Werthers Original Imperialists08 Aug 2008 03:14 pm
By Nelson
I work alongside a lot of Indian nationals, all of whom speak and write impeccable English. One of them told me that the teaching of English in most of India hasn’t changed much since the days of the Raj.
There’s a lesson there, I think.
[politicallyincorrect], Leeds, UK of A, United Kingdom
There certainly is. If we want an education system good enough for the eldest child of families who are prepared to starve in order to pay for it, then we need to get ourselves invaded by a bunch of authoritarian foreigners. They could get the trains running on time while they’re at it.
56 Responses to “Lucky Indians”
What possible lesson can be drawn from that?
Is that we should go back to the days of the Raj, where 500,000 Brits subjugated 400m people.
I bet he’s the only white waiter in that curry house.
It’s true, I was chatting to a punjabi software engineer just yesterday and he was telling me how the marvellous machinations of his thinking-machine were becoming vexed by considerable levels of phlogiston buildup.
Yes, the lesson is that this fuckers colleagues are idiots too.
Twatishness knows no colour y’see…
Thats strange, everybody else complains about Indian Doctors/call centres/Indians in call centres/Indian doctors in call centres not being able to speak good Englandish, but [politicallyincorrect] has somehow met up with a mystical majority raised in a public school system that puts ours to shame.
What he neglects to consider is that our societal norms result in the breakdown of the English language. We learn to disassemble it as soon as someone begins to teach it to us because if we all talked like complete ponces we’d get our heads stoved in.
I do have to say though – my granddad does have lovely handwriting, where everybody’s now is a shocking awful mess. He tells me its because he was thrashed 6 times a week then left to bathe in his own urine.
There’s a lesson there, I think.
Based on that final comma, it seems [politicallyincorrect] isn’t convinced either.
To be fair, they weren’t referring to the days of Empire when the Lieutenant Governor shot Tigers in the shimmering jungle, elephants roamed the cattle strewn streets, Memsahib knew her place and the Punkawallahs kept the Gin and Tonics cool.
They were referring to the halcyon days when Dr Raj Persaud was Head of the “Plagarising the Works of the Great Academics” faculty during his sabbatical at the University of Chennai. Ah, those salad days when the world was young, the summers long, the Pimms free flowing and [politicallyincorrect] of Leeds was drawing his giro rather than working amongst his grossly overqualified colleagues in a call centre in Wolverhampton.
Yes [PI] there is a lesson to be learned. And that lesson is that you’re a huge, floppy, bovine, quim of monumental proportions.
My job went to India and all I got was a fucking T-shirt.
I was going to say (well, type) something but Kelvin has already done it (two topics in a row. I’m either miffed or just a little bit slow of brain).
I bet a lot has changed. The teachers and students, at the very least after this amount of time. Or will it form the basis of the unlikely collaboration between Merchant/Ivory, George A. Romero, Nick Broomfield and [politicallyincorrect] of Leeds – Documentary Paki Primary School of the Dead?
Yes, what we need is a school system where the Dalit (chavs) are excluded from mainstream education and therefore good jobs.
That seems fair.
I’m confused…but i love curry!
He’s a dingo’s bell-end right enough.
Exactly.
I deal with articles in English from people in dozens of countries, all part of a profession where English is essential or highly desirable.
(The Spanish and Portuguese authors are surprisingly bad. Or perhaps it’s to spite for us inflicting dozy fuckwit expat immigrants on them.)
However much our Indian authors regularly produce excellent English, I think the French and Dutch do it best. Clearly we should all be taught English the French-Dutch way. It’s simply common sense.
Where exactly is the UK of A meant to be?
Is [politicallyincorrect] really saying “Im not racist, some people I work with are literate darkies.”?
Wikipedia sez: 8% of the population of India speak English as a second or third language. It’s pretty much limited to the upper classes, who can get good-quality tutoring and go to study abroad.
As a one time ex-pat teacher of English (guncrime me now), I met people with all sorts of arcane grammar knowledge and vocabulary. Most of them could barely stammer their way through a conversation though, unless they’d actually spent time in an English-speaking place, such as Leeds. QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM.
And WTF is the A in “UK of A”?
Bah. I’m kind of slow at typing….
If the French-Dutch way is best, then clearly we need to be importing our English teachers from Belgium.
Is the UK of A meant to be [politicallyincorrect]’s feeble-minded way of indicating that he thinks the UK is the 51st state of America? In which case he gets bonus points for making a shite cliché make no sense.
politicallyincorrect has actually checked that these Indians he’s so proud to patronise are actually, er, Indian Indians, right?
PI: I must say I’m so very impressed with your flawless command of the English language, my subcontinental colleague. Why, back home in your own country the educational system must be second to none.
Colleague: How many times do I have to tell you, I was born in Dewsbury?
I’m still trying to work out what this lesson is?
Is it an English lesson?
Alternatively, we should just provide them with canteens that not only serve excellent lunches over a two hour lunchbreak but are also licensed to sell cannabis.
(Two national stereotypes in one sentence. Get in!)
He’s saying that there is an (english) lesson there (in India)?
I reckon he’s actually saying “Damn Indians, come over here, steal our language”
From ‘what is you greatest challenge’…
Yeah, thanks for that sage advice Topsy, you massively self-deluded, spasticating mongoose vag. I’ll bear it in mind. Then again I could do what you do and not what you say and just cheat.
Ok own up, which one of you wrote this:
“I have a degree from a British university. Can anyone tell me if it’s worth anything?”
Tom Fakesurname, Plymouth, United Kingdom
I believe that if you got it from the back of a Rice Krispies packet, it’s worth slightly less than the ones from the back of Frosties. Apparently it’s the extra sugar makes the difference.
On the original subject, why do we in the UK always aim for the lowest level, instead of trying to bring everyone up to a respectable standard?
baj_uk, Chester
Surprised no one has said it yet, but here goes. . .
“If you like their English so much. . .”
I think the lesson is that all Indian English teachers are, and always have been, paedos that like fiddling with young boys. The number of copies of FHM they import is proof of this, that is a scientific FACT! You couldn’t make it up!
Fuck. Now I’m confused. I got mine off the back of a packet of Ricicles. Is that Top Trumps?
Roughly? A king-sized Mars Bar and a small bottle of Diet Coke. If you flog it to an asylum seeker or other similar ekonomic immigrunt you might be able to get them to run to a Snickers. It’s all about playing the market. A degree from the University of Forrin would be worth much more, potentially. So check the marks on the bottom.
Seriously! You couldn’t make it up!!!!
Piss up a rope, fuckstick!
As your degree hasn’t broken your habit of asking the magic gerbil who runs the internet to answer important questions, my guess is it’s worth slightly less than one peanut.
But what’s ’slightly less than one peanut’ worth? Does the magic gerbil know that?
My degree is worth infinity-one pounds; A quadruple first from Balliol, Oxford. Taken in the days when you actually had to be ritualistically buggered by the entire faculty just to be allowed to sit the exam; though for obvious reasons most of us preferred to sit the exam standing.
By the time I went there they’d started strapping dildos to the seats. They called it the autobummed, as it’s the fastest route to a sore arse.
*shock at finding myself leaping to the defence of a HYSer*
Am I missing something? Unless I’m being a big fat thicko, a twat though [politicallyincorrect] may infact be, wasn’t he just suggesting that their english lessons were good because they hadn’t changed for a long time? Given talk about standards slipping in exams and exams getting easier over time, he was saying that their english lessons haven’t gotten softer unlike GCSEs in this country simply because they haven’t changed for ages…
Unless he is actually a slutty snake muff of course. There’s a lesson here for us all, I think.
At the end of the day anyone calling themselves [politcallyincorrect]was always going to be a twat.
For the record – I was a teacher for a few years – I don’t personally believe tests are any easier. However the curriculum (and therefore what you’re tested on) is definitely streamlined and effectively “easier” to get your head around than what used to be thrown at kids. There are bits that could be included, maybe should be included – but if you can find an hour in a day to fit it in then you’re probably planning your lessons wrong.
There’s the presumption, by the rose tinted spectacle brigade, that what was taught in 1950 was good enough for them, as fine upstanding members of the community that they are, and so should be good enough for their kids. As would national service, and the right for parents and authority figures to hand out corporal punishment.
Of course the reality is very different. I had to split up a fight once between two 15 year old girls – I then had to face two angry fathers who both wanted to meet me after school. Both podgy, middle aged (by which I mean greying, and unathletic), and desperate to lash out at something because their darling daughters were prevented from removing the remainder of each others hair extensions.
They were also the first in line at parents evening to bitch about education standards and the disruptive elements, of the class I taught, being a bad influence on their otherwise cherubic angels who meanwhile sat their tutting and staring at the ceiling.
Both girls were pregnant and out of school by the time their exams came around, but the school put in extra provisions to get them through it all and they (to their credit) knuckled down and got reasonable B’s and C’s.
As I was exiting stage left one evening after an exam one of the girls was being picked up and I had the chance to chat with a few parents and her father and listen as he (rather bluntly) suggested to a few of the single mums present that it was the influence of single mums, the nanny state, sex education, large class sizes, the Indians, blacks and foreigners in the school etc that resulted in his daughter being knocked up.
Suffice to say he was partly right. His grandchild came out browner than the average white man.
Anyway – moral of the tale is simple: the education system isn’t inherently responsible for your kid being any particular way. Its just a means to an end.
Bet those parents are the same fuckers that demand human rights be thrown out, in exchange for ‘responsibilities’. Bet they’re also the same sort of fuckers that bemoan knifecrime and how it’s all the fault of ZaNuLiarBore.
It would be excellent if the reason those blokes daughters were up the duff was because they were whinging on Have Your Say instead of bringing up their kids.
I’m starting to see that the people who moan the most, in any given situation, are usually the cause of the biggest problems. They moan to hide their own deficiencies.
Schools are a marvellous little microcosm. If you ever get the opportunity I’d recommend getting involved with the Parents Teacher Association and school governors meetings. Then you get to read through some of the dross that gets brought up.
Like the second year I was there we made blazers option for our final year and 6th form. This was after the failure of our ‘trade in’ program where people could bring in their old blazers for kids in lower years to have (and save parents some of the cost of buying new ones). Apparently several parents were offended by the schools suggestion that they needed “help” paying for anything so it had to be withdrawn officially (though was maintained privately).
Anyway we said our 5th year and 6th form could wear x, or x, or x and x instead of a blazer. Cue parents kicking off because of the cost of having to by x, x, x or x and subsequent request for LEA support to help pay for the new uniform.
X, x, x and x were always part of the school uniform. We just didn’t “push” for them to wear (for instance) the grey sweater at all times that they wore a blazer. Most kids did already have them.
So we were featured in a regional newspaper, and news TV show, as a result of this. A number of concerned parents questioned about it on TV and quoted in papers, whinging and bitching etc and threats by various other families to take their kids to other schools in the area.
In the end the LEA had to step in on the argument and send out a letter showing the average costs across the borough showing the school I worked in, worked out cheaper by a margin of some £150 over a full senior school career.
End result – we had to “phase in” the optional choice to, err, wear or not wear what you wanted…
Yeah, made no sense to me either.
So when someone complains about education in this country I can’t help but be a touch cynical.
Ah me, one does rather yearn for the simple days of Empire, when we used to educate people by thrashing them soundly when the got it wrong and a chap could have a jolly good career for life out in the colonies being beastly to the natives. So long as he was from the right sort of stock, you understand.
“Teachers teach you how to be stupid.” – Harry Enfeild & Kathy Burke circa 1996
An infallible rule.
And btw, why do these cretins always insist on putting square brackets around their spasticated pseudonyms? Are they afraid people won’t realise it’s not their real name and their brave defiance/wry social commentary will pass unnoticed? Whatever it is, I wish they’d all die.
Square brackets mean they’re a registered member. It’s helpful in distingushing them from people who aren’t retired or incapable of contributing to society in any way.
Aaaahhhhh. Thanks Kelvin. I still wish they’d all die.
I work alongside a lot of Indian nationals and I ask each of them to show me the visa in their passports and I check their work permits. I make a note in my microsoft outlook calander of the date they expire and if they come into work after this date I make anonymous phone calls to the immigration service. Some of them are charming and intelligent people but I wouldn’t give them the time of day. They are here to work and while here they need to remember that they are guests in OUR COUNTRY (GB), so I send them anonymous emails about this most days so they don’t forget.
Sounds about right. Though I feel they should go further and say ‘registered phallus’. OH WAIT WHAT BAOUT TEH UN-PC?!!?
I agree and think everyone should speak like those in the HSBC’s call centre.
…yeah, and I work with a load of Indian nationals who are really, really hard to understand a lot of the time and can’t write an English sentence worth a damn; just like the majority of their British colleagues of whatever extraction. So the fuck what?
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. However we do have a word for people who think that *their* anecdotes *are* data – and of sufficient quality to form a basis for the setting of important social policy, no less – and that word is “cunt”.
“The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. However we do have a word for people who think that *their* anecdotes *are* data – and of sufficient quality to form a basis for the setting of important social policy, no less – and that word is “cunt”.”
I think politicallyincorrect had a point. Over the last few years, I’ve done a lot of recruiting for software engineers. That, naturally enough, has involved reading a lot of CVs and covering letters.
Some of the stuff sent in by (presumably) native English speakers has been so full of grammatical errors, poor punctuation and appalling spelling that they’ve ended up on the reject pile straight away. That compares badly with the documents originating from Indian candidates. The odd typo or stilted phrase appears from time to time, but by and large the Indians have shown the British up almost every time.
I accept this doesn’t represent the English ability of the entire population of India, but PI didn’t say that it did either. But when you’re comparing like with like (university degree vs university degree) and the Indian can communicate in a foreign language better than a native, you do start to form conclusions when the pattern repeats itself over and over again.
Seems to me that there are a lot of people on here who look at something found on HYS and proceed to criticise the content without knowing anything about the context and then think it hilarious to call the poster a donkey’s fadge, or whatever.
There’s a phrase for that as well – it’s “ignorant wanker.”
That’s the sort of knee-jerk reaction that typifies HYS itself.
You are still not comparing like with like there, blabla, you are continuing to compare two dissimilar subsets. One subset is a highly-motivated group of coders prepared to relocate to another country to work with your business. If my career goals involved breaking into an industry where the highest-paid work lies in a country where my language is not spoken, I’d pay a lot of effort and/or money to ensure I spoke that language well. Especially if my family was relying on me to do so. And I wouldn’t even have the historical influence of the Raj to guide me. Whereas if I was a graduate wanting a job with computers and that, I’d be firing off CVs scattershot to every company in the area. This represents your second subset.
Essentially this is where PI falls down as well. He sees the very cream of Indian economic migrants and assumes that the same standards apply to all Indian teaching of language whereas in fact it’s the result of extremely expensive and intensive language coaching that is denied to the vast majority of the populace. Undoubtably the techniques exist – many of them are used in British public schools – but I’m sure PI would be the first to quack murder at the tax hike required to implement them, and I even further suspect that PI has no idea that in the UK literacy is far improved over the time of the Raj, despite our apparently inferior teaching methods.
Still, you made a good fist of disproving Persiflage’s argument with your, er, anecdote.
And you’ve beaten me to it, Kelvin. As you said, the cream of the crop – highly-motivated individuals, largely from relatively advantageous social backgrounds or else so much better than their peers that they’ve qualified for hotly-contested scholarships – are the guys that PI is talking about. For all we know, half the Britisher candidates come from council sink estates and had a cookie-cutter education that never focussed on the correctness of their English.
Hell, whilst we’re abusing personal anecdotes, I’m from exactly that background myself and received my “comprehensive” education from one of the lowest-ranked schools in the country. Many of my contemporaries only scraped the definition of functionally literate by the time they left school whilst at least one is a prize-winning author, and we all got the same damn education.
Whilst we’re illustrating differences in our sample groups, there’s also the point that languages taught as *foreign* languages often leave students with a much finer understanding of grammar (in particular) than they necessarily possess of their native tongue.
When you grow up immersed in a language and culture and have no difficulty making yourself understood, however “incorrect” your speech and writing, there’s no massive incentive to refine your own knowledge of that language. You know how to make people understand you, and simply avoid the most glaring ambiguities through habit. When you’re learning a foreign language, you haven’t naturally acquired – through immersion in the normal processes of language development – which mistakes are going to be the ones that cause your meaning to be completely misinterpreted. As such, you have to work harder to get _everything_ right, and that’s exactly what intensive language coaching seeks to achieve.
Intensive coaching, I might add, that native speakers of English very rarely receive.
In light of the above, it would be nigh astonishing if foreign speakers of English – from countries where either privilege or exceptional talent is required to receive the requisite education in the first place – DIDN’T generally outshine the average native English speaker in their grasp of the language.
And to make a final observation; during the days of the Raj, the literacy (in any language) rate in India rose from 3.2% to 12.2% in the course of 66 years. Since independence, a slightly shorter but comparable period of time, the whole-population literacy rate has risen to nearly 65%… during which time the population has nearly trebled. I’m just saying.
But, you know, thanks to blabla for “donkey’s fadge”. I’ll remember that one.
Hah Ha! Yes! I am must to be agreeing with the good Mr Politicallyincorrect. He is most certainly of good family stock, my goodness yes. There are no flies on him. We High-Caste Indians speak very much like the fine fellows our grandfathers knew, your grandfather’s in fact! With the tugging of the forelock and stiff upper lip, cor blimey, what? God speaks The Queen’s English and likes Nanny’s porridge best. (Your God I mean. Vishnu speaks Bengali or my old man’s a Dutchman, Yes?) The decline of the English youth is a break to my heart. It is because of the Cricket! My word, if you played more cricket you would still have the marvellous Empire that never set. But that evil Dr. Jinnah and his vile Muslim Brotherhood devils stole from you. Believe me my friend, never trust a single muslim, they are all sons of dogs. Toodle-pip!
Persiflage, Kelvin,
“For all we know, half the Britisher candidates come from council sink estates and had a cookie-cutter education that never focussed on the correctness of their English.”
Fair points all round, and the quote above may well be spot on. I’m not disputing its accuracy. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that my second subset (British gradjits what wanna job in computers and stuff) have completed a degree course without having the ability to communicate clearly. We’re not just talking about minor disparities between Indian and British applicants’ standards of English either. I’m well aware that not everyone in the UK has had the benefit of the intense coaching that the Indian elite have. We can (and do) make allowances for that.
The old argument about dyslexia doesn’t really hold water when you look at the extent to which dreadful spelling and
grammar presents itself. When I was at school in the 1970s, there were a few people who were almost certainly
dyslexic and had a really tough time. I’d like to think that they would receive more sympathetic teaching thirty
years on. But there were only a few – not nearly enough to account for the stuff I have to read when recruiting.
OK, empirical evidence again, but the majority of people in my age range can spell and punctuate reasonably well. You get differing levels of ability, but you don’t see too many real howlers. A lot of emphasis was placed on that at school in the 1970s. It’s a huge difference to what we see today. I think that was what PI was on about – it was done then, so why the hell can’t it be done now? I can’t disagree with that.
Fair enough, it’s unlikely that everyone would get intense coaching, but it must be possible to raise the standards up from their current low levels.
Yes, language evolves and always has done. Nouns become verbs (text, email for example), variant spellings evolve and foreign words come in (for example, the American “program” is used a lot to describe a series of instructions to
be executed by a computer, with the British “programme” being used to describe other collections of related activities).
But when one is comparing a British graduate who can’t spell with a foreign one who can, it’s difficult to give the
job to the Briton when they will be required to create documents to be given to a customer. When you’re bidding for work worth tens of millions, you need to look professional at all times; presenting a bid full of spelling errors and slang is the quickest way to blow your chances.
blabla, after you read these applicants’ CVs and covering letters, did you meet them? Because (and I must now fall onto my own anecdotes) I’ve often had the pleasure of interviewing overseas candidates from India and Eastern Europe whose CVs could charm the very birds from the trees, and yet in the interview room they could barely string a sentence together. From the pages of various techy websites like The Daily WTF, occurences of this are not vanishingly rare.
It turns out that there are such entities as “recruitment agencies” and “translation services” who will help you put together an application in a language other than your own and make it sound very professional indeed. Whereas most recent UK graduates are under the impression that recruiters are evil money-grubbing scum not worthy of licking the bumcrack of an actual human being* and they rely on their own skills and/or that of the University Careers Department, which is probably too busy to proofread every document it would like to.
*because they are.
An odd question, Kelvin. Of course I did (and do). And yes, there have been candidates that looked outstanding on paper and have turned the interview into an advanced exercise in trying to get blood out of a stone.
To be fair though, this hasn’t been confined to overseas candidates. I’ve interviewed British people whose vocabulary has seemed to consist of phrases like, “yeah well, I suppose, like, whatever.” That’s often been coupled with a cocky attitude that suggests they’re doing us a favour by wanting the job.
And yes, I have to agree about the recruitment agencies. There are some very good ones – in fact we now use one to sort the wheat from the chaff and they do a pretty good job of it by and large – but there are quite a few cowboy outfits who I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.
So then we’re agreed that the people with the greater motivation to work for your company (as demonstrated by their willingness to move halfway around the globe to reach it) are more prepared to invest in the skills you require and the presentation to get noticed positively. This is no real surprise to me but the most important point to note is that all of this proves shit-all about the relative merits of the way English is taught in the state schools this country which was kind of the whole point in the first place.
Relative merits, OK, maybe not. It does show it’s worse than it was thirty years ago though. And for a country that has English as its mother tongue, that’t inexcusable IMO.
Excuse me, but how in the name of flipping fuck does it show that? If what you mean is “there is now a broader spectrum of graduates in technical subjects than 30 years ago, the requirements of which courses do not exceed English education beyond GCSE standard, so standards of literacy that might previously have been expressed by workers entering the job market from lower grades of education are now expressed by a proportion of the graduates that I see” then fine, but I absolutely cannot countenance the idea that in 1978 everyone had perfect literacy and we’ve somehow backslid. And I utterly cannot accept – and this is the point – that politicallyincorrect’s notion that everything would be just fine if we returned to Victorian teaching methods is anything utter than complete bullshit spouted from the arsemouth of a total fucking cretin.
“Total fucking cretin” sounds about right to me. There might be room for debate given the single extract above, but we know PI’s form and any perceived lucidity would be purely accidental and derived directly from his inability to express his cuntishness with sufficient clarity. What he was probably trying to say, giving his previous comments, was doubtless something along the lines of, “Our taxes were used to educate wogs whose grandchildren are now stealing our jobs. FACT. Send the Pakis back to India. End of.”
What I meant was that based on the job applications I’ve dealt with over the last ten or fifteen years, the standard of spelling and grammar displayed by graduates appears to have dropped through the floor.
And I didn’t say that in 1978 everyone had perfect literacy. What I did say was a lot of emphasis was placed on basic literacy back then and that doesn’t appear to be the case today.
Well you certainly don’t seem to be able to extract the point from anything I say, so perhaps you do have a point.