And yet, the school leader tells EducationHQ, too often the role of language is sidelined in discussions about the problem plaguing our society.
“One of the things that’s happening in society more and more in recent decades, seems to be more sloganising and more shouting, and less thinking and less attempts to understand causes, and to really come to grips with the forces that are propelling people into different behaviors or different personalities or different attitudes and so on,” Marsden says.
The principal of Candlebark and Alice Miller School in the foothills of Victoria’s Macedon Ranges says he “watches on with incredulity” as discussion unfolds in the media around domestic violence.
“It’s just lots of shouting again, and lots of assumptions that things have suddenly gotten worse, and that it’s become this massive new problem – which is ridiculous because it’s been going on for millennia.
“There’s so little attempt to understand the causes of it,” he contends.
As Marsden sees it, men’s poor language skills and inability to effectively articulate their views is one issue that sits at the root of the domestic violence problem.
This is clearly a generalisation, he notes, but “like many generalisations, there’s some value or some truth” in it.
He explains that in instances of conflict, people will “always take their preferred weapon” in order to achieve victory.
“Quite a substantial number of males are not good with language, so that’s not their preferred weapon, but quite a substantial number of women are good with language.
“So, if you have a conflict where one person is using her preferred weapon, which is language – and I use the pronoun her advisedly – she might let fly a torrent of words, which might be full of anger and lots of lists of grievances and dreadful things that the male partner has done, which might be entirely justified.”
But too often in the majority of such cases, the male partner won’t attempt to respond using language because he knows he won’t be able to win verbally, Marsden says.
“If that is the only weapons available to him, he’s going to lose.
“So, his preferred weapon is fists, or quibble, or bats, or knives, or guns, or whatever else.
“And to me, that’s a very simple understanding, but it doesn’t seem achievable, or doesn’t seem to be something that people discuss.”
A few weeks ago Marsden tuned in to a conversation on ABC Radio. The topic under scrutiny was domestic violence and abuse.
“The whole thing went for [around] 25 minutes,” he shares.
“And in the last 40 seconds, someone mentioned this issue of language being possibly a factor, but by then it was time to wind up and so they didn’t discuss it. It just got a passing mention.
“But that was the only attempt in the 25 minutes to understand the causes for it.
“And there are other causes as well, but [poor language skills] is one of the biggest issues.”
In writing, almost three quarters of Year 7 girls scored in the highest band ('strong' or 'exceeding'), compared to only 58 per cent of boys, the latest NAPLAN results found.
NAPLAN results from this year showed nearly half of Year 9 boys are below the national benchmark in writing, grammar and punctuation.
Boys lag behind girls in four of the five domains in the standardised test, but score better in numeracy throughout their schooling.
Meanwhile, a major performance gap was shown between teenage boys and girls in reading.
In writing, almost three quarters of girls in Year 7 scored in the highest band (‘strong’ or ‘exceeding’), compared to only 58 per cent of boys.
Previous NAPLAN results have revealed similar gender literacy gaps, while PISA results have suggested this is a phenomenon that runs across the OECD.
Nick Parkinson from Grattan Institute recently told SBS News that it was worrying to think about what the future for many boys might look like.
“This is quite concerning. What we’re seeing is that nearly one in two boys in classes across Australia are struggling to convey their meaning through text,” he told the publisher.
“And struggling to interpret the kind of text they’ll need for everyday life.”
In Marsden’s view, the language proficiency of Australian school leavers has not shifted significantly over his career spanning 45 years in the classroom.
He believes that English teaching is now full of inherent paradoxes.
“One of the paradoxes is that we teach the rules of English, and we teach them rigidly – and as they are inflexible, they must be followed at all times.
“And if students don’t follow them, if they don’t put a full stop or it’s equivalent at the end of every sentence, or if they spell a word wrongly, or if they use a word in an unconventional way, they’ll get red marks on the page and told that’s bad English,” he says.
And yet books like Ulysses by James Joyce, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Cormac McCarthy’s novels are taught as exemplars of the written word, Marsden adds.
“And these are people who completely broke the so-called rules of English.”
Such authors, who wrote “wrote dramatically” and were “spectacularly creative and unorthodox” in their prose, are held up as writers to be revered, and yet children aren’t taught to develop their own authentic voice and writing style beyond what is grammatically and stylistically correct, Marsden argues.
“It’s so inflexible, at the same time we teach them that these people who use language in such ways are to be revered.”
1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available for free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to support people impacted by domestic, family or sexual violence.
This is the first article in a two-part series canvassing Marsden’s take on English education.
