Thank. I didn’t want to sound annoying in my early post but I was on the verge of saying “just go read 1984”.
Most sad thing about 1984, is that every time someone introduce it in a discuss, it’s to talk about the “big brother” part, not the (most important) “Newspeak” part of 1984.
I won’t bother to go again in a debate. But Byte you have great luck. You weren’t born in a country with a completely failed education system. Where French teachers don’t bother to teach basic grammar any more, were people graduating from high school can’t READ a single line without mistaking a word for another. Where they are unable to build complex sentence forms. Where kids aren’t taught how to divide before they reach 8th grade. Where most of the university master graduate can’t write a résumé without errors. Where students can get their high school diploma in literatures without having read a single classic of French literature.
That whole crime committed only because the French education system has been hijacked by a group of “progressive” teachers and politicians coming from May 68. Who literally destroyed every single good teaching method that have been working with huge success for decades, in the name of social equality and modernization. Diplomas who were supposed to be obtained because of your merit, your work, and your success, are now given away (83% of success for high school diploma last year) in the name of equality. They stopped giving bad marks to bad students because 6 years old kids “are evolving the French language”. Where we throw up classics out of the window, to study “French rap” instead (I’m not making this up, and I wish I was). Mediocrity is now the standard.
French language doesn’t exist any more for 99% of people under 25/30~~ years old. They speak a subform of French, with a tightened vocabulary, and non existent grammar. We’re producing a whole new nation of idiots, lacking all the basics of thought process. No wonder we’ve been leaded by idiots and crooks for the last 5 decades. You get leaders you deserve. Ho and talking about leaders, our current president has a poorer French than my little brother’s one.
You may think I am bullshitting, but this is the sad truth. Orwell’s theory about Newspeak is true, and you can see its application in France. When you give up your language for a subform of it, you give up your most important tools as a human being, what you can’t point at or describe can’t be questioned, criticized or changed. But there are people who will have those tools and will use it for you.
For example, look at the kids of the 60’s north African immigration wave in France. Those people didn’t bother teaching them a proper French because in the post 68 era, marking kids from immigration with bad marks was considered “racist” “unequal” etc… Coupled with the new reading teaching methods, now they are rootless, they don’t speak a correct French but they don’t speak a correct form of their parent’s language either. They can’t find a job, they can’t express correctly and identify their real enemies, and they feel, because they HAVE BEEN, betrayed by this whole lie that was the French Republic’s myth. The lie of equality, human right, and freedom. They are variously used by right or left wing parties (where both are responsible), and their situation never change.
Because language structurate your thoughts but it also defines you as a human being, it gives you your identity, to which nation you belong. You can have endless debates about the definition of what a nation is, but people from any sides will agree that a common language is an undeniable link of identity and understanding. When you break that link you break the nation and you open the box of communitarianism, racism, and go slowly but certainly to a violent and implosive situation.
I may appear surreal, but this is what I’ve seen, and you probably won’t understand how painful it is to talk with a majority of people with no identity, no culture, no criticism, nothing, nothing to talk with them. Or how painful and sad it is to be 13 years old in a classroom where more than half of your classmate can’t READ correctly or can’t do basic calculus. How painful it is to study in a school where “smart” is used as an insult. To feel like you’re living in complete decadence, where politician debate is reduced to a pure hour of propaganda every evening, with the complete approval of the majority of citizens. Where cultural life is reduced to talk show animated by prostitutes and the same self called intellectual elite that has been killing the whole thought of this nation for the past 30 years, the whole thing with a fart joke every 15 seconds.
And then you immigrate, you discover a country separated of your native one only by a single border, a country portrayed as full of racists and exiled SS officers by your native education system. And you realise how being a little bit conservative about identity and language can change quiet a lot of things (and of course I don’t blame France’s problems only on the language point), mainly people and their relationships.
So yeah, I’m pretty conservative about languages.