One can no longer say that to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life. That is partly because this famous boast now has an unacceptably supremacist and sexist sound. It is also because it is becoming less and less true.

However, when we lost an empire we gained a lingua franca, and it is now true to say, instead, that to be born an English-speaker is to win one of the top prizes in life’s lottery. And this can be said without a hint of triumphalism, sexism or racism, without annoying anybody much except the French.

So it is all the more depressing to see how little care we take in this country of our lucky inheritance. Last week a primary school in Gloucestershire decided to stop giving children spelling homework because, according to the headmistress (absurdly called Ms Marklove), spelling tests are “unnecessarily distressing” for them and might give them “a sense of failure”.

School tests are not much fun, but in some subjects learning by heart is essential, and that is easiest when children are young. It is possible to find out whether children know their English spelling or German irregular verbs only by testing them. There is no other way. The alternative to rote learning and testing is ignorance, which is why so many British children are unable to spell their own language and unable to speak other people’s (unless they learn it at home).

People who read and write good English are at an advantage in most parts of the world today. Conversely, Britons who cannot read or write or spell good English are at a serious disadvantage, both at home and abroad. It seems to me a national disgrace that we, the inheritors of this extraordinary lottery prize, should be so careless of its value that we are prepared, unthinkingly, to prevent our children from sharing it. Why cannot teachers understand the central importance of these basic disciplines?

Those Gloucestershire children run the risk of joining the ranks of British no-hopers who cannot speak and write English as well as the most ordinary of Polish plumbers and Hungarian waitresses.

I felt the same rush of indignation on learning last week that a headmaster in Brighton is using Makaton, a sign language, in his primary school to help children be more readily understood while they grasp English. Damien Jordan and his staff teach children who speak 26 languages. But to get staff to master sign language as an aid to communication is surely madness. It is likely to be unfair and even damaging to native English-speakers in the school. Surely it reduces the time that teachers spend with them, in their own language at their own level, and surely it reduces the general level at which English is used at the school, to pupils’ disadvantage in the wider world. It could also slow the rate at which the new arrivals learn English if they have another means of communication to fall back on.

Any self-respecting country would insist that all children learnt to speak the country’s language before anything else. French schools, for instance, make no accommodation for other languages: French is the medium of instruction. Lessons should not be dumbed down, literally, to accommodate foreign languages.

Fortunately young children can learn another language quickly and easily if it is properly taught – a large “if” in this country – and the taxpayer is willing to pay to teach them English. I don’t see why taxpayers and parents should accept a lesser education for their children in the interest of those who can’t speak English.

I wonder about the attitudes of the parents of such children. Apparently many of the foreign pupils at the Brighton primary school are children of international students and academics studying at the universities of Brighton and Sussex. It seems to me to be shortsighted and regressive to impose children who don’t speak English on English-speaking schools and the British taxpayer.

However, it seems even more myopic, somehow, for a headmaster to respond to this problem by turning to sign language. His duty is to provide a good education in the English language, not to complicate matters with alternative means of communication. Would you want your child or grandchild to go to a school where English is just one of many languages and sign language could become the lingua franca?

There is something equally infuriating about The Guardian’s guide to house style, which was delivered free with every copy last week. If these primary schools are guilty of sins of omission by neglecting the English language, The Guardian is guilty of sins of commission by trying to control it too much.

According to the style guide, Guardian writers must avoid the following words or phrases: uneducated, acre, Third World, elderly, grandparent, tribe, stone-age tribe, committed suicide, practising homosexual, actress, dumb, old-age pensioner, deaf ears (one should talk about closed ears), disabled, career woman, politically correct, blacks, Asians, in a wheelchair, air hostess and province of Northern Ireland.

Although not prohibited, the word “terrorist” must be used with great caution, as the concept is subjective; so should the words “nation” and “country”, and the word “immigrant” should be avoided. Worst of all, to my mind, is the gradual suppression of the phrase “mental illness”; nowadays many people, and Guardian writers, feel obliged to talk instead of mental health, as in “a mental health diagnosis”, which means precisely the opposite, or “mental health patients”.

I understand what lies behind all this euphemism: it comes from the strange idea that to deny something is to make it better and it is meant to be compassionate, inclusive and inoffensive. But what such tinkering with the language does, often, is to muddle and mislead. This is to undermine the English language, to rob it of its natural clarity and power and to confuse the thoughts and feelings of those who use it.

To treat our great shared inheritance in these ways, both to neglect and to devalue this asset, regardless of the harm we are doing to ourselves and our interests at the same time, seems to me degenerate. It’s tearing up our winning lottery ticket for no good reason.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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