"Those grammarians hate freedom"
Language Log | "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.