teachers bad grammer!

I agree. I think what people sometimes forget in terms of the development of literacy is that speaking and listening come first, then reading, then writing. If a child comes into school with poor speech and language development then it is an uphill struggle from the start. That doesn't, of course, mean that you move through the skills sequentially, but they are all important and when all goes well you move in an upward spiral.
You can't teach grammar in a vacuum, it has to be in a context to make sense to a learner of any age.

grossi, bang on! I actually think nursery age children have far more important things to learn than correct grammar. At this stage they need to refine their social skills, their listening skills, and so on. They also learn through play so they need to play. A lot. Schooling should not be too formal at this age.

And, as you suggest, you get what you pay for!

That said, those children whose parents correct their little mistakes as they make them are the ones who will learn correct grammar. Whether they use it or not is another matter. In the pre-puberty and teenage years, it's far more 'cool' to be slovenly in one's speech.

We should not forget that there is a vast difference between an adult immigrant learning the local language, and a child. Pre-puberty children just pick up the language around them. Post puberty you have to learn it the hard way and in the end, this involves learning the grammar at some stage.

Also worth pointing out that the French health system is very costly for individuals in terms of contributions and top-up insurance and it has a huge budget deficit.
I agree absolutely about speaking the language Greatnan. I have a few of the French children in the village for extra English lessons and they seem to spend a huge amount of time in school writing. One even said that his teacher said that if he was not sure that his response was correct, he should say nothing! How can you learn a language like that? Yes grammar is important, but so is speaking and understanding (and getting things wrong so that you learn from your mistakes.)

Yes, at the moment the French health care system is good with much better survival rates for many kinds of cancer than the UK, but like most other countries the system is beginning to creak because we are all living too long!
At first, I was embarrassed to pay my doctor the €23 per visit, but I soon got used to it.

My grandchildren all learned French at school, but none of them would attempt to use it when they visited me and the French youngsters are just the same - nearly all of them learn English but few have the confidence to try to speak it. Whilst I agree that it is important to learn the grammar of any language, I think being able to converse easily is even more important. After all, French babies soon learn to chat, without knowing any rules of grammar! AT my grammar school, we never had a native French speaker and this was long before the era of language laboratories so whilst I could pass any written test when I arrived here, my accent was atrocious and it took quite a long time to learn the colloquialisms and local slang.

I would like to digress a little and respond to grandmaagain's original post.

Nursery staff are generally not very academic. If they were they could be "proper" teachers and earn a lot more. They are taught to care for small children.

I don't think that expecting formal education in literacy and maths to begin at nursery age without training and paying the staff accordingly is ever going to work.

Talking about science, I was bad at maths, physics and chemistry, so I dropped the last two and took German instead. My brother was good at maths and gave me the necessary tutoring to scrape through my GCE O level.

These days though, I am renewing my interest in all sciences, and have found this book by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to be a wonderful tool to reeducate myself. It is called 'The Greatest Show on Earth', and made me realise that the man is an excellent educator. At least I understand the periodic table now.

As a gardener, I'm taking a renewed interest in plant biology too. I think, in my case at least, hard science was very scary at school, and was taught with little patience for those of us who found it difficult. I was always OK at biology, perhaps because there's hardly any maths in it, or perhaps because we had a great teacher.

On the subject of French schools and business - yes, my Brother in Law is a teacher over there, and won't teach in the school system. He teaches English to adults instead. He and my sister are self-employed translators too, and the French business system drives them crazy. However, the high taxes do at least provide an excellent national health system which saved my sister's life when she had a double transplant. She is blind, and the provision and vet care of her guide dog is all free too.

I have always used 'Passive voice' rather than 'Passive tense', but maybe that is taking pedantry a tad too far.

Many British children have difficulty fitting into the French system because it is so rigid, with very little scope for individuality. Some 80% of French teenagers say they want to be 'functionaires' (civil servants) when they leave school. The over-manned and inefficient bureaucracy offers jobs for life and pensions, whilst trying to start a business in France is very difficult.
The British system does at least seem to breed some entrepreneurial spirit (odd that should be a French word).

Wrong Bagitha ...keep them coming ...my brain still wants to learn ...I think

hear hear!

Bagitha please continue to put scientific links on here - it's never too late to learn!

How about buses? Bus is short for omnibus, which is the Latin for "for everyone" ie not a private car, so omnibuses is wrong, it is already a plural. So is buses wrong?
(I was reminded of buses by my post of !What is it that roareth thus?" in the Did you learn Latin? thread)

Incidentally, Grannylin going back to your response to expatmaggie's comment on computers, did you know that the Chinese for abacus is hsüan pan which means computing tray? Nothing like going round in circles is there?

Okey dokey – bang to rights Grannylin. I can't help feeling that if the word has been around since the fourteenth century, it should be sufficiently anglicised by now for abacuses to be its plural.

Ah zut! you may be right!

'The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from Άβακός abakos, the Greek genitive form of Άβαξ abax ("calculating-table"), from Hebrew ābāq (אבק), "dust".[3] The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, with both abacuses[4] and abaci[5] in use.'

Grannylin This is pedants' corner – abacus has a Greek not Latin root.

I wouldn't say an entirely glowing report Maggie, but yes I do think things have improved a lot over the last fifteen years in terms of standards, resources and buildings. I think from my own experience that things were not great in schools in the seventies when I started teaching, but as an adviser and inspector of schools, I have been in a position to see many improvements take place over the last twenty years.
Strangely enough my son teaches the highest level of Cambridge exams in Spain so I know how hard it is - I remember he was working on the difference between "excise" and "expunge" with a student; I think that would tax a lot of people whose first language is English (though the Latin scholars would get it).

A true pedant!Would you prefer abacuses/abaci?

I'm going to be pedantic Mamie and correct you. I said the BBC MIS-uses the Passive Tense. Just using the passive tense is automatic for native speakers, using it correctly on the State TV news would be preferrable.
We spent some time in the education system in the UK and once my husband, lecturing at Chester College was told that he should shorten a fairy story because the students couldn't cope with more than one half of an A4 sheet of text. These were Uni students!
My husband oversaw the teaching of German for the whole of the North of England, sent in an advisory category by the German government, and some of the schools and the conditions there were terrible. The standards were always less than he expected to find for certain age groups, but he had a lot of admiration for the teachers.
Once at a cocktail party the main Inspector of Schools asked where I had been to school in Sheffield and I mentioned my grammar school.
'Oh you would have to pay for that kind of education these days' he said.
He sent his own children to private schools!

Since then 15 years have passed and I hope things are getting better and due to Mamie's glowing report, I think they maybe.
As for the Cambridge English examination, it is known to be very difficult and British children don't have to pass it. As someone says a lot of children get a good education in spite of the schools, usually because they have the right parents. These days there are so many who have parents who don't care and that applies to the rest of Europe, as well.
What we don't have in schools in Germany are rows of computers for primary school children. I'm thankful for that.

I suppose we see the results of a lack of knowledge of English grammar and spelling in a way that does not apply to maths or science.
I also get annoyed when newspapers (we all know which ones) say that 'A' levels are getting easier - I have been very impressed by the standard of the
papers my grandchildren have taken. There is not so much emphasis on remembering things learnt by rote, but more on understanding relationships and making deductions from facts. Access to facts is very easy via the internet so the emphasis now is on using information.
I used to be a volunteer tutor on the Adult Literacy Scheme in the 1970's, and I also taught basic maths to adults - it was reckoned that there were over two millions adults without basic literacy skills, so things were not so perfect in the past either.

I was amused by Liam Fox's use of the passive voice 'Mistakes were made' Yes, mate, and you made them!

Yes Grannylin, I am sure you are right. I think many of us (me included) tend to judge people when they make errors in pronunciation, spelling and grammar, but wouldn't notice / mind as much, if they demonstrated that they were in some way innumerate. I have noticed that some of my friends even seem to take pride in not becoming ICT literate(!) I am passionate about improving children's literacy (in the broadest sense), but I think the other things are important too.

I also found that people on GN didn't much like my posting links to scientific articles.

Also, speaking as a (bit of a) mathematician, if you bring maths into conversations, they tend to end rather abruptly.

Mamie, I think it's because there was so much emphasis put on English when most of us were at school. You were expected to to take both English and English Literature for O level. At primary school, reading aloud in class was a daily event - we read Don Quixote at 10.However, in spite of being drilled in tables etc, I have always been appalling at maths. My four children are all brilliant and my son has even offered to re-teach me as he feels I make hard work of something he considers to be simple!

Gracesmum- unless you are very recently retired I am not sure that you would have seen the full impact of the literacy strategy as these things take time to work through.
Joan, I think the DM article is misleading as it doesn't make clear that unless you pass literacy, numeracy and ICT then you cannot become a qualified teacher. Actually the DM doesn't seem very interested in ICT at all - funny that! I don't think trainee teachers should have lots of chances to pass these tests, but I would like to see the actual statistics.
Of course, there are and always have been some schools that do better than others; I had very good teaching in English in the fifties, but the maths teaching was dreadful. My children were at grammar schools in the eighties and there was a great deal of lazy teaching and lack of interest in the children.
I don't think everything is perfect now, there is still lots of school improvement to do in all phases of education, but I do believe that things have improved and it would be nice to see people recognising that. I found it interesting that very few people commented in the "Educating Essex" thread, where there was a chance to see a real comprehensive school in action.
I am also interested in why Gransnetters comment so much on English and don't have a great deal to say about maths, science, ICT etc?