Written
by Dr. David Mulroy
I have taught classics at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1973. During these years, I have noticed a
decline in the verbal skills of my students.
It is embodied in the difficulties that they have in reading
comprehension and English composition, as well as in the fact that few are
capable of studying a foreign language successfully.
The cause of the decline has never seemed mysterious to me. My
students generally lack an understanding of basic grammatical concepts. Put
most simply, they cannot classify words by part of speech. Most can identify
prototypical examples of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, but beyond that
they are in the dark.
Until 1996 I did not suspect that anyone questioned the value of
knowing the parts of speech. But in 1996, Wisconsin’s Department of Public
Instruction was drafting a new set of academic standards for the state’s public
schools and invited suggestions from the general public. At a public hearing I
recommended that high school seniors be required to identify the eight parts of
speech in a selection of normal prose, expecting that such a modest and
reasonable suggestion would be immediately embraced by all concerned. I
followed this recommendation with a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee
Journal.
To my surprise, I found myself embroiled in a controversy. I
discovered that my suggestion ran directly counter to conventional wisdom among
experts in K-12 education.
As I went on to discover, the National Council of Teachers of
English (NCTE), the nation’s leading professional group of English teachers—the
equivalent of the American Medical Association or the American Bar
Association—opposed formal instruction in grammar. That the professional
association of English teacher should issue a warning against the rigorous
teaching of English grammar struck me as both ironic and symptomatic of a
serious problem.
The clearest evidence of the problems that ensue in language arts
when schools abandon formal instruction in grammar may lie in the well-known
decline in the nation’s SAT scores. Both verbal and quantitative scores began
to sink in 1963, the year of the NCTE “Braddock report,” which purports to have
found that “the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or … even a harmful
effect on the improvement of writing.”
The average verbal score dropped over 50 points, from 478 in 1963
to the 420s in the seventies. The quantitative score fell from 502 to 466 in
1980. Subsequently, quantitative scores rebounded somewhat, but verbal scores
stayed in the 420s. In 1996 the College Board “recentered” the SAT scores.
The average verbal score for that year, 428, was reported as 505.
In 2002 the “recentered” verbal score was 504.
Another stark indicator of a problem is a decline in the
percentage of students studying foreign language on the college level. In 1965,
16.5 percent of college credits were earned in foreign language courses. This
figure fell to 7.8 percent in 1977 and has fluctuated between 7.3 and 8.2 since
then.
Language teachers have gone to great lengths to attract and keep
students, transforming their profession in the process. Emphasis on
grammar in elementary language instruction is now passé. It has been replaced
by various pedagogical innovations, especially the study of culture. The theory
that the study of culture is a better way to learn a language is sometimes
carried to foolish extremes.
I eventually withdrew my son from public school in favor of
homeschooling. The last straw for me was a project in his soi-disant
French class. He was required to prepare a dessert made out of mangoes and
powdered sugar, supposedly a favorite in Francophone Africa. At this point, he
had not learned anything about the conjugation of French verbs.
This emphasis on culture at the expense of grammar in foreign
language classes is partly designed to revive dwindling enrollments, but has
yet to produce any dramatic improvement. My hypothesis is that the problem lies
not in the way that languages were or are taught in college, but in the fact
that fewer students are given the foundation in grammar in grade school that is
necessary to succeed in the later study of a foreign language, however it is
taught.
The fact that teachers have seen instruction in grammar as a
problematic element in the curriculum lends credence to this hypothesis.
Apparently, their students tend to lose interest when discussion turns to conjugating
verbs, so they break out the mangoes and powdered sugar.
Grammar As a Liberal Art
Grammar entered education in the West as the first and most
important of the seven liberal arts. In Plato’s Academy, students could not
master philosophy unless they had first completed a basic curriculum, called
enkuklios paideia (“rounded education,” whence the term, “encyclopedia”). The
subjects covered were grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, harmony
(music), and astronomy.
The Romans imitated this curriculum, referring to the subjects
studied as the artes liberales, “the liberal arts.” This curriculum was
preserved and practiced on into the Middle Ages, thanks in part to the
continued popularity of books like Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Philology
and Mercury, an allegorical treatment of the liberal arts. The liberal arts
were divided between the language arts of the trivium (grammar, logic,
rhetoric) and the mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music, and astronomy).
The entire intellectual realm is accessible to the person who has
mastered these fields.
The liberal arts are the ground rules of thought, not its end. In
Aristotelian terms, they are not speculative disciplines, aimed at learning
ultimate truths, but practical ones designed to serve ulterior purposes. The
value of the liberal arts, in other words, is instrumental—but no less
necessary for being so.
Stobaeus, a 5th century writer, told of Crantor, a prominent
member of Plato’s Academy, who said that “no one could be initiated into the
Greater Mysteries before the Lesser Mysteries nor attain philosophy without
laboring in the “rounded studies.” This is a point made emphatically by the
fourth-century B. C. Greek orator Isocrates. The liberal arts, he says, do not
by themselves make students better speakers or counselors, just eumathesteroi:
“better learners.”
We should not be learning (non discere debemus) the liberal arts,
says Isocrates: we should have learned (didicisse) them.
Grammar As an Essential Taxonomy
No matter how well attuned you may be to the secret harmonies of
nature, you will not get very far as a naturalist without knowing the
difference between birds and insects. The understanding of complex phenomena
begins with taxonomy. Language’s basic taxonomic groups are referred to as
“parts of speech.”
The individual responsible for first dividing words into eight
taxonomic groups is known to posterity as Dionysius Thrax (“The Thracian”),
whose book Techne Grammatike is among the most influential books ever written.
It was the work that introduced the eight parts of speech to the world and
became the standard textbook for centuries. His system was adopted by the
Syrian, Armenian, and Roman grammarians, and through figures such as the Romans
Donatus and Priscian, his influence pervades the grammars of modern European
languages. This basic taxonomy of language became the first step in a liberal
arts education.
The Humanist Revival of Grammar
During the Middle Ages, logic became dominant in the schools,
displacing much of the emphasis on the systematic study of grammar. But through
the later influence of men such as Francesco Petrarch and Lorenzo Valla,
instruction in grammar was revived. In due course, new humanist Latin grammars
modeled on Donatus and Priscian appeared throughout Europe.
Desiderius Erasmus, who believed that young students needed to be
trained in elementary grammar in the tradition of Dionysius and Donatus visited
England early in the reign of King Henry VIII, spreading the gospel of humanism
in elite circles. His friend John Colet reestablished London’s leading
cathedral school, St. Paul’s School. St. Paul’s became the first of the
Renaissance grammar schools in England. Like Chartes under Bernard, it focused
on the study of classical literature based on a firm foundation of grammar.
William Lily was the first high master of St. Paul’s. In the
1540s, Lily’s treatise on the parts of speech was combined with a work on
morphology by Colet and published with a decree by Henry VIII prescribing its
exclusive use in all British schools—“one brief, plain, and uniform grammar,”
according to a letter to the reader in the 1544 version.
Lily’s grammar is a straightforward exposition of Latin morphology
and syntax based on the eight parts of speech. Students were required to
memorize Latin’s complicated system of inflectional endings by reciting
paradigms. As in other humanistic grammars, all the features of Latin were
explained by giving their English equivalents. Thus students were exposed to
the fact that sentences in English also had subjects consisting of nouns and
pronouns and that English verbs also had different forms expressing various
tenses, moods, and voices. They learned about main clauses and main verbs.
The promulgation of “one brief, plain, uniform grammar” in British
schools occurred on the eve of the English literary Renaissance. From Chaucer’s
death in 1400 to the mid-sixteenth century, England did not produce any literary
artists of lasting fame. Then the students who had been raised on Lily’s
grammar started coming of age: Edmund Spenser (1552-99), Francis Bacon
(1561-1626), Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), John Ford (1568-1639), Ben Jonson
(1572-1637), and, of course, William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Ben Jonson famously wrote that Shakespeare had “small Latin, less
Greek.” In fact, Shakespeare’s education consisted of a grounding in
Lily’s grammar followed by the reading of classical Latin authors and, if he
stayed in school long enough, a smattering of Greek. Chronological
considerations and references in his works have left scholars certain that he
attended a grammar school shaped by the Erasmian reforms.
According to Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare “had Latin enough to
grammaticize his English.” Though it comes to the same thing, I would prefer to
say that he had grammar enough to “grammaticize” his English. Understanding
Latin has no bearing per se on one’s ability to write English, but the
grammatical foundation on which Latin study is based in the humanist approach
is directly relevant. The grammatical concepts are the transportable elements,
and they are what even students with “small Latin” acquire.
Grammar’s Legitimate Role in the Curriculum
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century in America
that a full-fledged revolt against the liberal arts occurred. This happened
under the banner of “progressive education,” a pervasive movement in American
education responsible for many things, both good and bad. Its bad effects
resulted from carrying reactions against the liberal arts tradition to
unjustified extremes. The elimination of formal instruction in grammar from the
grade school curriculum is an example of such an extreme.
Because of the great increase in the number of students going to
high school after the turn of the twentieth century, educators began to argue
that students should receive training in specific vocations and for other
practical challenges that they would face as adults in a non-academic
world.
But besides introducing practical subjects into the curriculum,
progressive educators have always taken a dim view, methodologically, of
“formalism” in teaching. Formalism trades in rules and definitions that are
specified ahead of time and is based on the assumption that, for any question,
there is one correct answer, which the teacher knows and the student must be
trained to produce.
As rudimentary, practical subjects, the liberal arts have a
natural affinity for formal modes of instruction. This is especially true of
grammar. The point is not to reflect on the interesting behavior of words, but
to learn basic rules and definitions—and to move on. As a prototypical, formal
topic in the early years of education and the first of the liberal arts,
grammar was inevitably targeted for elimination by radical progressives.
But there is something to be said for hard-nosed, formal
instruction—for rote learning. Knowing specified rules and definitions gives
students autonomy. When they are right, they are right. They do not have to
rely on the teacher’s subjective approval. And this is particularly important
for younger students.
That grammar is most easily learned by the young was a familiar
truth during the English Renaissance. According to the 1673 edition of Lily’s
Grammar:
Grammar, as she is a severe mistress, is also a coy one and hardly
admits of any courtship but of the youthful votary. There are indeed many who
by great industry have redeemed the want of early institution but in the
performances of such there still appears somewhat of stiffness and force and
what has more in it of art than nature.
I have devoted entire semesters to trying to teach the parts of
speech, sentence diagramming, and the conjugation of English verbs to groups of
college freshmen. At the end, the only students who had any facility in
identifying the parts of speech were the few who entered the course already
understanding them fairly well. The others displayed an inability to master the
subject and had all the appearances of a hostile determination not to. It was
like trying to teach table manners to a motorcycle gang.
If the progressives are right in their opposition to formal
instruction in grammar, then 2,000 years of Western education have been a
charade. When I questioned her on this topic, a friend of mine who teaches
English as a Second Language (ESL) and linguistics told me that she carefully
refrained from criticizing nonstandard English in the classroom and felt it was
important to do so. Then she added as a humorous aside, a throw-away line, that
“of course” she policed her own daughter’s grammar with fanatical vigilance. It
was, I thought, a moment of truth. People who use “good grammar” do
not hesitate to force it on the children they love.
In view of this, I often find myself annoyed by contemporary
linguists who have made traditional English teachers objects of ridicule.
Stephen Pinker, for example, the author of The Language Instinct, refers to
dangling participles, split infinitives and the “other hobgoblins of the
schoolmarm.” He is a brilliant linguist and author, but for teaching my
children English, I’ll take the schoolmarm.
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