Grammar under Siege

Too many students are finding that it is hard to be truly multicultural and learn a second language when you have not been taught how to use your mother tongue.

“Finally, grammar is the foundation of the study of foreign language,” David Mulroy writes in his book The War against Grammar. “The reason that contemporary American students struggle with infinitives, participles, articles, demonstratives, and direct and indirect objects in foreign language classes is that they know very little about these entities in English.”

Dr. Mulroy has taught the Classics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee since 1973. In attempting to practice what he preaches, Dr. Mulroy made recommendations on the teaching of grammar to the state’s department of education.

“A consultant working for the Department of Public Instruction kindly showed me a printout from the Internet entitled, ‘Facts on the teaching of grammar,’” Dr. Mulroy remembers. “This was a web page produced by 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.”

“According to this website, ‘decades of research’ had shown that instruction in ‘formal grammar’ did not accomplish any positive goals and was actually harmful because it took time away from more profitable activities.”

Unfortunately, three decades of attempting to teach Latin and Greek showed Dr. Mulroy that the NCTE is wrong. Accordingly, he began teaching a freshman seminar on traditional grammar in English, garnering negative reviews that only served to underscore the need for such instruction.

“How well was the purpose of the course fulfilled?,” was one of the questions on the evaluation form. “Their [sic] was no purpose,” was one of the answers Dr. Mulroy got.

“In 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,” Dr. Mulroy observed. “The others displayed an inability to master the subject that had all the appearances of a hostile determination not to.”

“It was like trying to teach table manners to a motorcycle gang.”

The good news is that grammar fell out of favor once before in history, then was rescued. Educators resurrected it and opened a golden age that produced such writers as William Shakespeare.

The bad news is that that last grammar-free period lasted 300 years. “The twentieth century was not the first period in which the study of grammar was relegated to the margins,” Dr. Mulroy reports. “The same thing happened in a previous era whose intellectual culture bears a number of striking resemblances to our own.”

“I am speaking of the late middle ages, approximately A. D. 1100-1400.” Flashing forward, we find, much to our surprise, that one of the poster boys of progressive education actually has gone on record in favor of the teaching of grammar. Dr. Mulroy gives us a quote from left-wing icon Noam Chomsky that few might attribute to him in a blindfold test.

“I don’t see how any person can truly be called ‘educated’ who doesn’t know the elements of sentence structure, or who doesn’t understand the nature of a relative clause, a passive construction, and so on,” Dr. Chomsky has stated. “Furthermore, if one is going to discuss literature, including here what students write themselves, and to come to understand how it is written and why, these conceptual tools are indispensable.”

Perhaps the most poignant comment Dr. Mulroy reproduces is the one made by an anonymous public school teacher. This lady brings the double standard into sharp focus.

“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 that it was important to do so,” Dr. Mulroy recounts. “Then she added as a humorous aside, a throwaway line, that ‘of course’ she policed her own daughters’ grammar with fanatical vigilance.”

“It was, I thought, a moment of truth,” Dr. Mulroy concluded. “People who use ‘good grammar’ do not hesitate to force it on the children they love.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.