74 Culture The Economist March 12th 2022
A
bsence of evidenceis not, as the
saying goes, the same thing as evi
dence of absence. But if you continue
looking for something intently, and keep
failing to find it, you can be forgiven for
starting to worry. And so it is with the
vexed—and in Britain, highly politi
cised—subject of explicit grammar
teaching in schools, and its link or other
wise with improved writing ability.
Another study, in this case a large
randomised controlled trial, has recently
been added to the expansive literature on
the subject. Like nearly all its predeces
sors, it found that teaching kids how to
label the bits and pieces in a sentence
does not make them better writers. It was
novel in that it tested six and seven
yearolds who used a digital platform
called Englicious to take grammar les
sons, alongside the rote classroom teach
ing of grammatical particulars and their
functions. The Englicious group did no
better than those receiving ordinary
instruction when it came to writing
narrative passages. (The extra help
slightly improved their performance on a
task called “sentence combining”, which
requires pupils to turn two sentences
into one in logical ways, such as the
addition of “because”. But even this effect
was not statistically significant.)
Bas Aarts, one of the researchers on
the project and one of the scholars be
hind Englicious, holds out hope that
with longer exposure, or a study of older
students, an improvement in writing
skills might be detected. Other observers
may begin to wonder whether the Na
tional Curriculum in England, which
since 2014 has made grammar such a
central part of its English programme,
might have gone down a blind alley.
The force behind the reforms, Mi
chael Gove, a Conservative former secretary of education, is sometimes maligned
for other political reasons (especially
among opponents of Brexit, which he
championed). He is said to have insisted
on the insertion of personal bugbears into
the grammar curriculum, notably the
subjunctive form, “If I were”. Mention of
his name alone wrinkles many teachers’
noses—partly because some of them were
hardly prepared to teach the new material
themselves, after decades in which gram
mar was largely absent from classrooms.
In retrospect it scarcely seems surpris
ing that learning to underline a modal
verb, such as “can”, “should” and “may”,
does little to help students use them effec
tively in their own writing. These words
are anyway grasped by tiny children with
out the need to know what they are called.
This may tempt the conclusion that the
teaching of grammar should be shelved
altogether. But there are reasons to reform
it rather than scrap it.
Understanding of language is part of a
wider education in what makes human
beings human. How concepts are turned
into sounds, and how those sounds combine to form propositions, commands or
questions, are issues that have occupied
many linguists in philosophy depart
ments. What they reveal about the mind
has exercised psychologists and cogni
tive scientists.
There are practical reasons to ask
children to grapple with grammar, too.
One is that an explicit knowledge of it
will make learning a foreign language
easier. Even if you did intuit how to make
subordinate clauses in your native lan
guages as a toddler—just without in
struction—getting to grips with them in
German or Russian in later years is sim
pler if you know how to define and spot
them. As it is, many Englishspeakers
come to understand grammar by study
ing a foreign language, rather than the
other way round.
For grammarians keen on the jobs of
the future, the field of naturallanguage
processing is booming. After many years
of poor results, technological wizards
have devised programs for automated
translation, speech recognition (as in
dictation software) and other services
that are actually usable, if far from per
fect. These tools may rely more on
knowledge of artificial intelligence than
of the subjunctive, but linguistic ex
pertise still matters, and may give bud
ding programmers an edge over rivals
whose best language is Python.
Grammar could still be taught better.
One small study showed improvement in
some students when concepts are linked
concretely to writing tasks. Even so, it
may never be easy to point to a widget
output increase that results directly from
improved tuition. A cook does not need
to know chemistry to make a delicious
sauce. But the science of how words
combine to make meaning is fascinating
as well as fundamental.Teaching grammar is useful, if not principally in the way you may thinkJohnsonMore than the sum of its parts
with a phenomenal visual memory and
methodical rigour, but he had a Romantic
soul. He saw himself as Don Quixote and
Spanish science as his Dulcinea.
The father of the neuron, as he is often
called, either introduced or popularised
concepts that neuroscientists still debate,
from the potential for nervoussystem re
generation, to the influence of the chemi
cal environment on the wiring of the em
bryonic brain, to the organ’s plasticity. All
these phenomena, in his view, operated on
the basic unit of the nerve cell. Cajal was a
dyedinthewool individualist—and if MrEhrlich is a trifle heavy on the comparisons
between the microscopic world and Span
ish politics, his larger point about the role
of metaphor in science is important.
For ever since human beings first in
quired into their own brains, they have
fallen back on technological metaphors. It
was the telegraph in Cajal’s day; now it is
the computer. Neither is particularly real
istic, but both capture aspects of the truth.
Networks are a perennial theme and Golgi,
who took a holistic view of the nervous
system, saw them everywhere. Cajal was
warier of them. But as neither ever saw intothe spaces between neurons, they had to
intuit what was or wasn’t there. Cajal imag
ined a gap, Golgi a web of filaments.
The metaphor invaded Cajal’s draw
ings. Despite his eye for details, he left out
those he thought unimportant. He knew
that intuition precedes observation, but
his choices left him open to criticism and
he had to defend his theory all his life. To
day the reticulum is back, if in different
form—the idea being that what counts in
the nervous system is patterns ofneuronal
activity. Cajal might just about acceptthat,
since his legacy, the neuron, is safe. n