And this news from BBC is even more depressing:
English teachers who went to school when grammar was not on the curriculum struggle to teach it, research shows.
A review of international studies on the effective teaching of complex writing says there is a need to improve the teachers’ own skills.
The work was done by Exeter University for the Department for Children, Schools and Families in England. [...]
The study concludes: “For English teachers, who themselves attended schools when grammar was not part of the English curriculum, there is a significant issue of lack of assurance in grammatical subject knowledge, leading to difficulties in addressing grammar meaningfully in the writing classroom.
“In particular, effective teaching requires a secure understanding not simply of grammatical terminology, but of applied linguistics and an awareness of the ways in which grammatical constructions are used in different texts for different communicative purposes.” [...]
Another study described a “significant knowledge gap” in terms of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge.
One piece of research on the linguistic subject knowledge that teachers and trainee teachers bring to their teaching of writing found “a persistent theme in teachers’ attitudes to grammar is hostility to anything that makes formal structure the central object of study”.
What can I say? Grammar is an expression of the intrinsic logic of language. Non-teaching or poor teaching of grammar directly affects students’ capacity of logical, and, therefore, mathematical thinking. “Teachers’ [...] hostility to anything that makes formal structure the central object of study” is hostility to logic. It is a seed of future math phobia in students.
““a persistent theme in teachers’ attitudes to grammar is hostility to anything that makes formal structure the central object of study”.
A century ago, a typical British school education would have consisted of large dollops of Euclid’s Elements, Latin and Greek languages and literature, and the rules of English Grammar. How far our sociey has changed in 100 years!
Perhaps I am wrong, but I think in fact a typical schooling of 100 years ago would have ended at 13 and consisted almost entirely of the “three Rs” (as established by the Education Act of 1870). A typical British public school education would, of course, have been as you said.