Small HGs standardly sat for GCSE Italian at 12 and strolled off with whatever was then the highest mark; at 15 they sat A-Level Italian (a then 'unreformed' A-Level, very hard because of the sophistication of understanding in history, geopolitics and formal grammatical analysis required and, not least, the grasp of Italian literature from the earliest times to the present day which made Mr HG blench as he was required to produce teaching to the past papers). It served two purposes: a highly-prized qualification for the still functioning universities, and a sharp reminder that much of what was being studied at school was way behind what they would have been working on in Florence.
The demand that the assessment of achievement in Mandarin should be divided between 'native speakers' and 'the rest' is wholly ill-founded. Either you can cope with Dante, Tasso, Manzoni, the problems of severe underdevelopment within a single country, challenges to state power, governmental corruption and the grey economy, the centrality of banking and its history, art and culture from della Francesca to film, the Camerata dei Bardi to Nono, architecture and its uses, and the role of Church and State (mutatis mutandis) or you can't. This is an inappropriate playing field to level.
Like performance in music, mathematics, sport, endowment cannot be gainsaid. Value-added is a poor measure of capability when the start lines are so diverse. Are all examinations to be individually appropriate to the starting point of the examinee? There are built-in compensatory mechanisms - it's not easy to appreciate Wilfred Owen and his contribution to our cultural understanding of English history if you look at the First World War from the viewpoint of the defeating of Austria.
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2 comments:
Is there any profitable purpose in learning all that history etc of italy.
Unless you want to be a deep penetration spy.
Do native born Italians know all this stuff?
Or is it all academic padding?
They study it all, Anon. The suspicion it informs their culture crosses the mind. And it should be remembered that the British Isles is considered part of the history of Italy from their viewpoint.
When I was studying German at the university of Florence (any vacant place on a language course can be taken up by an outsider, paying of course) the students were shamingly fast on German grammar - all that analisi grammaticale and analisi logica in their Italian studies at school, all that Latin; all of them, philosophers, engineers, chemists, mathematicians as well as the linguists and arts students. Show them a sentence or a phrase and they could show you how it worked and what it generated.
I wonder if native English speakers are aware of the extent and sophistication of command of the European languages that is enjoyed by most European educated citizens.
And no university level student, in any discipline, has not studied mathematics to the level of maturita'.
The best English schooling is the best there is but why is the standard that most school students get so miserably inadequate? it's not brain power -if every school student in France or Germany or Italy etc, is studying at this level so should every English school student - and they don't.
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