Brighton College – the top independent school recently in the news for introducing compulsory mandarin Chinese lessons, is now making grammar lesson compulsory – and will have them taught by classics teachers, not English teachers. The sub-text of this is that English teachers trained over the last 20 years have never been themselves taught the basics of grammar, and are therefore unable to teach it to their pupils. This is so true, but we could only wish that all secondary schools would do this, not just for some parents paying £4,000 or so a term.
Brighton College – the top independent school recently in the news for introducing compulsory mandarin Chinese lessons, is now making grammar lesson compulsory – and will have them taught by classics teachers, not English teachers. The sub-text of this is that English teachers trained over the last 20 years have never been themselves taught the basics of grammar, and are therefore unable to teach it to their pupils. This is so true, but we could only wish that all secondary schools would do this, not just for some parents paying £4,000 or so a term.
Reported in the Guardian the Head of Brighton College, Richard Cairns is reported as saying that too many English departments had neglected to teach the basics, opting for the "instant gratification" of lessons in literature. "The consequence is a generation of young people with no understanding of the role of the apostrophe, baffled by the colon and semi-colon, and unsure of the use of the paragraph," "Worse still, there is a generation of teachers which is itself lacking a proper grounding in grammar and punctuation. "Whether the initiative is regarded as visionary or reactionary is an irrelevance. What matters is whether it will prepare children better for the future." Mr Cairns had asked the classics department to take on responsibility because teachers there "know that there can be no progress in Latin or Greek unless there is a grasp of the lingustic building blocks of each language. In the classics. grammar cannot be taken for granted." The classics department grades pupils according to punctuation, grammar and spelling rather than quality of ideas. Mr Cairns said: "In some ways it is counter-intuitive for a teacher to assess pupils this way these days but once in a while, pupils need a sharp reminder of the need for linguistic accuracy. Without it, they grow careless and that carelessness will handicap them in the future."
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