200 Years of Grammar

Grammar has not been a strong candidate for attention in the school curriculum for years. The professional consensus among school people is that grammar is neither palatable nor useful to children. In the words of one 19th-century school inspector in Nova Scotia, it was “more a torment than a benefit.” On the other hand, some parents, journalists, politicians, and even some professors mistrust this consensus. They wonder aloud why knowledge of the structure and rules of a language would not help young speakers and writers to use their mother tongue more effectively. Is using a language like riding a bicycle? Something you can do well without knowledge of the physics of balance? As Steinmann (1966) stated, “Neither sort of knowledge entails the other.” In other words, you can know how without prior need to know that (Ryle (1949); Scheffler (1965); Polanyi (1958). Or is the analogy defective? Since 1800, millions and millions of child hours have been spent learning English grammar. In the 19th century, it was common for children to spend more time on grammar than on composition. As children and teachers toiled at parsing and analysis, under the occasional and watchful eye of the inspector or dreading the exam at the end of the year, the debate about the real value of learning grammar raged. Nowhere were the arguments as passionate as in the English-speaking colonies of North America, New Zealand and Australia. Immigrants from Britain had a special anxiety about their mother tongue, which they feared did not travel well over all the thousands of miles of ocean. New experiences and the absence of good language models put a strain on the Queen’s or the King’s English. Without vigilant supervision, dreaded colonial “twangs” were springing up. Communities of immigrants looked to their schools to defend the mother tongue, and the defense they wanted was grammar—the rules of good speech. Conviction in matters of language is a function of a discourse larger than valid and reliable statistics. It emerges from a set of assumptions about the aims of language instruction, about the nature of language, about the use of language in a society, and about the psychology of learning. To the detriment of the debate about grammar, these assumptions are generally not articulated by either side of the issue. The essays in this book attempt to present the story of grammar teaching in the provinces of Canada, the states of Australia and the unitary state of New Zealand during the two centuries from 1800 to 2000. All three countries, as former British colonies, shared an educational heritage. In the case of non-English-speaking immigrants, it was important to the authorities that they too learned to speak good English in order to maintain the Imperial culture. English grammar was considered to be part of the maintenance kit, an important bulwark against deterioration of the Imperial language, English, as local speech adapted itself to new conditions. Parents and citizens wanted their children to learn grammar as the route to proper use of the standard language. After 1960, instead of standard English as a unitary institution, there developed the concept of variable standards such as “standard Canadian English”, “standard New Zealand English”, and “standard Australian English.” Thus there is logic to including all three countries in the story. If the basic question of grammar's proper role in the English language arts curriculum is too complex to be turned into anything less than a formidable array of empirical research questions, and if, in any case, convictions on both sides of the debate tend to be too firmly rooted to be swayed by that kind of evidence, an historical perspective on grammar teaching might contribute to a broader inquiry agenda. This study is an attempt to provide that contribution. It also reveals the residues of older convictions which, although in official disrepute, may linger as ritualistic survivors in current practice or participate unconsciously in the debates and controversies. Geoffrey Nunberg (1983) appealed for an end to the “invective” that has often attended the debate about grammar and a “return to civil discussion of the problems of grammar and their social importance.” A history of grammar’s role in the curriculum and an assessment of its changing claims to educational significance will be a contribution to this civility. In the sense of grammar’s inclusion as one of the basics in education, there would be value in attaching some useful meaning to part of that slogan. Enquiry into grammar Grammar was once the most autonomous of that loose aggregation of subjects that grew into English in the school timetable. It was indispensable to the timetable, appearing as a separate subject or in combination with composition, dictation, rhetoric, or even orthoepy. Its rationale, implicit or explicit, was confident as a commonplace of educational theory. Its demise since roughly 1960 has left a curious void in subject English. On the one hand, in the face of apparently unanimous research evidence that the teaching of formal categories and rules, exercised through the analysis of sentences, produces no benefits in expression or comprehension, it is hard to make a serious and well-informed case for a return to traditional teaching of grammar. On the other hand, to omit it leaves the English program vulnerable to the question of how the study of language as an important and defining part of human experience can be properly conducted without learning the language used to talk and think about language. In no other school subject, it is claimed, are you not allowed to use a technical vocabulary. It is, as one issue of the Guardian newspaper described, like trying to discuss painting without being able to use the names of the colors (Guardian, 1988). The dilemma is to find an appropriate technical vocabulary about language to replace traditional school grammar, now discredited. Attempts to develop an alternative curriculum strand from the “new grammars,” structural grammar and transformational grammar, failed in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1984 British report, English from 5 to 16 observed that although there appeared to be a broad consensus that some knowledge about language should be included in school English programs, there was a lack of professional unity that would be required to implement any specific policy. (This report is discussed in detail later in this book.) There is a temptation to think that grammar as it existed as a school subject at the height of its popularity in, say 1875, or prior to its removal from English, was a homogeneous thing, consisting of defining and identifying the parts of speech and analyzing sentences. This was not so. Apart from problems of definition within English, which have variously included under grammar the mechanics of punctuation and the social etiquette of usage alongside propositional information about language structure, the more parsimonious term, grammar, was constantly being transformed in its content, method and rationales through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.