Jason White wrote:
So primary school children won't be quizzed about common nouns, proper nouns, abstract nouns, collective nouns, etc.?
AFAIK the last generation to be formally taught grammar (as in, this part of a sentence is called X and here is how to recognize and use it) was my grandparents' -- people a couple of years too young to be trucked off to WWII. IMO it is a vital tool for studying foreign languages.
It wasn't exciting; nor was it particularly useful. I learned more about grammar by studying a second language than I did in English class. That's probably because it wasn't taught either very well or very systematically.
Precisely. Unfortunately trends in foreign language education (last time I looked) also shied away from grammar. It's all about being slapped with sentences without explanation and hoping you can guess the rules yourself. When my Mum was studying French recently, she had a book called something like "English grammar for French students", i.e. teaching anglophones to recognize parts of speech in *English* first, so they can then do so in while studying French. I remarked quite grumpily that she ought to have learnt that in school.