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As Washington Post media critic Tom Shales wrote in 2007, “Being well-schooled, well-trained and experienced is actually acquiring a taint.” A popular bumper sticker at the time of the teachers’ shift in views said QUESTION AUTHORITY. It simply means that society and language have been changing together.

Even the word “English” has become too scary for the youngest of learners. As a subject, it is now almost universally called “language arts” or “language studies.” And “grammar” has become such a dirty word that it hasn’t been used to name an elementary school in half a century or so.

FOOD FOR CRITICS

Few people outside the education community got any inkling of this huge shift in policy. It was barely noticed by the mass media. But it aroused a few harsh critics. Former NBC newsman Edwin Newman was among the more prominent. In a 1974 book, Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? he answered his own question with an emphatic yes.3

Needless to say, many Britons also have been deeply disturbed by what they see as a coarsening of English by the Americans. In 1995, the Prince of Wales complained that the U.S. version was “corrupting” the Queen’s English. He said Americans “tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn’t be.” He added that “we must act now to insure [sic] that . . . English English maintains its position as the world language well into the next century.”4 He didn’t realize that this Battle of Britain was already lost.

PISS ENTERS THE ROYAL CHAMBER

Prince William, the son of the Prince of Wales, seems to be setting a language tone more toward Amglish than his father might like. In January 2010, he was asked about his musical preferences while greeting a crowd of well-wishers in Australia. He blurted out, “I normally get the piss taken out of me for my choice of music. Bit rappy.”5

Others who have resisted the trends include David Mulroy, a language professor at the University of Wisconsin. He attacked the NCTE policy on grammar in a book entitled The War against Grammar.6 In it he said, “It is hard to give any kind of language instruction to students who lack the conceptual framework provided by the terms of basic grammar.” He added that inserting some grammar into other parts of a school curriculum “is like trying to insert partial foundations beneath half-finished houses and concluding from the ensuing debacles that foundations are useless.”

It is telling that Mulroy had to reach back to the ancient Greeks to find a society that really revered grammar, which eventually became the first of the seven so-called liberal arts. Since then, the enamor for grammar has been on a downhill slide all the way to today’s U.S. society.

THE CURMUDGEON IMAGE

Did the NCTE’s decision to relax grammar instruction have anything to do with the desire of English teachers to wipe out their traditional image as curmudgeons ready to chastise a weak student in front of others?

Former NCTE president Randy Bomer acknowledged the possibility by officially denying it when he declared that English teachers “do not see themselves as grammar police, on the lookout for mistakes and intolerant of diverse ways of speaking.” But even in a writing class, a teacher cannot help becoming an enforcer when correcting a student’s speech or prose in the presence of other students. After all, what is a teacher who doesn’t teach?

FALLING TEST SCORES

The steady relaxation of formal language standards may have had an effect over the years on test results from the College Board’s annual Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for verbal skills. But the Board has done its best to cover up the actual scores. Apparently that is its way to go with the flow. (The Board refused to honor several phone and e-mail requests from me for scores back to 1963, but I obtained them elsewhere.)

The Board has even gone so far as to fudge its own figures. If you had followed its news releases since 1994, the important average score for the verbal part of the annual test went