I'm currently a student (11th Grade and 15 years, in case you were wondering), and I thought I'd poke my nose into this debate so as to balance things out a bit. Things are really quite different in the climate where I am studying. I don't know whether it's something peculiar to my school, or to the fact that English is not theoretically my "mother tongue" (though in reality, I do speak only English, and my spoken Hindi is quite a torture to hear), but I've always placed an enormous importance on grammar. In fact, a sure way to earn ridicule in my school would be to speak in disjointed or otherwise defective English. As regards Grammar, while I have received formal grammar lessons, I can't say that I've ever used any of them. But, as I say, I might well be an exception. Grammar's always come naturally to me, as an integeral part of the English language. I suppose it might have helped that I was a bit late to catch on to the MSN bandwagon, but frankly, I was quite astounded to read some of the horror stories mentioned in this thread. I cannot imagine a scenario where a 16 year old would not know the meaning of 'sedate', it just boggles the mind.

Another one unsure what diagramming a sentence is exactly ... :S

While not trying to "dumb down" this thread (because I find it most interesting) but I found a site that explains diagramming, at least the basics of it. It is geared towards 11-12 year olds [and none of us are that] but, as I looked at it, I thought "What does this matter, really?" Diagramming doesn't seem to teach or to produce much, now that I think back. It just gave us the 'talent' to assign names to different kinds of words and not how to use them correctly. Anyway, here's a VERY simple example of how it goes, for those unfamiliar:

www.geocities.com/fifth_grade_tpes/diagram.html

I am convinced that the only people who diagram sentences are English teachers who are preparing to teach kids how to diagram sentences.[ I have been asking folks this question for many years now.]

Sorry - but this is just not a 'real life' skill!

OOoookay - not what I thought then. Nope, never did it but there was a lot of attention to different types of words and how a sentence should go together.

By Heck as like, Gats, that's boring. Do we really teach that?
Anyway it seems much like parsing, which one has (or had) to do in Latin lessons. web page Even MORE boring...

In all my years in the system - either as a student or a teacher -I have never seen a sentence diagrammed like that. It is not at all what I pictured when the expression was being tossed around!
I remember circling parts of a sentence, underlining other and using different shapes (consistently) for different parts. This is what I assumed was being discussed.

As I said, I don't remember every diagramming a sentence. I doubt very much that this hurt my English skills, because while I wasn't instructed on the proper way to indicate graphically what the subject is I am still well aware of the various parts of a sentence and types of words used, and I've never been the type to need a graphic interface to understand things.

It occurs to me that things like diagraming sentences are meant to teach a certain type of person. In my Modern US History class, the teacher, who also taught AP Psychology, spent the first week teaching note-taking techniques. (It should be mentioned that Modern US History, or MUSH, was the underachiever version of social studies and the reason I took it is because with my focus on science/math and performing arts I simply didn't have time to waste on social studies.) Since he was a psychology teacher, he supported the idea that students learn in different ways and taught note-taking in several methods, several of which were more graphic than textual.

Certainly those people who understand things better if they are explained graphically should be taught how to diagram a sentence. I don't think it's something that SHOULD be taught to EVERYone, because I don't think everyone neccessarily benefits from it, and I don't think failing to learn it implies a general lack of understanding. Like most things, when you get focused on the little details you lose track of the bigger ones.

To me teaching kids to diagram sentences is quite secondary. It is a tool for teaching kids how to understand sentence structure. It is not THE tool, it is A tool, and it should be treated as such. More important than that they know how to diagram a sentence is that they understand what that means, and why they should, and if it takes a couple of other tools to reach that understanding as well or instead, I see no harm in it.

Gatsby, thanks for the link to the website on diagramming. It was very informative and not at all "dumbing down" the discussion.

We certainly never did this at school although we did have to be able to identify subject and predicate, and we had to be able to identify the individual words in a sentence as being a noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition or whatever.

Quite frankly, I just don't see the benefit of being able to diagram a sentence. I have to agree with the comments you and ktstew made.

Diagramming is a term used in the US (and Canada) for what is known in Britain as parsing.

In effect this involves going through a sentence word by word and for each word stating its role within the sentence (for example, "dinner - noun, singular, direct object of regular verb to cook, here used transitively"), giving the part of speech if one has not already done so, and with verbs giving the person and tense and with nouns one has to state whether singular or plural and so on.

In much of Europe parsing was abandoned in the last third of the 19th century, that is the 1800s (possibly even earlier) as unnecessary. If anyone had wanted to find a perfect recipe for bringing the teaching of grammar into disrepute and making it look inane, they couldn't have done better than to use parsing as a school routine.

It may occasionally be useful to ask a pupil to give some of this information for an individual word that's causing a problem, but not as a matter of course.

To avoid misunderstanding I'd like to say that I feel very strongly that some grammar needs to be taught quite early (preferrably between about ages 8/9-12/13) to kids in schools, but parsing certainly isn't the way forward. Indeed, it makes grammar teaching look downright ridiculous!

I think kids need to learn the things listed by MotherGoose and to be able to distiguish between main and subordinate clauses, and with the latter, it's useful if they learn to identify relative clauses. (There are a few other bits and pieces that are also useful).

I'm delighted that this thread is going so well.

We had diagramming sentences in grades 4-8.
I disliked it and still have no clue why we needed to do it.

I agree with the others here that something has to be done to improve the education system.

It is so sad that the future generation is so lacking in even the basic skills that everyone needs to get through school and later on in life.

This is a excellent topic and it is interesting to see the different views and experiences that we have all had.

PF

There is clearly some confusion in regard to certain aspects of grammar when experienced writers are not sure of the meaning of diagramming, construction, and parsing. I'm not criticising, by the way, as I have absolutely no idea what parsing and diagramming mean!
Last year in the UK a paediatrician was subjected to considerable abuse, hate mail, and vandalism of property by ignorant thugs who thought he was a paedophile.
Vocabulary is important.

I'd like to go back to the original question of why things have reached such a wretched state of affairs.

As had been suggested, the root cause is the theories that have come to dominate much teacher training. They theories emerged in the first two decades of the 20th century in a number of countries, including the UK and US (and Germany, too, for that matter). These child- and activity-centred theories were a 'romantic' and fanciful rebellion against what was seen as the 'dryness' of much teaching in schools. The period also saw the rise of various youth movements and other innovations.

For the rest of this thread I'm confining myself to Britain, though I have the inmpression that in various forms much the same applies in other English-speaking countries, too.

As far as classroom work was concerned the starting-point was the obvious point that teaching doesn't necessarily result in learning. The theories then stressed the remarkable ability of young children to learn - often with only minimal guidance from adults. So far, so good.
However, many of these theories pushed these points of view to extremes. In England, for example, Percy Nunn expounded the view that learning was an integral part of child growth; he compared the education of children to the growth of plants, and so the teacher's role was essentially to keep the plants watered, protect them and so forth, so that they could grow healthily. To put the matter simply, teaching was presented as largely redundant.

Another of the key theorists was H. Cauldwell Cook, whose immensely influential book The Play Way ... was first published in 1917. (Some sections of the book had appeared in the form of articles just before the outbreak of WWI).
In The Play Way there is a very clear anti-academic undercurrent. The book contains all kinds of 'quotable quotes', some of which can be taken to imply comtempt for literacy itself. One of the best known of these is 'We don't read Shakespeare, we act him'. At first glance the statement appears clever, but it seems to prize activity above literacy ... That may not have been what Cauldwell Cook intended, but as passed down in various forms to generations of trainee teachers, that's what it's come to mean.

The strange thing is that many of these cranky theories were taken seriously by university education departments and later by teacher training colleges. (In England, education - in the sense of pedagogy - has generally been a low prestige subject and so very few people took the trouble to keep a close eye on what these departments were up to).

Some may feel I'm being a little harsh. If the traditional theories of teaching wanted to turn every child into a scholar, the child-centred theories seem to see every child as a budding artist.

Until c. 1960 (in Britain) most teachers in senior posts treated these theories with the contempt they deserve and managed to get newly entrants to the profession to teach in an 'instructional' (or didactic) way, passing on (transmitting) skills and knowledge to the next generation.

From the late 1950s onwards adherents of the 'new' theories increasingly rose to senior positions in schools and imposed their theories on junior colleagues.

The problem was compounded by the incredible dogmatism of many of those in teacher training.

So who and what do I blame? Propounding eccentric views isn't a crime. However, (1) dogmatism on the part of teacher trainers is inexcusable.

I blame (2) teachers for failing to speak out against the appallingly low standards in many schools, for failing to say openly that the new methods simply weren't working, for looking for excuses, such as social deprivation, to explain the sharp decline in standards.

Above all, I blame (3) my own profession - university teachers - for remaining silent when the problem worked its way through to the universities from c. 1990 onwards. More than any other group, university teachers had an excellent bird's-eye view of the real state of affairs. In Britain, a handful did in fact speak out, especially among the mathematicians, physicists and modern linguists. In public, they were branded as 'reactionaries' and on one occasion it was even said at a conference that those modern linguists who'd written articles about the fall in standards were 'pursuing a sinister right-wing agenda'.

Now some of those who remained silent 10-15 years ago are throwing up their hands in horror when undergraduates write such things as He got it from of off the internet and The question he tried to answer it [sic] was very difficult.

Well, that's more than enough from me for the moment.

Compounduing all this is the tendency of school boards to embrace theories about learning, often with very little research into whether or not they actually work. My teacher friends tell me of one 'system' after another that grabs the administration's fancy, only to be discarded a few years down the road when it is shown to not be effective.

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when it is shown to not be effective.

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Meanwhile our kids pay the price.

Unfortunately Agony, this occurrence is not resricted to Canada.In Asia every few years they come out with a new theory too.I think they are like sheep who have to justify their salaries and so come up with new ideas and choose those selected by Canada , England etc.
Teachers have to suffer and also the children by the inconsistencies of the Education Department.
What new fangled idea will they come up with this year?

The reference to "Asia" could mean anywhere from Turkey to the Bering Straits. Any chance of being more specific?

Wow. This thread is so long, and the coments so insightful and detailed, that I'm not sure it needs another voice. But I do feel compelled to add my own sense of dismay about the subject. Here, in my small rural town in Maine, USA, I can forgive and even accept the constant misuse of the English language that I encounter. After all, many of those with who I come into daily contact didn''t even gradute from high school, or, just barely did. But in my outside life, I encounter the same negligence, some of it spilling over into positions of supposed authority. The worst of it is that only those who deal in language for a living seem to care. Everyone else is content (and even seemingly eager) to lower the bar, especially when it comes to grammar and spelling, citing the grammer and spell check tools on their computers as the reason that they don't need to hone these particular skills. I swear, if language truly is a living thing, the one called English is very much on life support.

In many ways the problem within the education system is much worse than meets the eye (at least in Britain).

Many who have graduated from universities in the last few years or so have **excruciating** problems writing English correctly. (Anyone in doubt should see the examples given in my previous posts). I'm not talking about unimportant details at or beyond the edges of grammar, such 'split infinitives' and the like, but the inability to handle fundamentals like the internal structure of relative clauses.

Some recent graduates are of course becoming teachers, and so the education system is merrily recycling ignorance, to use an apt phrase that I often hear in this context.

The price being paid for what started as a fond and foolish desire to extend the methods and ethos of the nursery school first to primary, then secondary schools is horrendous.

The rot, such as it may well have been, did not just begin to appear "in the last few years or so" but can probably be traced back in the UK to the Universities discarding Matriculation (including English Language and mathematics) as a statutory requirement to taking up an undergraduate place.
In the 1970s and through most of the 1980s there was no requirement or UK teachers to have either english or mathematics at GCE/GCSE level either.

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there was no requirement or UK teachers to have either english or mathematics at GCE/GCSE level either.

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You are absolutely right, there was not. I trained in the 60's. I failed GCE Maths three times, but was still accepted into training college. However, I was obliged to take extra lessons in Maths to compensate. One does not always have to score top marks in a subject to be able to teach it well. I do teach Maths at Primary level, as well as all the other subjects, and I feel I do it quite well, since I can see how the children are having problems in understanding. A highly qualified person may not be able to do this.

Oh boy Ren, you were lucky. It was a requirement by the time I would have done the course, I tried maths just the once, realised I didn't stand a chance and moved on. After my degree I again looked at the papers and realised that I'd have to study for months and still only have maybe a 50-50 chance of passing. I'd already got a teaching job in a small private college, and carried on in that area for another 6 years before my counselling work began.

I really wish I'd been able to qualify, I doubt I'd have had employment problems and could have worked in just about any part of the country I wanted to, but that one little exam first stopped any chance of it, and I seem to remember a few other postgrad courses I would have been interested in as well needed it. (And I'd guarantee you'd still be better than most of the new lot of teachers even without your maths pass!).

Thanks for that David! (er, I think!)
The teachers from England that I meet out here seem superb to me, but maybe they are the cream. The English Schools Foundation recruits staff world wide, and the British ones have the most wonderful energies, ethos and intellects. I learn so much from their methods. I can also say the same for those from Australia,NZ and Canada. It seems that the teaching resources emerging from Australia and NZ are simply wonderful. It is great to work with all of them. I think the best sorts of teachers are those that watch and learn. You need to constantly move on with new ideas, in my view.
David it strikes me , from your wealth of ideas about so much, and your ability to pass on your enthusiasms , we are lacking a great schoolteacher. Couldn't you have just one more go at the maths GCSE? Training to teach would be a doddle for you. If I can do it , anyone can.