I’ve seen a lot of “down with grammar!” messages, often alongside “learning should be fun!” The implicit–and sometimes made explicit–message is that grammar takes the joy out of language. Fun and joy, as far as I’m concerned, are more about teaching than about subject matter. I want to take a moment to say “up with grammar!”  

To borrow an analogy from a friend, not wanting your child to learn about grammar [by which I mean: describing how sentences and words are structured] is like not wanting your child to learn about molecules and atoms. Yes, you can happily interact with matter without knowing that it is made up of elements, which are made up of atoms, and that those can combine with others to make all sorts of wonderful things. Not being able to explain the chemistry and physics involved will not stop you from making or enjoying a milkshake.

But do you really not want to have a clue that there is more to the world than meets the eye? I’ve found it very useful to know what I learned at school about matter–even though I grew up and had to discover that there might not be any such thing as electrons. All the same, having a basic knowledge of a model of how matter works makes it easier for me to understand the science I hear about in the news. It helps me understand a little bit better when I read about new medical treatments. It also points out to me how little I know, and makes me a bit more curious about the things I don’t know. It helped me learn about the scientific method and encouraged me to wonder at the scales of the universe.

Learning about how language works is like that. Learning about it can lead you to appreciate it more and to be less prejudiced about it, and if you go further with it, you might be able do a lot of things with that knowledge. Speech and language therapists can use it. Teachers can use it. Editors can use it. Cognitive psychologists can use it. Computer programmers and software designers can use it. Having a theory of what language is and how it works — what sentence is, what a word is — has lots of applications and can open up all sorts of other areas for investigation.

As Bas Aarts (of University College London’s Survey of English Usage) explains in his response to being a scapegoat for anti-grammarism, any grammatical exercise is a test of a particular model of the grammar of the language. At university level, our students compare models. But we don’t present more than one at school level, generally–not for language, not for physics, not (generally) for evolution. A problem in grammar teaching/learning sometimes is that several different models are available and no one’s pointed that out, and so concepts from one are mixed up with concepts from another and things stop making sense.

What can you do by learning a single model of a grammar in school? Well, you can have conversations about your language, about other languages, about your writing, about whatever you’re reading. Students’ lack of metalanguage for talking about language and writing is something I’ve complained about elsewhere.

Does that need to happen in the early years of school? No. And it doesn’t need to be tested in pressure-filled rote ways. But if you are not confident in your (or your school staff’s) knowledge of grammar and you don’t have the resources (including TIME) to get that knowledge and confidence up, then teaching-to-a-test is what ends up happening.

As I’ve written about before, grammar teaching has never been very strong in the UK. […] This has left us with a situation where everyone involved in the discussion has different half-developed ideas of what grammar means and which models are relevant. And in that situation, it’s really easy to see why people are anti-grammar. Grammar in that case seems like hocus-pocus that’s used as a means to keep some kids back. That may be the meaning the SATs test, but it’s not the meaning of grammar.

The only grammar/language teaching to trainee teachers at my UK university was for those who were upgrading themselves from classroom assistant to teacher. (And that programme has since been cancel[l]ed.) It was just assumed that people who had studied literature and had university degrees would be able to teach what an adverb is, should the curriculum ask for grammar.