Status Updates From The War Against Grammar (Cr...

Chapter 5, " Grammar at the Dawn of the Third Millenium": More students would bet set up to succeed later in school and life with the knowledge of grammar to guide them, but instead we set them up with unrealistic standards as goals, which are then promptly ignored.

Chapter 4, "The War against Grammar": As usual, the problem is the extremists throwing out the baby with the bath-water. Plus the typical stereotyping of people you disagree with in broad strokes. And no surprise to find here a fellow fan of the sentence diagram.

Chapter 3, "We've passed this way before": The idea of skipping over basic grammar to concentrate on logic, "or critical thinking", is not new - it happened in the thirteenth century. Perhaps some new humanists will bring us back to basics someday (soon?).

Chapter 2, "The First Liberal Art" - 'The understanding of complex phenomena begins with taxonomy.' For language, this means grammar, and its eight parts of speech.

Chapter 1, "America the Grammarless" - The leader in the fight against teaching students grammar in school? The National Council of Teachers of English. [In my experience, probably because most high school English teachers don't know enough grammar to be able to teach it.]