English as she is tort? I thought it might be fun, in the wake of Jazz's revelation that her/his Junior High english classes are dull enough to permit contemplation of simming, to discuss the whole point of studying English as a language (by native speakers) beyond the basic school grades. While it is true that grammar is important, and spelling is important for clarity in many (but by no means all) instances, it seems to me that teaching or studying the subject beyond the age of 11 is counterproductive. Of course the study of literature should continue, but frankly there is too much worth knowing that is never included in school syllabuses because of the bone-headed assumption that the kids need learning about dangling participles and subordinate clauses and all the zillions of arcane verb declensions. Such stuff is only of value to the likes of the uber-nerds of places like MATY, where the poking with sticks of people who mix up their future perfect with their pluperfect is pretty much mandatory. A great many (respected) professional writers have, at best, a hazy grasp of the finer points of the mechanics of language and rely (depend) on editors to correct both spelling errors as well as any significant grammatical faux pas. But is pointless and petty-minded to subject our teenagers to hours of tedium in going over the fine details as though there was actually a point to possessing such knowledge. Last night, I turned to the web for background information after watching a TV news item about Henry VIII's flagship: the Mary Rose, which has given us such a wealth of detail about medieval life. But I was always puzzled by the background to her sinking. Why was she engaging a French invasion fleet in the Southampton roads? The web revealed a vista of a European history far richer and more byzantine than I had ever suspected. Of course there might have been time for more history lessons at school if it had not been thought I needed to know how not to carelessly an infinitive split. There might have been more time in my own school curriculum for classes in English Lit; there were never enough! And also for creative writing, which should never have its walls sullied with the profane indiginities of the grammar police. Sentence fragments? Pah! My argument is simple. School english language teaching should be restricted to three simple phases. Teaching to read, closely allied with handwriting is the first. The second should concentrate on the basic rules of sentence construction: capitalisation and periods, and of the sentence's big brother, the paragraph. Basic spelling rules, the i before e rule, for example are also introduced, but only as a means by which the teacher may titillate her charges with the beauty and vagaries of a living language, not as a stick with which to intimidate them: I before E, get it wrong and get a C. The final phase, during the ealry teen years (12-14) should be limited to honing skills with the basic rules of usage of such things as apostrophes and of basic understanding of the need for agreement of tense and number. My point can be summed up neatly. If teaching english in schools, beyond age 14 was any good, we wouldn't now have so many universally used grammatical mash-ups. Examples: 'mother in law' correctly pluralises to mothers in law, but common misuages has made it mother in laws (probably partly due to the fact that "having the in laws over to visit" is perfectly grammatical and thereby confirming that the teaching of english will not stop a language from living and evolving.) BOGOF is a new marketing term, which in the UK is not often used so explicity since to tell someone to "bog off" is rather rude. So we have TV adverts proclaiming mulitple such deals with the execrable "buy one, get one frees" ... it is so unattractive to my ears, when the alternative "buy one, get one free offers" is much more explicitly meaningful. And, of course, we would never have seen the explosion of confusion over such things as there/their/they're if english teaching concentrated on the useful rather that on the mind-numbingly arcane. The real issue is that spelling and grammar make no significant impact on comprehension. Studies have shown that words can be monstrously mis-spelled and still be read correctly so long as their first and last letters are in the right place. The whole eats, shoots and leaves police should be shot. Language is not about rules for the sake of it. Language rules are for clarity not for their own sake. Comprehension in language is not taken from the rules it is taken from the context. The rules only come into play in law courts where the position of a punctuation mark (in a deposition or in a legal statute) might make make the difference between freedom and a date with a noose. Eats shoots and leaves makes perfect sense in context without any punctuation. In the context of giant pandas it clearly referes to diet, in the context of a spaghetti western it obviously refers to Clint Eastwood and in the context of a lousy date ....
Ah Mirelly! You make a vivid and well-balanced argument! I, myself, feel rather blessed with my English education as it was much like the ideal you describe. At the time I was going through grammar school and jr high, there was a great deal of educational experimentation going on. Some of it really lame (Was that class on Meal Worms really necessary?), but some of it was really good - especially the English classes. My mother may have been horrified that we never really learned how to properly diagram a sentence, but in my mind, we gained much more. We learned the basic of nouns and verbs, and the intricacies of punctuation, but not ad nauseum. And we were encouraged to use our fledgling skills to read and write and create, thus honing said skills in much more interesting and effective ways than merely learning a bunch of grammar rules. I was encouraged to write my first "novel" at the age of 11 (When a South Wind Blows) and it was "published" and handed out to the other students in the school. That bit of encouragement was much more effective in giving me a life-long appreciation for the language than all of the gerunds and split-infinitives in the world!
