"Gary McGovern" <garywork at lineone.net> wrote:
	I've seen how some of these Russians are taught. They get a heavy education
	in literacy and grammar. In England, that's not true. Grammar has been
	abolished from the curriculum (Except for the expensive private schools run
	for the rich). I know people who leave school not even knowing what a verb
	is. Sorry but that isn't by accident.
	
It's not just England.  10-8 years ago I ran a computational linguistics
paper in Melbourne, Australia, and I was getting students who didn't know
what a verb was.  I was also getting European-ancestry Australian-born-and=
educated students at the undergraduate level who wrote "Chinglish", that is,
the kind of English written by Asian students who are not used to inflections
and have trouble even _hearing_ the difference between "sing" and "sings".
(Like I have real trouble distinguishing tones.)  It's not accidental; it's
just that "evidence-based teaching" is an idea whose time has yet to come.
There used to be a saying in New Zealand that we were always five years
behind the USA in educational "fashions":  wait five years until the latest
fashion has PROVEN itself a dumb idea and THEN adopt it.

It isn't by accident, but it's not a conspiracy.  It's basically the
"prescriptivist" (now a dirty word) -vs- "descriptivist" question; current
ideology has it that descriptivism is the humane true-to-linguistics
approach but prescriptivism is authoritarian (and we all know how evil
THAT is (:-)).
The problem is that the educators have forgotten (or never cared to learn)
that the natural state of natural languages is for people to be unable to
talk to the people in the next village but one down the river.

This is relevant to Smalltalk:  the natural state of programming languages
is for Foo Basic to be different from Bar Basic (like the Prolog company
that had a Mac Prolog and a DOS Prolog, one of which took angles in degrees
and the other of which took angles in radians).  I find the recent work on
porting things between different Smalltalks encouraging.

	Well, I was thinking more along the lines of Roboteacher :o) where anyone
	can download the program over the web and get a good solid education in
	literacy and grammar just as the well educated people get.
	
Is this something that exists?  Where can I read more about it?