David Boulton: I appreciate you bravely going into these areas that make you a little bit nervous. And, remember, what we're trying to do is, we're not trying to be scholarly accurate. We're trying to give people an impression. A lot of people think that reading's a natural thing. And, when we look at the length of human evolution, and we look at the time that human beings have struggled to learn to use this technology. I mean, it's a just blip on a whisker in the timescape of our development..

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah.

David Boulton: I mean, It's fresh. And, it's this transition right here that we're talking about, that sets the stage up for where we are today.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. It's really a turning point in the lives of ordinary people, at least ordinary middle class people, where reading and writing become essential skills, and I think that's what you're looking at. There's a long period where it's not really important. The period that I'm looking at, I would say, is a period in which for the merchant class, anyway, it is a highly desirable quality. And, it becomes even more highly desirable as it goes along. Then, later, it becomes essential. It becomes a point where you can't enter the middle class without having those skills. And, today, we're in a much more democratic society, where we believe that everyone ought to have the capability, ought to have the opportunity to move up economically. And, because for a long time, I think, we were willing to accept that lots of people would just never have those skills, and they were going to stay where they were. They were going to stay laborers. And so, the minimal amount of being able to sign your name would be fine. But, now, we're launched on a new experiment where we would like everyone to have the opportunity to move up, and that is different. And, I think what you're looking at are the blocks to this, things that are left over from a previous age that were created for a class system that doesn't exist anymore, or shouldn't exist anymore.

David Boulton: Yes. Thank you. I think that's better said. There's a residue to these archaic, relatively recent, but still archaic structures that have unfolded through time that we must understand. There’s institutional inertia at work here making it hard for millions to participate.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Absolutely. And, whole ways of teaching that would work with a relatively small percentage of the population don't work with the kind of population we have now. I'm sure you've been told this many times. We have a population of people who are trying to move up, on the social ladder, from poverty into the middle class. We have huge numbers of immigrants coming into this country who are often taught English, taught reading and writing with a model that might have been suitable in the 1830s, when we had a relatively a few number of people we were concerned about. Most of whom, were already being taught a foreign language, usually French or Latin, just like 200 years before, and so they could understand things like declensions in a way that are meaningless to a lot of people in this country right now. On the higher end of education, where I am, supposedly, I still see obsessions with standard spelling and standard punctuation. Not so much in the humanities, but, in other fields, where we, meaning people who teach English, have taught from grade school up, that the measure of good English is standard spelling, standard spelling and punctuation. And one of the sad things for me is when I go out into industry and do consulting is that managers, who are completely flummoxed by the inability of their new college graduate employees to be able to write a report, is that the managers don't have the vocabulary to explain to me what the problem is. They will say, "Spelling. They can't spell. You have to go in there and do something about spelling and punctuation. It's just terrible. The reports are unreadable." Well, I go in and I look at the reports. And, the problem isn't spelling. I mean, it may be true that they don't spell that well, or grammar, necessarily, athough, there may be grammar problems. It's that they can't organize. They have no conception of what the expectations, rhetorical expectations, of that profession are. But, the manager can't explain that to me, because he or she has gone through our school system and been punished for misspellings, and grammatical errors, and so, has equated that, that kind of really artificial standardization, with good English, with communication.

David Boulton: And, this trickles back to affect the developing child’s sense of his or her own intelligence. But, because children can't intuit the ability to conform to our artificial standards, our series of conventions, which are bizarre from their perspective, they come to feel as if there is something fundamentally wrong with themselves.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. Yeah, there are historical accidents that have become ingrained, or aspects of them have become ingrained in our consciousness as being the equivalent of good communication, when there are lots of other things that we should be looking at. I think part of this, part of the problem is the decline of rhetorical education in the school. That is, and I'm not advocating everyone should go back and try to speak like Cicero, as in the 1800s, early 19th century education. But what rhetorical training did give was a sense of audience. A sense of appropriate speech, depending on the people you're dealing with. Rhetoric is, I would say, pretty liberal, in that respect. And, the separation in teaching of rhetoric and writing, even though most of our universities have a division called rhetoric and composition, it's really composition, is unfortunate. And, education colleges, at least the ones I'm familiar with, require a course from the English Department, called modern English grammar, but they don't require courses in rhetoric.

Communication skills are very problematic still. And, we see this every day – exacerbated by the huge number of immigrants we have in the school system. There are students who come into the public schools who can't speak English, or who have just a rudimentary sense of English. And, one of my hopes is that this will precipitate a crisis where we look at the entire picture and see what we're doing, and see that the kind of education that we got in the 1950s is, is just not working anymore.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. It is. And we're eliminating many people. Just to give you one example, and this is, I realize, about people who have already made it through the system. I had a graduate student who did a thesis some years ago, where she talked to engineering professors about writing and about how writing should be taught to engineering students on the undergraduate and the graduate level. And, their opinion was almost universally that they had nothing to do with that. That this was a problem of the English Department, until you get to the dissertation stage, writing a doctoral dissertation. And, then, there were all kinds of pious comments about mentoring, and, how the dissertation professor should be there at all times helping with the writing and the shaping of the dissertation. And, that's all very good. The problem is that the people who don't come into the system already having some concept of the organization and mental processes that go into writing an argument in the traditional, academic way, those people aren't there. They never make it to the dissertation.

David Boulton: Which comes back to: how do we create the environments that will cause them to learn the necessary abilities in incrementally more complex ways along the whole course, rather than this obstacle course wall at the end of the game.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: And, that's an accurate term - an obstacle course. Because it means that people are eliminated who haven't been trained in their early education to think and write this way. I think it's one of the reasons that you, well, one of the many reasons that you see comparatively few women, getting through in science and engineering education - much better than it was, but still not great. And, certainly people from lower socio-economic classes are just not making it through, except, of course, the ones, the talented tenth, you might say, and many of the others just give up, because they just don't have that kind of basic education.

David Boulton: That's one of our key points. Not only do they give up, they give up because they learn something about themselves, which isn't true, but, that it's hard not to believe, which is that they're fundamentally deficient – not good enough. And, that's a heck of a wound, scar, image, and aversion to learning, to carry around in life.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. Well, you've probably talked to what are called returning students, which usually means older students, students who've dropped out at some point and come back. We don't get that many here, because they don't feel welcome, and a lot of them come in through evening school, but, now, they're being put into the community college system, which is a great receiver of returning students and I think that's a wonderful thing. But, one of the things I've found in teaching the returning students who come my way, and it's not been huge numbers, is that they are petrified of writing. They are petrified of writing. Now, in fact, once we get them going, because of their life experience, they do fine. But, when they come in they see writing as this tremendous obstacle because of grammar, because of prescriptive grammar that they've been taught and spelling and this is the first thing they'll tell me. Most of them are not shy. They're older and they come back and they say, "I'm terrified of this course. My grammar and writing are just not good." Most of them get through fine, without any kind of problems.

David Boulton: They overcome the fear of being confused.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: They do. And, they realize, well, "I can understand this. It's really not that hard. I was traumatized when I was young."

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Right. Yeah. They got a paper back that's full of red marks and they think, "This is hopeless". Or they have to go diagram a sentence on the board when they're in the fourth grade, and their parents don't even speak English, and their English is a little touch and go, and they can't get through. Yeah, they give up. They give up.

David Boulton: Let's step back to something you said which is a real hot button for us, which was about the historical accidents that shaped English writing. Take us on a highlights tour of what you think are the most significant historical accidents associated with the development and evolution of our writing system.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, an obvious historical accident is the way England kept getting invaded by different kinds of people, and the way the language developed as a consequence. And, I know you talked to John Fisher about that and how English is a conflation of several different languages. Certainly, Angle-Saxon and French, and Latin, and Scandinavian languages, and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Those certainly have nothing to do with central planning of language.

I know you're interested in is the accident of the printing press, which in England served to freeze spelling in the fifteenth century. So, you have these bizarre spellings, which are baffling to foreigners. One of, the obvious example, the 'ought', which would not have been a problem to anyone in the fifteenth century, who could read. They would have said, well, there's 'throcht' [Through) and there's 'thoucht' [Thought] and that's the way they're pronounced. But, now we have Through and all these other variations of that which are just utterly senseless, and, to me, that is a great accident. Another accident that actually comes out of education, I don't know if this could be considered an accident or not, was the long predominance of Latin, as a prestige language, long after it ceased to be spoken, long after it served any kind of use whatsoever in northern Europe. It preserved attitudes about language that were then codified by prescriptive grammarians in the eighteenth century that we're still stuck with. Paradigms of teaching English that are based on Latin grammar that are utterly senseless.

One example I think everyone can understand is the split infinitive. I still find, particularly people who are in the humanities, not necessarily in English, who become enraged over a split infinitive. This is a rule that comes out of the eighteenth century. You can't say, "To boldly go, where no man has gone before." That's a split infinitive. That's a terrible thing. Well, this is an utterly senseless rule that comes from Latin, because in Latin, you can't split an infinitive. An infinitive is one word. In English, it's two words. To write. To run. So, why can't you put an adverb in the middle? Why can't you say, "To boldly go"? Well, because somebody back in the eighteenth century said Latin is the most prestigious language. You can't split an infinitive in Latin. So, therefore, you shouldn't be able to split an infinitive in English. Uh, that, to me, is, and the kind of prescriptivist tradition, like that, that came out of the eighteenth century, and earlier, is one of the more unfortunate historical accidents that we're, that we're stuck with.

David Boulton: Go back to the printing press for a moment. Give us a more exploded view of that. I mean, we've heard some people address the ‘cost of fonts’. Some have said the printing press just coming at the wrong time in the evolutionary process of written English. And that's part of what we're trying to convey. I mean, this soup of languages that hadn't quite gelled at the time that it gets frozen, or snapped in by subsequent things like the printing press. The printing press technicians were no more conscious of the hundreds of millions of struggling learners that would follow them than…

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: No. They were just trying to print and make some money. Another rather small example of an accident is the loss of letters, several letters that were lost out of the English language, that represented actual sounds. And, they were lost simply because the printers, came from the Low Countries, and, the actual typeface came from the Low Countries, where they didn't have those letters, or, they had lost them centuries before. And, so, an example, I think, that will be familiar to most people is, you'll be driving along through a shopping district, and there'll be a cute little shop that says: "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe". Well, the 'y' in Old English would have been a letter called Thorn, which was being used up into the fifteenth century, and, when they started printing, the Dutch didn't have a Thorn. So, they used something that looked like a Thorn, which was a 'y'. And so no one, ever, ever said, "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.' They always said, "The Olde Tea Shoppe." An accident of print. It probably would have been better if printing came in at another time, but we don't get any choices in those matters. It would have been better once a relatively standardized form of English had been agreed on but we don't get to make those choices. We just do the best we can. And, certainly, other languages have fared much worse than English, by being subjected to the Latin alphabet, and the sounds that missionaries and other well-intentioned people heard and translated into the Latin alphabet, languages of native Americans, for example, which contain all kinds of sounds that can in no way be represented by the Latin alphabet, and yet found their way into print, and then, they're stuck with it. Irish is another example. The absolutely baffling spelling of the Irish language, which the Irish have tried to undo, in this century, undo the work of a thousand years before, where you have monks coming in from Italy and saying, "What on earth are these people saying?" And trying to reproduce the sounds of the Celtic language that was being used, using Latin letters, and they were stuck with that until the early twentieth century, when they tried to simplify. Well, the fact that almost nobody spoke Irish, only something like five percent of the population, helped.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: I'm sure you've looked into efforts to simplify English spelling.

David Boulton: We have. And people with that agenda frequently contact us.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. And, it would be nice. It would be nice. But, you see, what's happened is there's this tremendous force of inertia. So, I think we're stuck with English orthography as it is for the foreseeable future. So the question is how do we do a better job of teaching that. How do we reach all of these new, not just children, but immigrants, and people who really should be given access to the demands of twenty-first century civilization. And one of the demands is literacy in the modern sense. Reading and writing fluently, good communication skills. And, I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you, but...

David Boulton: Thank you. We're not so much looking for magic bullets, as we are magic glasses. We need to see this differently, is our sense. And, we’ve got to reframe our understanding. It's not the kids' fault. It's not the parents' fault. It's not the teachers' fault. We're all dealing with the transmission of a certain ignorance and negligence and accident that's been propelling itself through history. And, we need to understand that and build new kinds of bridges, new training-wheel effects, new ways to get people up into this that aren't locked into the steep protectionism of days of old, because the conventions themselves are arbitrary.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes. They're extremely arbitrary, and, there are so many people who are vested in the current system. I mean, people of good will who are vested in the current system are found in English departments and Education departments in colleges, I think, especially, and many other places in our society. I mean, what we've created is a way in which, many people in power, and it doesn't have to be very high up the food chain, are able to eliminate people from consideration for advancement, are able to literally write them off, because, they say, this person doesn't have good communication skills. This person is going to have to stay as mid-level manager because of these communication skills. And, whether or not we like to admit it, a lot of times these are the very people they want to get rid of, they want to eliminate, because they're of the wrong class, or the wrong ethnic group, or something like that. They have an excuse. And, they don't even have to be consciously aware of that.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Exactly, exactly.

David Boulton: Yes. And, the people that need the most help aren't on the radar screen of the people in power, in the sense that they aren’t sufficiently literate, they’re not able to participate. They don't have the economic means and they don't have a collective voice in the same way as other constituency groups. And so, this whole machinery of literacy and all the learning that goes with it and what it enables is this huge divide we've been talking about. And, the people that are on the other side of it aren't really well represented, because they don't have collective economic meaning.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: They don't have economic meaning, and they don't, most of them, don't understand what the value of this is. I mean, they've been, they've gone to school. They've been told they're not good enough. And, they decided they just don't need it. So, if you could identify a group of people, and get in a room and say, "What you need is literacy." They would probably say, "We've tried that. And, that doesn't work. We want something else." So, it also may be a question of explaining it to the people who need it, in a different way, and in a non-threatening way.

David Boulton: I think that's really the key. What we're really trying to do is to help reframe the experience they've had to free them from the shame prison they're in about it.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Right. They don't need somebody like me coming down and saying, "I'm a professor at a major university, and let me tell you what you need. You'll never get anywhere in life unless you do what I say." Because, they've been told that before, uh, in different words, but, they've been told that before.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Right. The future of participatory democracy is tied up in this, and, we have a lot of people concerned about it. We don't have as many people as we should doing something about it in my opinion.

You see, people who are in major research universities have a vested interest in things as they are. I mean, most of us would like to feel that we're part of helping things to change. There are things that we do, in this department, service learning, where we send our students out to work with kids, where we will send faculty members and graduate students out to work with children in poor areas. But, it seems very hit-or-miss to me. I know there are lots of good people working on it. I've gone through your web site. I've been really impressed. I think you could probably interview every linguist in the United States and you wouldn't have anyone say, "You need to have them diagramming sentences on the board, and, spelling is the most important thing in the development of communication skills." And, yet, we don't seem to be going anywhere as fast as we need to be. I don't want to be pessimistic and say we're not making progress. And, I think attitudes are changing. But, time's moving on.

David Boulton: There's a flat line. There may be small, incremental improvement, but, the whole literacy thing's been a flat line for a long time.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes.

David Boulton: There've been all these changes. Let's teach this way. Let's teach that way, and flat line it remains. But, meantime, the society's accelerating in its demand for literacy, and therefore, there's more falling out than ever before.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Absolutely. Yeah, I wish you could have been here last week. We had a grad student come in and she was talking about the dissertation that she wants to write, and, she's completed everything but her dissertation in English, and, she's now teaching in the public school system in Houston, where most of her students are Spanish speakers, are ESL [English as a Second Language]. And, to hear her talk about the gap between the students that she teaches and the kind of standardized testing that's being implemented in the state of Texas and the likelihood of the one meeting the expectations of the other is just appalling.

David Boulton: Yeah. Did you see that CNN report just two weekends ago? High-stakes testing?

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: No.

David Boulton: Yeah. It was very much on the point. These tests have implicit assumptions about cultural and social relevance that are way off the mark and, you know, sidelining even more and more people.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes.

Cori Stennett: Earlier you referred to the medieval Chancery, the "Chancery scribes". To someone who hasn't studied English, who hasn't really delved into this space, what do we mean? What are we talking about? I'm looking for something that's kind of a basic, for someone to understand. How many people? What was this tribe of scribes, so to speak? How many people are we talking about that were involved within the Chancery?

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: I noticed John Fisher said 220, and if you include all the various hangers-on, and what we would call contract workers, that's probably right. I think they had probably more like a hundred people who were officially, a hundred to a hundred and twenty people who were officially classified as Chancery clerks. The Royal Chancery was as close to the central administrative office of the Royal government as you would have as a modern equivalent.

The Chancery started off as the scriptorium, or writing pool of the King. That is, it simply produced decrees, but it very quickly assumed some judicial and legal functions. So, at the very top of the Chancery you have twelve clerks who oversaw the production of things like treaties, very important documents, others, like deeds, maybe less. And, underneath these twelve were a rather large number of people of intermediate status, who, at the very bottom did nothing but copying and writing. And, others, as they moved up, actually had some kind of discretion in what they did. And, it's these lower-ranking people that, I think, were training, law students, and others.

David Boulton: They were the interface for radiation.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah, yeah. Because they didn't have much money.

David Boulton: I remember when John first brought this up, you know, in our phone conversation, he talked about twenty-six, and then it later went to two hundred and twenty or something, as if there really was this central core, and then these rings around them.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, I think that's accurate. The question is how wide the rings go. And, that book I worked on, which is based on looking at people who signed off on documents, and then other people who were named, say, in a law case, as being a Chancery clerk. I think I came up with about a hundred and twenty. But, it could very well be more. And, this is also the Chancery of Henry the Fifth, and Henry cut back. He was very efficient. And, they fired a lot of people. He made his Chancellor the Donald Trump of the time. The Chancery worked directly under the Chancellor of England, which is why it's called the Chancery. So, it was like the central administration. Now, there was also the Exchequer, which dealt with the finances. So, you know, that's the equivalent of the central government.

David Boulton: I have a sense that these scribes, because they were so close, and because they spoke the language and they were the interface for so many things, that a lot of differentiation in governmental function would follow from them, rather than exist before them, in a way.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, it did. Because... The Exchequer had one main function, which was to deal with finances and taxes. Because the Chancery had the capability of evolving in some way, it became the Court of Chancery, a term that we still use. The Chancellors' Court was a court in which, if you couldn't find a remedy under the existing court systems, and there were several, you could come to the Chancery. And, so it became very popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So, some of these Chancery clerks were also functioning as attorneys in their own court. They were helping to write the documents that would enable these cases to go forward. And, eventually, by the time you get to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when you're talking about Chancery, everyone thinks about the Court of Chancery. And the most famous case is the Charles Dickens' novel, Bleak House, in which the Chancery was a place you wanted to go because there was some flexibility. The Chancellor could say, "Well. OK. We'll give you the benefit of the doubt even though strictly speaking, the law says this." Where it was a very flexible case, to where it became just a sinkhole of expenses and delays and lawyers.

David Boulton: The modern court.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah. So, that's a source, I think, of confusion when people hear the Chancery. But, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the Chancery Court was still a minor function, or a lesser function of the Chancery itself, which still mainly dealt with the administration. They kept the rolls of Parliament, for example. They were the records office. They stored records in the Tower of London, and in this place in the middle of London. And, so, if you wanted to find a, if the King had granted you, your great-great-grandfather some land, and there was a letter that said that, you would go to the Chancery and pay them some money and they would go through their rolls and they'd find that for you, in Latin, you know.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah. Well, it was a mixed group, and I think at the beginning the upper rank of the Chancery clerks, I think, are the ones that John and I were first looking at, were really pretty much removed from English. They were very well-to-do. They had all kinds of ways of making money, particularly through land speculation because the records of land transfers would come to them, and the rolls of the time were just filled with these land investments, where everybody is a Chancery clerk. And, you know, they'd get hold of some land, and then they, for a fee, they let it go later.

David Boulton: There was no SEC watching over insider knowledge.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Certainly not. They were certainly not. I mean, that's why you wanted the job, because it was insider trading. I mean, that was just a given in any kind of medieval government, very much like the State of Lousiana, until recently.

David Boulton: Until recently. OK. Well, that part will read well to some later on.

David Boulton: One of the things that really attracted me to your web page when I first read it was this phrase, "The textual awakening of the middle class."

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes.

David Boulton: That kind of leads back into one of our themes in a way, which is that reading changes who we are.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes.

David Boulton: Writing changes who we are. When we engage in this it creates needs. And, the need wants us to engage more. And, the more we engage, then there's more need. And, it just ratchets itself – spirals up into ever greater interdependency..

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, you see what happened to the English central government, which is that they start off with just a few records, and then it snowballs. And, what I'm looking at is how that happens to the rest of us. By textual awakening, you realize that's a kind of dramatic, catchy title, but I'm really writing about how middle class citizens, especially in London, acquired writing practices, personal writing practices. And, so, there's a transference of this dependence on writing from these clerical and legal classes to ordinary people, what we would call ordinary, middle class people. And, that happened in the fifteenth century. That was the beginning of it. And, now, we're enmeshed in it. We've just paid our taxes. We know exactly how bad it can get, going through these records. So, we've all become thirteenth century Chancery clerks, in a way.

David Boulton: Yeah. Or, as suggested by our series title, Children of the Code.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Children of the Code. We have all become Children of the Code, in some way or another. So, I'm looking at how this all began, when these merchants, and in some cases their wives, started saying, "I can do that too. Let's see how it would be if I sent a letter to my cousin asking for a couple of bottles of wine." And, there are plenty of letters that have no historical interest in the National Archives of Britain. I've got one next door, a copy of one, where this student is writing and saying, "Will you send me some cheeses, Mom?" And, of course there are lots of student letters, because they're always writing home, just like they are now, "By the way, I need some money." Or, they're writing to their future employer, "Have you looked into that job for me yet?" So, it's beginning to gell that this is a skill that they need to get along in life. So, that's what I mean by textual awakening, just this sense that, "I can do this too."

David Boulton: And its snowballing effect. A few do it. And more and more do it. More and more do it. And we get, like you said, we're doing our tax returns.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yes, or dealing with HMOs. Even worse. Your money or your life.

David Boulton: Is there something we didn't talk about that you think's vital, given your sense of what we're about?

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: No. I think I probably lectured too much. I apologize.

David Boulton: No, no, no. I appreciate your perspective on this. This is one of the things that's really missing out there, the sense that it hasn't always been like this. This developed.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah.

David Boulton: And, it developed in ways that there wasn't any cognitive scientists, and developmental psychologists, or modern code scientists, or English professors all sitting around saying, "Let's do this right, given its importance."

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Yeah. Let's clear the boards here and go back and see what really works and how people can move into this world, which is not going to go away. I mean, we're still going to have our "Through." I just don't think there's any hope for simplified spelling. Let's see how we can get people into this in a way that actually works, instead of trying to teach them a system that may have worked with ten percent of the population in 1735, but, it's just not going to cut it with the population that we've got now. And, you know, you've got a wonderful list of people who've probably got suggestions. We ought to, anybody who's behind the No Child Left Behind bill probably needs to look at this, but probably won't, they just...

David Boulton: Our basic theme is we've got to catch the ball before we throw it. And, we have been trying to throw this thing in every different which way, but, we haven't taken the time to really understand what we're talking about, as a society. And, that's what we're trying to inspire, and catalyze.

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, you're really talking about a root and branch approach. Because I think we have some good current models of teaching writing, and maybe we have several good models of teaching writing. But, when you look at the magnitude of the problem, and the fact that we're still grinding out teachers who have no more concept of the social history of English when they leave the university than when they came in, you know, that's a problem. That is, I think most education colleges require a course in English linguistics, which is good, but, a lot of times it's taught from a very technical point of view. You talk about Grimm's law, and things like that. Well, these are the teachers who, the next year, are going to go off into these school districts where three-quarters of the students speak Spanish, or Vietnamese is spoken at home as in parts of Louisiana, or, some variety of Black English. And, they're going to go into the classroom and may very well think that these are somehow debased forms of English, that Black English is just a kind of form of English spoken by people who haven't thought about it very much, when, in fact, it's a very highly evolved form of English. And, in some senses a more evolved form of English than so-called Standard English, because it's carried language change one step farther, in many cases, than Standard English. But, these teachers are not going to know that. They're going to go in with, maybe good intentions, but a wrong knowledge base. So, time for a change.

David Boulton: Yes.

Cori Stennett: One last question, as we wrap up here. You mentioned spelling reform attempts earlier. Just out of curiosity, being who you are, and studying in this, what's your favorite spelling reform attempt story? Would you share that with us? Is there one that really tickled you, or that you got a real kick out of?

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Well, frankly, no, because they all fail so badly. I think George Bernard Shaw's, attempts are amusing. But, that's because I think Shaw was so full of himself that he actually, he thought he was such an important figure, uh, that he could actually implement a change on his own, just by being GBS. There were lots of good attempts like that, good-hearted attempts like that in the nineteenth century. There was another guy, F. J. Furnivall, who was one of these Victorian busybodies. Most of us in English knew him because he edited, and very badly, many, many editions of Middle English text. And, he wrote all of his introductions in something like the kind of spelling reform that Shaw advocated. I think Shaw came out of that Fabian Socialist tradition. And, they really look quaint, I think, nowadays. And, one of the problems is that if you try to reform spelling to make it, English spelling, to make it sound like it's pronounced, well, who's doing the pronouncing? So, they may very well look like what Shaw and Furnivall pronounced, but it sure doesn't look like the way they talk over here in Thibodaux. And, that's a problem with spelling reform is that you've got to decide on how things are actually pronounced. And, of course, we and the British have a different approach to that.

Cori Stennett: Thank you. You put that in perspective.

David Boulton: Thank you so much for taking the time with us today:

Dr. Malcolm Richardson: Thank you.

Special thanks to volunteer Carol Covin for transcribing this interview.