The War Against Grammar (crosscurrents)

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Summary: An Essential Subject Denied
Review: Do you know what a participle is? Can you identify the eight parts of speech, and diagram a sentence? If so, and if you went to American schools, you are dating yourself; you are probably not young anymore. And quite possibly, you don't think it makes much difference. David Mulroy disagrees. In _The War Against Grammar_ (Boynton / Cook Publishers), he reports upon a hiatus he took from his usual work, translating and teaching Latin and Greek poetry, so that he could research the history of grammar. He did not do so from purely academic interest; in 1996, at a public hearing on standards for public schools, he suggested that a good goal would be for high school seniors to identify the eight parts of speech. He was surprised that he had suggested anything controversial. The very National Council of Teachers of English had pronounced that instruction in grammar did nothing but take time away from more important studies.

Mulroy makes clear that there is a need for grammar study. Opposition to grammar education coincides with decreased literacy, lower SAT scores, and increased need for college remedial writing and reading courses. His fascinating history of the subject goes way back to the basics; it isn't surprising, given his own interests, that he turns to Ancient Greece. Dionysius Thrax in the second century BCE made the first division of words into the eight parts of speech, taken up by Roman and English grammarians in their turn. Oddly, the rise of the universities meant that logic, not grammar or literature, was king, but the humanists were able to insist on a Latin grammar book for all English students in the 1540s. Raised on it were Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, and Shakespeare; it might be oversimplification, but there is probably some sort of cause and effect here. American education was in direct descent of this emphasis on grammar, until the advent of "progressive education" which shunned "formalism," instruction by rote. Instruction in grammar was held to be detrimental to the unconscious and automatic way students would express themselves. The definition of what a sentence is can be disputed, as can definitions of the parts of speech, and the conclusion has become that such formalisms need not be taught. This has become the way teachers of English teach English, or fail to.

It doesn't have to be this way. Mulroy gives many examples, in different languages, of the art of diagramming sentences. If you can break a sentence into its parts and know how the parts function, you can understand it. He admits that when he is stymied by a complicated sentence he wants to translate from Latin or Greek to English, he starts diagramming it. "Normally, the obscurity vanishes before I finish the diagram." He tells of the remarkable success of schools that insist that students master grammar. Schools in England have made grammar the centerpiece of a literacy drive. In America, there is even an Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar within the National Council of Teachers of English, but its members are a tiny fraction of those in the NCTE. Mulroy's classic structure for advocacy (problem, history, solution) gives his book a surprising immediacy and practicality. At the end, a reader will possibly think, "I can't have just finished a book about the lack of grammar in today's schools." Mulroy has made the erudite instruction surprisingly entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: An intelligent defense of formal grammar instruction
Review: In pellucid prose, author David Mulroy, a classicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, discusses the deleterious effect that a decades-long avoidance of formal instruction in grammar has had on American students: SAT scores are down; reading comprehension has declined; enrollment in most foreign languages has dropped; and students suffer in general from a "higher illiteracy." While students can, that is--some of them, at least--express themselves adequately, they are not proficient at explicating the literal meanings of grammatically complex texts. Asked to paraphrase the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, for example, one of the author's students writes: "It doesn't matter where you came from. In the end we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't respect nature. Because we have one earth, learn to preserve it."

The purpose of grammar, Mulroy explains, is twofold: "It preserves and perfects understanding of the great literature of the past, and it contributes to eloquent self-expression." He argues persuasively for a return to a concentration on formal grammatical instruction in schools, not out of some school-marmish obsession with sentence-ending prepositions or the like, but because grammar is a foundation for further understanding: "Intellectuals work with words. Questioning the value of basic grammar is like asking whether farmers should know the names of their crops and animals." He points out, too, what most of us probably take for granted, that the world benefits enormously from the existence of a standard English, which grammatical instruction helps maintain: speakers of English across the globe can communicate with one another easily, which was not true of English speakers mere villages apart in the medieval period.

Mulroy hits on a number of topics in his short book, among them the ancient liberal arts curriculum, the history of the classification of words into eight basic categories, educational practices in the middle ages, and progressive education. Happily, he also includes a section on sentence diagramming. This allowed me to pass a pleasant half hour diagramming sentences with my eight-year-old: intrigued by the game at first, she came to think me unusual in my interests, and facetiously suggested we try subtracting for pleasure next. She may mock, but then she's not likely to wind up thinking the Declaration of Independence was an early-American plea for nature preserves.