EDUCATION
When I was starting French at school, one of the teachers told us to think of the difference between ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ as the same between ‘thou’ and ‘you’ in English. I still remember the confusion this caused. ‘Thou’ in English is archaic, rare and formal, isn’t it? We use it to address God. But you say ‘tu’ in everyday French to address your family and friends. How were they the same? I asked for clarification, but didn’t really understand the teacher’s unsatisfactory response.
It was little wonder, as the issue isn’t straightforward* [see end of article]. I’m guessing my hapless French tutor simply used the outdated conventions by which he himself had been taught, without questioning them, and thus ended up utterly confusing a subject instead of clarifying it. It still prends ma chèvre (gets my goat, ho ho) when I penser about it, and just goes to show the terrible pitfalls of mauvais enseignement (bad teaching).
That’s enough of my hardscrabble French.
I’ll be looking at pedagogues of the keyboard in this article, not of modern languages, but the situation is the same: bad teachers have been with us since time immemorial. They were to be found in the court of Louis XIV, and the palace of Frederick the Great, and the grandest homes of Victorian London, just as much as they were
