A charming blog on our blogroll, Quiddity - created by the Center for Independent Research on Classical Education (CiRCE) - has an excellent post on the beauty of formally-taught grammar. Author Andrew Kern, CiRCE president and developer of a classical composition program called The Lost Tools of Writing, reasons:
When you teach grammar for her own sake, you keep the benefits and also gain her blessings, many of which are simply unpredictable. When a child learns formal grammar, he becomes her intimate acquaintance and they flourish in a symbiotic relationship like a cherished governess or mother. She forms his mind to its own nature. She empowers the child to think. Form itself becomes a mental habit – if the soil is ready. You come to realize that things have structures. You start looking for the structures of things like language, poetry, literature, natural objects (e.g. trees, bodies, the cosmos), and knowledge itself. By recognizing structure and order you come to perceive the relationships between things and you realize that the life of the thing is embodied in its structure. You come to love order. But you don’t make it the end of your observations. It is always a foundation, a skeleton, and never the spirit. [...] And when a young child learns the form of grammar, he develops two habits of mind that are essential to self-governance and freedom:
- He learns to limit what he is saying to what he is trying to say – he learns to think with limits and therefore to think about something
- And he learns to insist that others mean something when they speak and limit themselves when they rule
Kern's article is worth reading in its entirety.
