New English suffered another well-deserved blow last month when the State of New York reintroduced old-fashioned grammar instruction and testing.
Seems most of its students don’t know the difference between a noun and a verb--not to mention participles—“because they’re immersed in improper usage wherever they go.”
Duh.
New English has been taught in most public schools since the 1960s, when American schools of education labeled grammar as meaningless as long as what was said or written was “understood.”
For the past 40-plus years, students have been encouraged to invent and use their own forms of the English language—producing a modern version of the Tower of Babel.
Mix that phenomenon with the balkanization of American communities with unassimilated speakers of foreign languages and dialects and you have compeet kayoss (complete chaos.). (16 OCTOBER 2005)
