I talked to someone this morning who gave me something to thing about with the They Don’t Want You To Know Linguistics issue.
They grew up in the country, in a place where it was still not a given that someone you meet is literate (80% literacy rate), and to them, at school, it was made quite clear that learning to read and speak the literary standard language is a choice and if you do not make it then life will probably not go so well for you. Literacy, in other words, is a frightfully recent thing – load bearing but fragile.
This was part of a conversation where they remarked how important a bit of social improvement universal literacy was, and how little this is considered. I responded that I think it is considered a lot by teachers. But when I thought about what my impression of teachers considering it might be, I took their point.
Specifically, I think this casts some light on why They Don’t Want You To Know Linguistics. They, frankly, are afraid that You Can Barely Learn to Read, and believe the only way they can get you to even be able to read, because it is the only way that has worked so far, is to make it a matter of morals and national social stratification.
I don’t like this, but it tracks the online-reactionary graph of society where d/dt is high at the beginning of the 20th century (it’s safest to talk about derivatives rather than absolute values), goes sharply down at the Great War (briefly negative even), starts to struggle around the Second World War (involving a lot of traumatic ups and downs) and then shortly after the war, d/dt settles down into being either 0 or negative. Whether it’s turned positive in recent years depends on whether you Trust The Plan.
This matches the pattern I have observed where pedagogues seem to have been very optimistic about language learning up until shortly after the War (see eg that French book I posted about a couple of weeks ago, and Saunt Burgess coming out of the War full of enthusiasm) and then their confidence collapsed, quite suddenly. I think the nadir was reached in the 70s and 80s when the teaching profession consciously turned their back on phonetics (branded as “phonics”) and a little despairingly decided the best they could do was to teach people to pretend to read to keep the metrics high and the factories going until the environmental crisis killed all the surplus population with nuclear bombs
i note that this does not bode well for prospects of education in the present day and near future, so maybe the schools have an accurate sense of their own capacity and ability to educate people about linguistics