Inquiry versus polemic in grappling with history and language

By Paul Monk

Suppose you were in an English language class and your teacher or professor insisted that the use of language in all old books, going back to Anglo-Saxon poetry, had to be changed because outdated usage was objectionable and offensive. And suppose that, instead of applying yourself to learning the archaic words and syntax of your ancestors, they insisted you should fault them for not having written as we do in the 21st century.

Wouldn’t that seem outlandish and strange as an approach to the study of the language? Yet, we seem to be facing a tidal wave of pedagogy which takes this approach to history and to language in the name of ‘decolonisation’ and the entrenchment of racial, sexual and gender diversity.

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