Here we go. The next step in fanning the flames of ignorance. Several here are fighting to keep Latin and Greek in schools. It will only be more difficult when you cannot keep English in English schools.
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/19/ngram19.xml
That is most disturbing! What’s next…no formal education?
Your topic reminds me of David Mulroy’s The War Against Grammar. I have personally found that in the US many are ignorant of grammar, and very little is being done to change that fact in the US public school system. I’d be willing to listen if someone could convince me otherwise.
WB
I’m afraid you’re right William. My grammar knowledge is almost exclusively due to my own study with the exception of a couple of renegade teachers who believed we should know the parts of speech and be able to diagram a sentence. Grammar is not the only subject dying in schools, but one of the most crucial and the one fading the fastest.
I found that I really didn’t know anything about English Grammar until I studied Greek Grammar. I did take German in High School, but even that didn’t give me a good grasp on how grammar works in general. Once I studied Greek I finally started learning things like “a predicate is…”. One interesting side note…I took four years of English in High school and was always an A or B student…scary!!
I went to a small rural high school where you were taught nothing about grammar except some questionable rules, and when you entered the seventh grade you began to hear the rumors about Mr. Gendle’s class in tenth grade. Kids dreaded it for years because he taught grammar in adult terminology, and you were graded according to your answers on the tests, not how hard you tried…even if that meant failing. He was probably the only teacher in the school who failed students, and eventually the parents started complaining because the low grades looked bad on college applications. So instead of developing a program in which the students learned grammar in grammar school, rather than being thrust into it just before college, the school administration started pressuring him to retire early, which he did after some brief resistence. I suppose now they don’t teach grammar at all.
Another English teacher in the same high school once related to me a story about when they stopped teaching French, before I was there. The principal told him that it was a choice between dropping French or German: Spanish was too important because Mexico was our closest neighbor (this was in upstate New York, which borders Canada). Now, several years later they’ve decided to drop German too.
I found myself in the same position as Kopio: I was an A student, who was able to read well, and write properly, but who knew next to nothing about grammar (except was I picked up from Mr. “Grendel”) until I took up Greek on my own. That was when I bought a book on English grammar and started to explore. It’s really so interesting.
This is indeed a harsh state. I have witnessed throughout my life children so ignorant and devoid of not only linguistic but also general vital awareness. The cane should live again; however, neither this nor a rebirth of grammatically sound lads bar choirboys will ever happen owing to the fact that english teachers themselves nowadays are nowhere near competent enough in the respect of their english grammar to teach and/or beat nuts properly. Believe me I have experienced harsh times correcting worthless degree bearing fools only to be branded insolent. Such a response to grammatical accuracy from the educators means no hope for the young ones. Also unjust lashings häd I received in such disputes and I was fighting. Ah well I gave up a few months agone. Back to listening to the Ying Yang twins and shaking my head/laughing in abdication at the exponentially increasing stack of racism in school. yay for no grammar makes hell of a child! 
Oh Yes, we had a Mr. Gendle too. It was Mrs. Shaw. She retired the year before I hit her grade, but basically the same story.
Uhm… I disagree. runs like hell
In high school I was taught nothing nothing but grammar in Dutch class (note I am originally from The Netherlands). Dutch classes were the most boring thing in the world. It taught me nothing about he beauty of poetry or the brilliance of good literature. There was nothing about style - we were taught neither how to write letters nor how to write fiction. The only thing we ever learned was about conjugation of verbs, predicates, accusative, nominatives, etc.
For years after high school it left me with no interest whatsoever in either poetry or literature. Only on about turning 20 I started to become interested in these things.
On the bright side, when I started with learning latin and greek it did give me some comprehension of what all this grammar was (apart from having the learn the english terms for it first).
I grew up in the US and had quite a bit of grammar in grade school. In fact my parents and grandparents referred to “grade school” as “grammar school.” 
I could tell you all about English grammar, before I even began Latin as a high school freshman.
It’s a good idea to avoid making sweeping statements about “the US public school system” because there is a different system in every school district, and there are thousands of school districts across the country. The quality of public schools varies considerably from place to place. I went to Catholic schools, but it so happens that the public schools in my home town are quite good.
I am all in favor of teaching grammar in primary school. It’s hard to imagine a school that does not teach it.
BTW, thanks for posting a reference to that book. It sounds interesting. I will try to find the time to read it.
Well … if the research shows that teaching grammar formally does not improve writing skills, one has surely got to take that seriously. And it is not obviously true that one really needs to understand grammar systematically in order to use language expressively and well. If one adds in the additional problem that time spent teaching grammar is not spent doing other things, and that many people find grammar dull, and if you find a subject dull you are unlikely to get much out of it, it seems to me to make sense.
Of course, when it comes to learning a foreign language after infancy, it may be useful to have a grasp of formal grammar so that you can approach the language by “learning its grammar”. And for that purpose knowing something of the grammar of a language one understands intimately well (one’s own) may help to make sense of grammatical terminology in another language. This is the reverse of the usual argument: one does not learn grammar in order to make better sense of one’s own language, one learns the grammar of one’s own language first in order to grasp other, stranger grammars more efficiently. I don’t believe the research deals with that hypothesis (which may or may not be correct). Nor with the additional argument, different again, that learning a foreign language does improve your use of your own language.
Even then I’m doubtful. It is a common misconception that knowing a language means knowing its grammar and its vocabulary. It is about much, much more than that. We need to be careful not to fetishize grammar, which tempts us by its difficulty (difficult = prestigious), its boredom (dull = virtuous), its rule-like quality (rules = law/morality) its traditional aura and its testability. Learning grammar formally is certainly not sufficient to understand even a foreign language; it is probably not necessary; it may be a useful short-cut for some people, but as an end in itself it’s about as useful as learning the Ruritanian state railway train timetable.
Democritus, point well taken.
The War on Grammar is high on my list of books to read this coming year; I’m glad you enjoyed the link.
WB
Although I’m in favor of teaching grammar to young people, nevertheless, I agree with you, in part. There is more than one way to teach grammar.
I remember as a young person – as an ignorant little boy, sitting in class – that the grammar rules we were taught sometimes just didn’t make any sense. I fully understood that my own sense of things was the right one and the books were wrong. Not just the grammar, but also the phonics rules did not match my own pronunciation. It was irritating.
Some advocates of grammar instruction are crusty and unimaginative, and have no sense of the English language themselves.
Now I will turn around and disagree a little bit. Let’s not overstate the case. Grammar is certainly helpful for learning a foreign language. We should not fetishize grammar, but we also must not demonize it. It’s just a tool, after all. It has its place.
Different people learn things in different ways, and some learning strategies help some kids more than others. Grammar helps, but it helps some people more than others. And, as you say, it’s only part of the story.
Grammar should be taught, but it should be taught well. This is hard to do, because language is subtle, complex, and constantly changing.
It is very interesting to hear everyone’s views on this subject, I am very much in agreement with those who say that grammar should be interesting and not a pedantic set of rules (like the old split infinitives!).
However, it is sad that any subjects that are seen as too hard for the poor little public school system children are scrapped - all we end up with are badly educated “factory fodder” workers. The good jobs all go to the privately educated, who, of course, still study grammar, languages and so on! One way of ensuring that the rich get richer…
of course grammar should be taught when coherent writing has already been mastered (doesn’t this usually happen in middle school?). The issue is horrible English programs that don’t accomplish that which the article blames on the curriculum. If you are going to blame grammar that way you also have to blame literature because neither contribute as directly as they want to writing skills.
My grammar background as a student in the San Francisco Unified School District :
In my elementary schools (I transferred) they taught us nouns, adjectives, verbs, subject, predicate, and in the last year adverbs as well.
In the first year of middle school (6th grade), we had to do master all of the parts of speech, diagram sentences, know the difference between simple, compound, and complex sentences, as well as the rules of capitalization and punctuation and what, from a book called “Warner’s grammar”. We alternated, doing lots of literature one month, and a lot of grammar another month. This was with one of my two faviorite middle school teachers, who had decades of experience (she boasted that her social studies class was one of the few which covered Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, the Hebrews, Greece, and Rome thouroughly, which was true when I took it). Personally, I enjoyed the grammar sections, but I find algebra relaxing, so go figure.
In the 7th grade we covered grammar in class and did worksheets at home. They covered things such as common homonym mistakes (its vs. it’s, layed vs. laid, there vs. their vs. they’re, etc.), learned termonology such as homonyms, antonyms, and synonyms, covered verb agreement, irregular verbs, etc. However a lot of students, myself included, frequently did “what sounded right” instead of thinking about the grammar.
The biggest problem in this (7th grade) approach was that they taught it to us as if it was something we did not know as native speakers (a few of us were not native speakers, but we all spoke English fluently), rather than as an analysis of what we already knew. My father remembered that a classmate from his junior high days was always right in grammar, but when the teacher asked why that was right, he replied “Because it sounds good.” But one day, the teacher said, “No, Ralph, that does not sound good.” (it was something about who/whom).
In the 8th grade I had an easy teacher. All grammar we went throught had been covered in previous years.
In my freshman year at high school, our teacher focused on literature. Grammar only played a role in grading papers. Ditto in sophmore year. But in sophmore year I started getting very involved in foreign languages (independently: I’ve already ranted about the language departement in my high school) and saw grammar from a new perspective. Only then did I really appreciate the grammar experience I had in elementary and middle school, and see how important grammar was.
Now, in my junior year, I’m taking AP English Language and Composition, and we’re doing a lot of rhetoric work. The teacher assumes that our grammar is solid, though our textbook also has a comprehensive grammar section for those who need reference. However a lot of rhetoric and grammar are connected to each other like Siamese twins, and my good understanding of linguistics (syntax and vocabulary origin) gives me an edge over my peers.
Mind you, all of these school are on the west side. My middle school was very pure west-side. My elementary schools and high school are somewhat less west-side, as they are 1) magnet schools and 2) closer to the geographic center of the city, but at least 50% of the students live in the west side. For those who are not familiar with San Francisco, the west side neighborhoods are the stronghold of the middle class, especially the Asian (mostly Chinese/Cantonese, some Japanese and Vietnamese) community. Due to its size, the Asian community has a strong cultural identity, including the notion that their children need to have an excellent academic background to have a good life. The Asian parents lobby the school distict to death to make the schools their kids go to as academically rigorous as possible. Other students at west side schools (moi) reap the benefits alongside the Asian kids.
Also, California public schools have one of the highest rates of students who do not speak English as their first language, so maybe that encourages teachers to supplement the ESL courses with more grammar.
Conclusion : There is such a good thing as good grammar education in American public schools, but it depends on good teachers, as well as high pressures on the school to give a challenging academic curriculum.
German grammar was taught at my school and predictably I always did really badly in those test - but I was not the only one and those that did badly in the tests could speak and write German alright, they just didn’t understand the grammar. So when they say that teaching grammar doesn’t actually do anything to help write and speak English, I think they are right. It only helps you to well… ‘know your grammar’. I’m not sure it really is necessary to know English grammar. The first time I was confronted with my lack of ‘knowledge’ of English grammar was when my pupils kept asking me questions like: so what exactly is the gerund, when can I use it and when do I use this form of that verb…? etc.. I quickly got out my grammar book and cause I knew Latin grammar I could at least understand the book and so explain the English grammar with the help of the book.
I think it’s important to know some basic terms like what is a subject, object, verb, adjective etc. I mean that is basic, but the rest? If you learn a foreign language you should be learning the grammar rules then, so like people should be learning about grammar in French or Latin classes and then they would be able to transfer those skills to English in the rare case when they might want to understand an oxford grammar book. But I know from Episcopus that this is not the case, in the French and German lessons they just don’t learn any grammar either… instead of teaching English grammar in school, I think they should be teaching the foreign languages better.
Most of the posts which agree with the article are making the same mistake as the researchers. Even they suggest; grammar is only useful when… This is a major reason not to remove grammar from schools.
Notice all the positives listed about knowing grammar. If everyone had these skills wouldn’t communication be improved since the terminology is there to discuss communication and improve it? Imagine if Chemistry were taught using different methods in every school, but none of them were based upon learning the chemicals and rules by the same names. Progress would be stifled since chemists would have a difficult time communicating. That red stuff does the same thing sometimes when I mix it with that blue stuff.
Immediate improvement in writing may not be gained through grammar study in every student, but it equips them with the tools to become better later in life. As they grow and read more from other authors they can see what it is they like about particular writings rather than saying “wow, that was great and I don’t know why.” Everyone agrees that grammar has helped them to learn other languages. The push for inductive study rather than deductive, had its place. However, the argument “that’s how babies learn” has gone way too far. We’re not babies. We can intuitively pick up our mother tongue having been immersed in its culture from birth (familiarity with patterns). But adult minds need the handle of grammar to get into a language effectively and make sense of what they hear and read.
A common point for discussion worldwide is another plus for teaching grammar. I think that long term benefits of teaching grammar far surpass a get better test scores quick approach to “teaching” (if it can be called that). I also predict that removal of grammar will decrease scores in the long run rather than improve them, and stunt educational growth for adults beyond their school years.
Is that a rant? 
I dont’ think it’s a rant. Here’s how I see things:
The important question is not “Grammar: yes or no?” but rather “What sort of grammar?” Who will make the “rules”? What is the basis for these rules? Is it OK to finish a sentence with a preposition? Who says so? Why exactly is “y’all” ungrammatical? Why is it better to say “with whom” than “who with” ? How do we go about changing that rule? IMHO these are not spurious questions, they are central. I won’t propose any solutions to these questions, but in my judgement one cannot propose to emphasize grammar as part of universal education without reaching some kind of consensus about who determines what the grammar will be, and why we should pay attention to these people’s judgements. There is plenty of room for disagreement. It’s a tough problem.
If anyone tells me I can’t split an infinitive, or that I am not allowed to start a sentence with “and” or “but,” or lectures me about the supposedly correct way to use the word “hopefully,” I politely tell them to buzz off. Some hard core grammar advocates do a lot of damage to the language, because they themselves have no good feel for the language, and they insist on enforcing “rules” which are wrong-headed to begin with.
My own pet peeve about American usage nowadays is not about grammar, but about the inconsistent use of vocabulary, particularly when speaking. It is as if we are not all in agreement about what certain abstract words actually mean. It’s true that language changes, so sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between linguistic “innovation” and linguistic “sloppiness.” Perhaps there is no difference. But I think it’s fair to say that there is a lack of verbal precision, even among supposedly quite well educated people. This is in contrast to the British, who seem to be verbally much more adept. The problem is not simply one of correctness, but also of clarity and elegance. When we speak it just comes across as clumsy, IMHO.
Geoff - your comparison of languages and chemistry could not be more wrong. A language is not, that is NOT, an exact science. If you mix one chemical substance with another you will always get the same result, whether you live in 2005BC or 2005AD. Languages however change all the time. The purpose language in the first place is communication and the only measure of proper use of language is the efficiency of the communication. Some basic grammar knowledge is usefull to achieve this, but when it comes to one’s mother tongue correct usage of grammar comes naturrally.
Use of language is an art, you can hardly say that Monet was right in his painting and Rothko wrong. When you admire Michelangelo’s David you are not concerned with how the marble must have formed over millions of years (except if you are a geologist I suppose…).
Only when as adults we try to learn foreign languages a thorough understanding of grammar becomes usefull and even then the necesarry extent of this understanding will utterly depend on one’s purposes: whether you learn the languages in order to be able to communicate in it or for study of the language, e.g. etymology, itself.
Democritus - although the rules of grammar do change through time, at any one point in time the rules are pretty well established and rarely up for discussion.