ABSTRACT
Let us look at the experience of an imaginary English teacher – Mary Angell – who was born in the 1930s. Her early schooling, broken up by the Second World War, included such things as making many copies of ‘headlines’ in a copperplate hand. The intention of this (which seldom succeeded) was to inculcate handwriting skills, but the process also provided unwanted and decontextualised information, such as ‘Linseed oil is derived from flax’. The whole process certainly conveyed the lesson that copying from adult models was the way to learn. This was supported by copying passages from books chosen by the teacher and reproducing from memory stories read to the class. Twenty years earlier there had been isolated, more imaginative initiatives such as that quoted by Shayer of a teacher who said, ‘The best way, indeed the only way, to learn to write is to try to write’ (1972: 81) He went on to provide interesting assignments like describing a sea-monster, but if Mary's teachers had heard about these they gave no indication of this in their lessons.
