In her Times comment piece on April, 13th Melanie Phillips wrote, “Correct English, it appears, is a tool of cultural oppression,” and reported one lecturer who saw notions of accuracy as based on unequal relations between teacher and taught.
Perhaps we should ask whether those advocating the abandoning of elitist academic accuracy would happily undergo surgery at the hands of surgeons trained in non-elitist medicine or live in a building designed and built by non-elitist architects and engineers.
Phillips also dismissed concerns that pupils should never fail when failure, of course, can be a good teacher; at sixteen I failed O-level English literature and left school; at thirty-two I became an examiner for the subject.
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