graders learn how to greet people or how to ask the way.”
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