Reading, writing and remedial
Summary Description Brush up your history and literacy, says Simon Vandore.

Introduction
Even if you hated school, you probably remember a teacher who really taught you something. For me, it was a pair who threw away the rules and did things their own way.

Body
"Today, I want you to write," Mr Anderson used to say. He was a fairly conservative old cricketer and the English syllabus treated literature as a science, but he recognised that creativity must be nurtured. Twice a week he would hold up a painting or read something aloud, then tell us to write for 40 minutes.
Meanwhile, Mr Wilson appeared to have written the entire history of the world down by hand in exercise books. He would turn the dog-eared pages and begin reading about the origins of the First World War, chalking important names and concepts on the board, keeping us entertained like a good film.
I absorbed a lot of knowledge from those gentlemen. But I look around the Internet and see it lacking -- most people can't spell or use grammar, while nobody seems able to contextualise current events. Am I just getting old?
An expert on call centres told me last week that his industry has a major problem with email enquiries. Most staff went through the last 10 to 15 years of the education system, he said, meaning they are not literate enough to reply in a suitable manner. I was reminded of a spelling test I saw undertaken in 1992 by journalism students, where 90% failed.
Every day I read mailing lists and message boards online where people cannot make themselves understood. Everything from bicycling discussions to online gaming forums. I have come to accept that most people misuse 'their', 'there', and 'they're', confuse 'weather' with 'whether', misspell 'receive' and so on. But it's much worse than that. These are native English speakers using the greatest mass communication tool the world has ever known, and they don't communicate.
On the other hand, Internet culture develops its own elements of language. In the adolescent online world, a k3wld00d h4x0r n33dZ n0 d1ksh0n4ry (a cool dude hacker needs no dictionary). The JeffK parody site is scarily accurate.
I think my new hobby is spotting new online spellings of the French/English word 'voila' (meaning 'there!' or 'behold!'). Nine times out of ten it becomes 'viola' (a stringed instrument), 'walla', or even 'wah la'.
There is no shame in not being able to read or write. But for those who choose to do both, accuracy is vital. The volume of words we produce has risen dramatically thanks to email and self-publishing, so it's worth taking the time to brush up your skills.
Lack of historical knowledge is perhaps more disturbing. Some examples? The people who didn't know there had been a previous Fiji coup. The guy who had never heard of US film star John Wayne and thought I meant comedian Johnny Wayne (of Wayne and Schuster). The group that didn't know there had been more than one Kennedy assassination.
The Internet is a wonderful means of tracking history from 1994 to the present. Documents are a vital part of history and thanks to electronic duplication they now tend to stick around. But I wonder if pre-Internet history will suffer? The Net can be a great educational tool in the right hands and I hope it is not a hindrance to thorough study.
Then again, historical knowledge isn't part of popular culture today. War stories for boys are out of vogue, but I've gotta admit the less bloodthirsty ones helped me later in history exams. Ra-ra-rasputin, lover of the Russian queen, may not have ever slept with the tsarina, but at least we all learnt he was a cat that really was gone.
Pokemon is great and Bardot is catchy, but pure escapism comes at a price. A population that doesn't know its history and cannot communicate is ripe for manipulation.
SOUNDING BOARD: Is knowledge suffering in the information age? Have your say!
Vandore is an occasional Newswire column. You can contact Simon Vandore at svandore@acptech.net.