Others
mistrust and say, "But time escapes:
Live now or never!"
He
said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever."
Back
to his book then: deeper drooped his head: Calculus
racked him:
Leaden
before, his eyes grew dross of lead: Tussis
attacked him.
from “The Grammarian’s Funeral,” by Robert Browning
On many days, when we get back from the gym about eight
o’clock, Joan and I share a most pleasant quarter of an hour over the breakfast
table reading aloud to each other from the Times. Our material usually comes from the
Op-Ed pages, and often enough from the letters to the editor. On Monday four letters, headed “How to
Teach Reading and Writing”, responded to an earlier article (which we had not
read) entitled “The Fallacy of ‘Balanced Literacy’,” by Alexander Nazaryan.
I
had never before encountered the phrase “balanced literacy,” and I have found
no very precise explanation of its meaning. I take it that what is being “balanced” is some formal
instruction by a teacher and a variety of more free-form activities undertaken
by individual learners. I will not condemn what I know so little
about. It is easy for a college
professor to pontificate about what is going on in our schools, and I know, as
I have said several times on this blog, the fundamental problem in our
contemporary classrooms is not necessarily in the classroom. A schoolteacher not supported
adequately by a student’s home environment, has little hope of
success. Still I do think that elementary
teachers need to teach rather than to “facilitate”, especially as I know from
long experience that the skills of literacy are among the things that actually
can be taught. Sharing with young people my ideas
about the meaning of the whale in Moby
Dick may or may not prove useful to them; but if I can teach a student to
read I know I have done
something. Reading and writing
really are special.
There are many ways
of differentiating human life from the rest of the animal kingdom, but surely
the most fundamental and obvious is the very rich development of human
language, which in spoken forms makes possible social transactions of
considerable complexity, and in its written forms has allowed us to make a vast
storehouse of the practical and theoretical knowledge achieved or posited by
our human ancestors. Our Western
educational practices, for all their variety and trendiness, are still mostly
related to a few classical ideas about two thousand years old. They are designed to teach, and then to
exploit, the fundamental skills of literacy—the uses of language.
The language in
which our educational theories developed was Latin. A place where three roads (tres viae) met was in Latin called a trivium; so this was the term used by medieval school teachers to
denote the three fundamental “language arts” leading to learning: grammar,
rhetoric, and logic. Grammar
explained the structure of language and the rules governing its use. Rhetoric was the science of writing and
speaking effectively. Logic was
the art of probable argument. What
was “trivial” to the old Romans was not what was unimportant but what was commonplace. Anybody claiming to know anything had to command the trivium before doing anything else. That is why “grammar school” was once
the universal term for “elementary school”.
Ms. Grammatica: Not an Easy Grader
Latin
has long since been effaced by the modern European vernaculars, but a contemporary
command of grammar remains indispensable, in my view, for an educated person of
the twenty-first century.
Americans, whose national language is English, for now and for the
foreseeable future the greatest of world languages, have a particular privilege,
but also a cultural responsibility. If
that is too ethereal or too pompous a claim, just consider the advantages of
being reasonably well spoken in trying to get a job today.
From
the historical point of view widespread literacy is a novelty. The vast majority of men and women who
have ever lived, including hundreds of millions today, have done so entirely
without any formal training in their native tongue. But just because it is perhaps possible to subsist on a diet
of roots and berries does not render such a diet ideal. It strikes me as bizarre that some
“educationists” should congratulate themselves on having removed grammar from
grammar school. Some of them seem
honestly to believe that an innocence of knowledge of the parts of speech, the
construction of a functional sentence or paragraph, the effective uses of the
marks of punctuation, the norms of correct pronunciation and spelling, leave
the young mind free and unfettered to pursue “independent” and “critical”
thought.
The
English language, especially American English, is a vital, robust, and dynamic
tongue. There is not the slightest
danger of its being emasculated or pollarded by dry-as-dust grammarians. But in general people are comparatively
good or less good at using complex systems in direct proportion to the degree
to which they understand their structures. English grammar is the detailed description of the complex
(and fascinating) system called the English language. And just as childhood is the ideal time to learn a second
language, it is the ideal time to master the grammar of a first language.
Anyone who has
known young children in a domestic situation must recognize their love of, and
capacity for, expertise, detail, distinction, and classification. Certainly the manufacturers of baseball
cards, Barbie dolls, and Pokemon figures recognize it, to their considerable
material profit. Surely you have
met an eight-year-old who knows more about dinosaurs than Warren Buffett knows
about the stock market. I don’t
actually remember all that much, specifically, about my early schooldays, but I
do remember how I loved diagramming
sentences. Do American children
even diagram sentences any more?
You want to do some real critical
thinking? Diagram the
sentences of the “Gettysburg Address”.
