Grammar and Politics-Personal Opinion Paper
Conrad Geller,Chair
NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak

The rational horses in Gulliver’s Travels can’t understand why apparently rational human beings with access to the same facts, can so often arrive at widely differing conclusions.  Sometimes I wonder, too especially when I see the polemic that surrounds so much of the current discourse about education.

One theory about conflict is that it’s always nothing but a misunderstanding, a failure of language to communicate ideas perfectly.  We see many obvious examples in educational debates where word choice may be misleading or inflammatory:  “choice,” “inclusion,” “privatization.”  But often, too, the very grammatical structures I use seem to be creating as much of the confusion as any manipulation of the words.

On inspection, we see that some of the slogans most often put forward in the arguments over educational policy get their force from the use of transitive verbs without clearly expressed objects.  Here are a couple of prime offenders:

“I don’t teach math, I teach children.”  This is one that is sure to get a round of applause at any PTA meeting or teacher symposium.  Yet the “children” part of the statement isn’t—can’t be—the object of “teach.”  “Children,” in fact, is grammatically the indirect object, the person to whom or for whom the teaching is done.  So what you are paid to teach, Sir or Madam, is math.  The children get the benefit, such as “I teach math to children.”  If you just teach children, period, you are by implication teaching them nothing.  Could be the kind of thinking exposed by such a garbled statement be some part of the ignorance that seems to be engulfing our schools?

“I believe every child can learn.” This is another grabber, much favored by politicians these days.  The verb “learn,” however, like “teach,” is transitive.  We need to ask, “Every child can learn, but learn what?”  Does the speaker mean that every child can learn to solve problems in calculus?  Write a meaningful sonnet?  Run a five-minuet mile?  It’s exactly the What of learning that has to be the subject of curriculum study and reform.  Vacuous half statements, whatever their power to please the electorate, don’t help.

Language, I guess, has a way of fooling us, of seeming to be saying something when really it is only begging the question.  I once hear a supposedly wise Eastern religious leader explain that the path to the Good Life involved performing good acts and avoiding evil ones.   A friend I was with whispered to me, “How profoundly simple!”  I answered, “Yes, but worthless.  The hard part is knowing which is which.”

See NCTE positions and articles on the teaching of grammar at www.ncte.org/Solutions Center Grammar.