Why Our Schools No Longer Teach Grammar

If you ask any school-age child today what his or her least favorite subject is, it is almost guaranteed that grammar will not be the answer. Go back twenty years and ask the same question, and the reverse will be true. What is it about grammar that used to be so distasteful? Why do children today not seem to mind? The answer is easy - it's no longer taught.

Oh sure, your children are probably learning all sorts of information about the English language: how to write legibly, how to write legibly in cursive, how to use a keyboard, how to read, how to spell, and the general differences between a noun and a verb. But past participles? Compound sentences? How to diagram a sentence? The correct usage of a semi-colon? You'd be hard pressed to find any of these subjects in your average classroom. Kids and teens (and adults, it's sad to say) throw around words like "your" and "you're" without any regard to the difference between the possessive and the contraction.

So what is happening to society? Are our kids being cheated out of an important educational tool, or is the older generation simply overreacting? Are punctuation and grammar really that important?

The problem lies in the lack of an overriding rulebook or authority on the subject. Culturally, we turn to Miss Manners for advice on societal proprieties. We turn to the surgeon general for public health safety information. The FDA is our guide for safe cooking and eating. We even have a poet laureate as our leader of creative writing!

As a general rule, we accept these authorities and their recommendations regarding their specialties. We have to, because otherwise, any number of quacks could declare to be the ultimate authority. Unfortunately, there is no official guide to the English language; grammatical anarchy is rampant. In fact, when searching for rules regarding the English language, there are a number of conflicting guidebooks.

The Chicago Manual of Style, long held to be the ultimate authority on all things word-related, acts in opposition to the Associated Press in many areas. While the former extols the virtues of serial commas that include, embrace, and utilize a comma after each word in sequence, the latter only requires that a writer include, embrace and utilize a comma after the first. If these two official guides cannot decide amongst themselves, how can we expect our children to determine which method is correct?

The only answer we can currently provide is that it depends on the audience and the medium. Newspapers, which are unfortunately not read by a startling number of kids today, follow the Associated Press guidelines. Most of the kids' textbooks, however, employ the Chicago Manual of Style method. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are other "authorities" to look to, including the Modern Language Association and the American Psychological Association. And let's not forget to mention that the subject matter of grammatical discord is incredibly diverse. Can you start a sentence with a conjunction? I just did. Does that mean I did it wrong? In addition, what works in American English is often the reverse in British English. While Americans put the punctuation inside the "quotations," the British leave it "outside". Does the fact that the British have been writing for hundreds of years longer than Americans make them more correct? Also, how far should you spell out numbers? Is it 33 or thirty-three? Don't even get me started on times of day, dates, introductory clauses, dashes, and hyphens.

So, does any of this really matter? Very few people will actually notice when a comma is misused, but many will notice the incorrect usage of "their" versus "they're." At what point do the details of grammar change from being correct to being obsessive?

I can already feel the readers of this article who, like myself, are grammar fanatics. They are picking apart all my mistakes - mistakes I probably consider to be grammatical accuracies. Does this make them any more correct than myself? I doubt it. Does this make them better people? I certainly hope not.

I wonder at what point philosophical debates over the correct use of a comma became the forerunner of anyone's concerns. With rampant warfare across the Middle East, genocide in Africa, and massive national debt at home, our kids certainly have enough worries to fill their plates without the added burden of punctuation-related details. Yet, at the same time, when I see a sentence composed with accurate regard to grammatical niceties, my life feels just a little bit more ordered. It calms me in a way that most of my disordered life cannot.

Ah, if only our children could discover the calming joy of a correctly-used comma. Perhaps they could carry this sense of peace overseas.