Disquisitions on teaching technique commonly give off the odor of learned monographs on, say, jute manufacture in British India.  Not so the rhetorical dust-ups we see — if we’re looking and listening — over arguments for the explicit teaching of grammar to Texas public school students. Here we confront a first-order educational issue. You can tell by the voice tones.

On May 22, the State Board of Educations is to consider proposals for a new reading and English curriculum. Board conservatives seek stronger emphasis on the teaching of grammar: participles, predicates, and apostrophes; the bone structure of a sentence. Professional educators express horror at the idea of returning to rules and regulations rather than helping students pick up the essence of the  thing through their own reading and writing.

“Learning the basics of the English language,” insists Donna Garner, herself  a former English teacher and now a well-known back-to-basics activist, “will provide students with a strong foundation upon which to write sophisticated papers and upon which to base clear communication.”

A fellow educator, Dr. Stephen Krashen, ripostes: “Teaching grammar to older students has value, to fill in gaps that nearly all well-read readers  have, and as an introduction to linguistics. But there is no substitute for reading, the basis of our  ability to read  and write well, the source of much of our vocabulary and spelling knowledge, and the source of our ability to handle complex grammatical constructions.”

The president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, Kylene Beers, of The Woodlands, sniffs that the kind of  people who want to go back to the basics mostly got their schooling in the 1950s.

Yessum. I did get my book-larnin’ way back in them ole days.  It’s one reason that, on this question, I stand  alongside  Donna Garner. It’s not the only reason.

For five years, after retiring from the newspaper business, I taught persuasive writing to journalism students at  a much-esteemed Texas university: good kids, smart and likable, and less prepared than they should have been, as Dr. Krashen would have it,  “to handle complex grammatical constructions.”  I was startled at first. Not only, I found, did my students not appreciate the scandal of the dangling participle, they didn’t know, many of them, what it was in the first place...

I said to them, look, if  I write, “Jumping from the sinking ship and swimming away, his heart was in his throat” — if I write that, I’m saying his heart jumped from the ship and swam away. It proved an elusive concept for many. As did noun-pronoun agreement. Everybody has their book? No! Ixnay!  Everybody has his  book — or, if  you want to get  all feminist about it, everybody has his or her book. Anyway, not “their” book.

We went on like this for a long spell.  I diagrammed sentences. (Talk about 1950s stuff!) I plugged Latin as an entry port to the wonders of grammar. Which, by the way, it is: thank you, Miss Frances Broadstreet, thank you everlastingly for the Latin you gave us in the ‘50s. I argued for good grammar in writing as the rhetorical equivalent of shoes at a job interview.

“Oh, Mr., Murchison,” one of my students said to me one day, “we weren’t taught!” Weren’t taught? Weren’t escorted around the framework of the English language? Weren’t shown the studs and joists, and given to understand that language is, in the end, plain old architecture: every nail, every beam exhibiting purpose and design?

Nope. “We weren’t taught.” So why not? Not because the bad old ‘50s, being Stalinistic in their approach to schooling, required massive repudiation.  Rather, because the whole course of pedagogy changed about 40 years ago. It wasn’t fashionable any longer to Impose Expectations on young people. Oh, goodness, no! We’d warp, perhaps, their tender sensibilities. They might not feel affirmed or complimented sufficiently. They might — sniff! — come to doubt themselves, as well as their intellectual parity with the rest of the world.

No, they “weren’t taught,” which is a pity. But what of those coming on now and in the future for tutelage?  No help for them either? Here we move beyond educational theory.  Grammar isn’t “theory.” It’s reality: the way things work. Kids deserve to know, and to understand.  If we’re all committed to getting them there, so much the better. Then we can theorize to beat the band.

My own “theory”? Compulsory Latin in grade school. Amo, amas, amat...Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres...Arma virumque cano...

It works. Which is more than anyone can say for the fine “theories” that gave us the mess our public officials are diligently — I pray — trying at last to sweep away.

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