"Those grammarians hate freedom"
Heidi Harley
has
posted about the French government's promotion of grammar teaching
in the schools, with links to reports about the initiative. Among
them is a link to Dennis Baron's
Web
of Language coverage. Baron's blog has a three-paragraph
summary of the story. But go to the site for the rest of this
page, which quotes various authorities -- British Minister of Schools
Jim Knight, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, U.S.
Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair -- on
the controversial plan. The tone of this part of Baron's blog can
be judged from two quotations from Spellings:
"Bring formal grammar back to the
classroom," she predicted, "and you'll have angry mobs of teachers
overturning cars in the parking lot and torching them."
[with reference to Noam Chomsky] "Those grammarians hate freedom," she
concluded.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 19, 2006 02:35 PM