Works and Prayers of a Fils Prodigue

When asks to write about the dispute over teaching children grammar or not, what the latent ideologies are present in each argument, I wrote this. Not my usual religious fare, but I hope you like it:

There is a sentence which has traveled through history and arrived at my own computer, and I feel it would best describe the modern attitude toward grammar. Emperor Sigismund at the Council of Constance was corrected for a minor mistake in his Latin grammar. He then replied: ego sum rex Romanarum et super grammaticam (“I am the king of the Romans and am above grammar”) (Cohen 394). Now, I am no king and I don’t know any Romans personally, but it seems that Sigismund’s idea of grammar has been transmitted through history to the modern classroom: some are the quiet clerk correcting the minor mistake, while others are the “King of Romans” who won’t be bothered by petty grammatical errors.

Today, there are two major schools of thought on this matter: prescriptive and descriptive, and both it seems have a valid point. The prescriptive grammarian attests that the English language ought to reflect Latin and Greek in its rule-syntax, because Latin and Greek are the preeminent languages of the religion, philosophy, science – essentially, the civilized world (Yule 74). These teachers stress proper usage of various grammatical categories, proper structure, and never ending sentences with a preposition. The latter school, the descriptive (or transformational) school, rather seeks to describe language as it is – that is, as it comes from the mouths of speakers themselves. Throughout the mid-to-later parts of the 20^th century, this became a very popular method of teaching grammar (Glencoe 1). Both have their latent ideologies: the prescriptivist as one who sees knowledge is primarily transferred via master to student, while the descriptivist as one who desires creativity and individuality in a learner.

Nevertheless, it seems that neither method takes into account the entirety of language and grammar. In fact, the first step would be to agree upon a definition of grammar itself. Among the definitions listed in a British Government “Critical Review” of SAT grammar requirements were “the set of formal patterns which speakers of a language use automatically to construct and construe larger meanings”, “the scientific study of the formal patters of language,” and “a study of the rules governing how one ought to speak or write” (Wyse 411-12). Moreover, one would have to reconcile the various views not only of teaching grammar but of understanding grammar itself (including structural, generative, transformation, functional, etc.) (Wyse 412). Clearly, this cuts to the heart of a tremendous issue: how to help man understand and utilize his language more artfully.

Many feel that the only solution is a disciplined grammatical understanding. Marie Rackham, a retired public school teacher, sternly protests the loss of grammar in the school, remarking that “life is easier when you’re disciplined” – especially grammatically. In the face of opponents decrying the prescriptivist method as one which “stifles creativity,” she interjects that grammar is not the memorization of rules, but the “technique of English.” She wryly points out the irony of master’s-degree carrying educators condemn the teaching of grammar while they themselves could not have received a degree without it. She echoes the sentiment of many who support teaching Standard English in schools: it is meant not to stifle but to enable. While a student may not need to know what a determiner is on a day-to-day basis, his knowledge of concrete and abstract nouns could serve him well in his writing. This sentiment of grammar-as-enabling was stated as far back as 1937, when teachers remarked that students without a solid grammatical understanding were finding it harder and harder to learn Latin (Cohen 393).

This position does not seem to negate the amazing productivity and creativity of human language. Rather, its proponents see it as putting a paintbrush in the hand of a painter, or giving a book of Sonnets to a budding poet – grammar is a tool and not an end in itself. Still, Glencoe, a leading educational resource for teachers, stresses the importance of integration in the descriptivist and prescriptivist methods. The most important thing to remember, they stress, is that teaching be “tailor-made” to the students. Students are “expected to function with both,” utilizing each as he needs, and they should be enabled to do so by their teachers.

Walker Percy, novelist and little-known semioticist, once remarked about a strange phenomenon in human language. Oftentimes, the symbol for a given object will begin to obscure the object itself, such that when one sees a robin, one doesn’t see the robin right before one’s eyes, but a sort of prototypal robin in one’s mind. In the same way, teachers seem to allow their theories of pedagogy concerning grammar to cloud the most important issue of all: that their students become masters of English, able to understand the rules enough to write a brilliant dissertation but not so bound by them as to lose sight of the flux and creativity of spoken and written language. Whatever the ideologies buried within the grammar-teaching may be, the most important aspect is that students learn the “technique of English” for themselves.