Hi Harry, (HP) <<<< I began school at 4 1/2 and immediately began learning to read. By the time I reached 6, I was voraciously reading "tuppeny bloods". These were "blood and thunders" you could buy for two pennies. They were full of space stories, war stories, school stories, sports stories and bore names like "Wizard", "Champion", "Hotspur" "Adventure. >>>>
I remember these well! Like you, I read 'em all -- begged, borrowed or stolen. You've forgotten the Rover. (I think they were all published by one, perhaps two, publishers only, yet there was fierce competition between them. At any one time, one was clearly on top, yet others would recover with a new series with a terrific new hero. I remember Wilson, the long-distance runner particularly. I'm sure he must have inspired Roy Bannister too! <<<< I remember an English officer dressed locally called "The Wolf of Kabul". His sidekick was an Afghan whose name I can't recall, but who had a fearsome weapon - a cricket bat wrapped tight with metal wire. Obviously, all these stories were really bad for a 6 year old to read -- even though good invariably triumphed over bad. I wasn't alone in reading these. Money was scarce in the 30's - we kids would sit on the curbside and swap the B and T's, so the early ability to read seemed to be general. >>>> Apart from the ethos of these comics, it's occurred to me that it would be interesting to re-read these and assess their literary quality after one has had a lifetime of reading. As I don't have any to hand, I can't do that right now. I suspect, however, that the quality would be surprisingly high. The writers would have been writing huge tranches every day (did the comics name the writers? -- doubtful, but I can't remember) and, as George Simenon used to say: "To be a good writer, it's quantity, not quality, that counts". <<<< In 1973, I visited England after 20 years. There on W.H. Smith were the wizard, the Hotspur and the rest. I picked them up. Horror! The old "tuppeny bloods" had hardly a picture - they were page after page of reading material. In 1973, there had been a transformation. Now they were end-to-end comics with just grunts of words. >>>> I share your horror. On the other hand, maybe we're moving out of a literary age and into an oral age. But no, young people today can't express themselves well in speech either. Any skill that's worthwhile can be expressed with great precision in words. >>>> This is good market evidence of the state of British education. However, Keith, I was taking a suburban train into London a few years ago, when a lady boarded with three children - girls maybe 10-12 years old. They sat down, and two of the girls took out books and disappeared into them. The third had no book, so she contented herself by looking at the book of the kid next to her. I liked that. Maybe all is not lost! >>>> All is not lost. But these would probably have been distinctly middle-class children. In England there's a growing gulf between the two sorts of newspapers -- the broadsheets and the tabloids -- with a huge difference in reading abilities between them. And, of course, about 20% of the population can't even read the simplest papers! One of the penalties of a highly-centralised state education system, as we have in England, is that methods of teaching are imposed across all schools (and, indeed, spread elsewhere right across the state education systems of the English-speaking world). The "whole-language" approach which held that children learn best by absorbing the meaning and sound of a word from the context swept the board in the 70s and 80s, but it was never tested scientifically. This was probably the cause of a great deal of the present illiteracy. The truth of the matter is that, for most children, a phonics method is superior, though a skilful teacher will use a variety of methods in the case of some children with particular difficulties. (Many of the more experienced teachers of the last 30 years or so had to break the rules in order to teach well, but the new inexperienced teachers were afraid to -- with result that they were nowhere near as effective and thus gradually lost the respect of parents and children. As a consequence of this the better university graduates that used to go into teaching 30/40 years ago no longer do so.) The same widespread application of misguided ideas has been the cause of poor teaching in mathematics and science. But there's some hope now. As I've previously reported, our state education is breaking down and, at last, all sorts of new types of schools (state, private and hybrids) are now being contemplated by our Ministry of Education. We might now see a recovery in the quality of, and respect to, teachers. Keith __________________________________________________________ “Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
