The fact that that aspiration can exist at all is remarkable

How the 'Harbrace Handbook of English' Changed the Way Americans Learn About Writing: The University of Tennessee's John C. Hodges Created the Best-Selling Textbook of All Time by Brooks Clark, Cari Wade Gervin

An interesting essay in its own right but also intriguing for the connection to a number of things I am engaged with at the moment. Growing up peripapetically overseas, my formal exposure to English grammar and style might be characterized as mixed. Strunk and White and Fowler were the more dominant exposure but that mostly later in high school and college. I believe we used Harbrace Handbook at the Oil Company School in Libya in the late sixties but that was only for a year and a half.

I am currently reading Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference about the empathetic mind and the systemizing mind. The author of the Harbrace Handbook, John C. Hodges, seems a leading example of the systemizing mind, particularly with his focus on real world data. Hodges starts with the question, What are the problems with grammar evinced by my students? How refreshingly pragmatic.

Which leads to one of the other elements in the article. The overweening interest on the part of latter day scholars, not on the enablement provided to students by having access to a consistent and workable guide but rather a disabling obsession with equity and a desire to unshackle individuals from the constrictions of grammatical rules.

Hodges sought to free people from the constrictions of their own ignorance so that they could effectively pursue their dreams in a broader society. Our modern scholars seem committed to courses of actions whose consequence is to limit their victims to ever smaller arenas of achievement. The smaller the arena, the less an individual can achieve.

Studies in theoretical linguistics and new ways of thinking about grammar in the 1950s—especially works by C. C. Fries and Noam Chomsky—began to trickle down to the English-teaching establishment. Other concerns about equating correct grammar with correct usage had been bubbling up for years, according to an essay on the history of grammar in U.S. schools by Martha Kolln and Craig Hancock.

In 1963, at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English, the council issued a statement that was the discipline’s equivalent of the atomic bomb. It reads, in part: “In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing.”

As the 1960s wore on, scholars such as Peter Elbow promoted a student-centered classroom, suggesting activities like journaling and peer review to improve writing skills. Elbow writes, “[T]he process of learning grammar interferes with writing: It heightens your preoccupation with mistakes as you write out each word and phrase, and makes it almost impossible to achieve that undistracted attention to your thoughts and experiences as you write … For most people, nothing helps their writing so much as learning to ignore grammar.”

Reading this in the same week as the detailed Governor's report on the widespread and systemic cheating on the part of teachers and administrators at Atlanta Public Schools almost forces one to leap to a cause and consequence conclusion.

Having spent time tutoring APS children in reading, I have a visceral rage at the arrogance of both those long ago academics preening themselves over their sophisticated ideas as well as rootless teachers sacrificing the education of children to their own career interests. Bleh. A pox on all of them.

An ability to empathize and communicate is such a critical foundation underpinning any hopes of viability and success in a modern, connected, global, and changing economy that any trends, academic fads, and base behavioral abdication ought to be smothered and cast out.

The final point I take away from the article is a more positive one. For all that we fall far short of where we wish to be in educational outcomes, Clark and Gervin remind us of the miracle of what as been achieved.

In the first two decades of the past century, perhaps fewer than 10% of the population completed high school and perhaps only 10% of that 10% received a truly sterling, classical education. It is easy to gloss over the fact that we now take it for granted that everyone should be educated at least to a high school level and that we expect that education to be of the high level that was once reserved for the 1%. The fact that we fall short of that aspiration is a constant spur to improvement. The fact that that aspiration can exist at all is remarkable.