Why Can't Americans Teach their Children how to speak?

Why Can’t Americans Teach their Children how to speak?

 

In the old 1960’s musical, My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison asks the musical question “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?”.   One could ask that same question of Americans today.

Ask a student to diagram a sentence and he/she would probably think that was something for Instagram.   

It used to be that one could count on newscasters and reporters to model good grammar.  Not anymore.  Then  the print media became the last bastion of decent grammar, after all they do have editors to look over the work before it goes into print.  Guess again!  A recent headline in Food & Wine delivered this incorrect sentence, “The next generation of spice companies are delivering better tasting spices while disrupting an outmoded industry.”  Evidently, the spice industry is not the only thing that is outmoded.  The subject of that sentence is “generation” which you may notice is singular and; therefore, takes a singular verb- IS delivering would be correct.

Baltimore magazine did its annual best in Baltimore listing.  It was excited to announce that the winner in the “stationary” category was a calligraphy company.  Clearly the copy editor was never taught that the “e” in stationery was just like the “e” in letters and hence was used when referring to paper products.  Either that or this calligrapher is stationary and never moving.

Appropriate use of pronouns is a totally lost skill.  Technically well-educated people will mix pronoun tense.   “Me and Robert are going to the movies, do you want to go?”.    REALLY! How about Robert and I are going to the movies?   Or “When you are finished, please give that report to David and I”   Most of us would never say “please give that report to I”, but add another person’s name and reason seems to flee from “me”.  

Don’t even get me started on the use of plural pronouns for a singular person.   I get that an individual who is transgender may not feel comfortable in either gender but she/he should be even less comfortable as a multiple personality.  A transgender person often takes a different name to match his/her gender identity.   Just match a pronoun to that identity.

I have been told that email and texting have led to the loss of grammatical skills.  I also know that years ago school districts stopped teaching grammar.   I am not a fan of testing but I will bet if end-of-English-course testing included grammar, we could get back to it fairly quickly email and texting notwithstanding.

Lack of STEM skills isn’t the only test of an educational system. We keep throwing money at education but we still can’t teach our  children how to speak?