I'm American. This applies to U.S. schools, specifically Albuquerque Public Schools.
We’ve all seen them. From little messages scrawled on billboards: “Our prices is low!” to the child’s scrawl in the comments on the Tube of Youb: “wat i dont get is why did they end it differently in th comci.” You begin to think, “What’s wrong here.” The kid on Youtube, okay, maybe. The prices is low people… They’re professionals, right? They were paid to put up that sign. You start to look around and find a copy of the New York Times that calls shepherds “sheep herders”.
“WHY ISN’T BASIC GRAMMAR TAUGHT IN SCHOOL?”
You scream. If only people were taught this stuff, you could sit peacefully through your job in the retail world where copy coming from the top telling you how to set up your displays would not be a jumbled mess of subject-verb agreement errors and clunky misspelled words. What a world that would be. Clarity for all and all for clarity.
So, why isn’t it taught in school?
It is.
Okay. Breathe.
It is.
Say what?
It is.
It is taught in school. And it is compulsory. I remember my ninth grade English class. We started with nouns and verbs and subjects and objects and prepositions and moved on to sentence diagramming and a whole slew of nasty confusing problems like: “Identify the parts of the sentence and write down whether it is a declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, or imperative sentence: Human beings being human.” And we would sit there, the class and I, trying to remember our notes and getting the object and the subject all mixed up, suspecting that “human beings” was the object but not sure if we should count that as one noun or if “human beings” was two nouns or a prepositional clumping of word mass. We often went home with homework and we often did that homework, stuffing our little student brains full of this stuff until the test where we vomited it out in unseemly chunks on our scantrons and forgot all of it.
It’s not that there isn’t education. It’s that the students aren’t learning.
And who can blame them? High school is filled with drama, angst, hormones, evil girls and asshole guys, subpar teachers, malicious and/or incompetent principals (one for each grade even), and guidance counselors who are more interested in getting you ready for college than helping you with all of the aforementioned problems. All of that and you expect us to learn English?
The students don’t care about any of this subject-verb nonsense. My classmates who sat around me were the usual collection of high school stereotypes from the morose goth kid to the pseudo-jock pothead, and all matter of people in between. They were human beings being human and as such didn’t give a damn about what they were being taught. And so they never learned it.
I didn’t learn it either. I’m self taught. Self taught from middle school even, where we also covered grammar, incidentally. In fact, I believe grammar was taught in elementary school too, but I can’t be sure because my memory doesn’t cover that section of my life very well.
Then there’s school after school. College where most degrees require some acquisition of an English credit. The problem here is that the humans are still busy being human and if they don’t have a vested interest in grammar they are going to repeat their high school mistake and forget it once the midterm passes.
The problem isn’t the schools as under funded and inefficient as they are. The problem is that people just don’t want to learn. This stuff is hard.
Andromache01 says: "This one has to be seen to be believed. "These's color don't-run" (next to, of course, a faded flag) was a landmark of the area where my first college was."
Junkill says "I collect these, misspellings, horrid grammar errors, etc... on of the funniest I ever saw was a sign at Fry's for a grammar checking program: 'Grammer checker' ... I also saw hologram pads at the grocery store 'Hollow Gram Pads' (that wasn't a trademark...someone just didn't know how to spell it) Oh and at my high school, the cheerleaders had a cheer 'H-E-double L-O, that's the way we spell hello.' Until one girl went 'H-E-double L-O-W...' a dark day indeed!"
Apatrix says "I have one very much like Junkill's. The local community college is offering a remedial course called 'Grammer Brush-up' in its catalogue."