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MOUTHS OF BABES....

A work experience media student rocked me this week as we were talking about a recent survey showing 20% of adult Australians are so illiterate they could not accurately read the instructions on a medicine bottle label for their child.

A situation not only scandalous but dangerous.

This young woman - with the complex communications world of newspapers or radio or television ahead of her -- was not shocked or fazed by that 20% figure. Who can read? Who can spell?

She let slip a reason that to me signals an education white ant in the computer age.

This final year student airily admitted that spelling was a weakness in her case because “ I have been using computers since I was twelve. I’ve always had Spellcheck”.

And that confession coalesced in my mind as the reason why I receive job applications from earnest young would-be who cannot spell, cannot construct a decent sentence, cannot even put together a respectable CV.

It also told me yet again why school-leavers can’t even do modest arithmetic. The computer disc supposedly takes care of spelling mistakes and a built-in calculator removes any urge to be able to work out that seven sevens are forty-nine.

No wonder I saw a contestant on Nine’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the other night who had to go to the audience for a hint on

“ What are nine nines?”

Her excuse was that “ maths isn’t my strong suit”. Gnashing the teeth in my lounge-room I wanted to shout at the TV that this was hardly maths. It was simple Times Tables.

I have always thought that calculators in classrooms was a bad policy. To me the “ two times two, seven times seven” tables were not just ways to learn how to multiply. They were as much a method of exercising the

“ brain muscle” as the gym was for the arms and legs.

And in recent times, as an author, I have bristled at some well-meaning educators who claim that “ stream of consciousness” writing is more important than accurate spelling or good grammar. How mangled English and spelling can get your point across is, frankly, beyond me even though I will admit (in this column) to breaking rules of grammar for impact or effect.

But an e-mail I received this week may have given me the clue to why I feel the way I do and why my work experience student feels the way she does. And why I have moved into the curmudgeon division at a mere 58 years of age.

To put this into perspective let me remind you of the ageist joke when a mother started talking to her teenage son recently about Paul McCartney and she mentioned the Beatles.

The son replied: “ Beatles? Was Paul with them before Wings?”

The e-mail, and some personal research which will make anybody over forty feel old, makes some salient points.

Did you know that students starting university next year were not alive in 1980? That’s more than a decade after men walked on the moon.

That means many, if not most, of those students have no knowledge of Ronald Reagan as an American President let alone Reagan as an actor. Even with his chronic Alzheimer’s he probably recalls more about his life than they do.

Throughout their lives there has only been one Pope and one Queen. And many cannot even remember the Fraser years in Canberra – let alone Gough Whitlam.

For some, who now get to vote for the first time, the only Prime Minister they have ever really know since their teenage years is “old” John Howard.

Who’s Keating, who’s Hawke?

With talk of an attack on Iraq by the United States, with Australian support, it is sobering to realise that many university students – who may have burned a flag last week – were only six when Australia joined thirty other countries to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the Gulf War of the 1990s.

These same young specimens obviously can’t remember the Cold War or how close the East and West went to a nuclear showdown over Cuba. Shucks, they were only ten when the Soviet Union collapsed.

These new uni types don’t remember when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up and Tien an Mien Square may as well be a dish on a Chinese menu.

But to put other things, they don’t know or haven’t experienced, into perspective let me admit that I was 17 before I saw television. Did not grow up with it. It was never my baby-sitter. And when I first saw black and white television across the ditch in New Zealand we had only one channel. And that was a Government one.

Now we have entered an age where the letters LP (for long-playing record) mean nothing. And that ignorance affects conversation. Say to a teenager in 2002 “ you sound like a broken record” and he or she will, quite rightly, say: “ What’s a record?”

They did not ever live in a house that did not have remote control. They did not ever live in a world without a Walkman. They know all about VCRs but would look blankly at you if you mentioned Beta.

Vietnam is as ancient as World War Two although Gallipoli now moves them on April 25.

They cannot imagine a life without a mobile phone or an answering machine and Eftpos is just there. Isn’t it?

And Michael Jackson has always been white.

PS: For English scholars looking for a payback: Hinch did not know what a High School dropout was until he went to America and discovered that he was one.

Nov. 10, 2002

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002