JamesandJon33
Do school children learn grammar any more? Parsing, précis, clauses etc.
I don't think it is about what young people are taught. I am in a few local history groups online, and the majority of members are older than me (maybe in their 80s and above) and their spelling, grammar and sentence structure are often 'interesting'. Many people left school very early when those people were young though, so the chances of their having parsed sentences and declined verbs are slim - most people were streamed at eleven and taught what they needed to know in oder to get a job at 14. That doesn't impact on the validity of what they have to say, though, and it doesn't mean that those who were taught about the subjunctive or whatever have more interesting things to say, however correctly they might express it.
There was also a period where things such as parsing and formal grammar were discarded, and this had a knock-on effect, as a whole generation of teachers had little or no knowledge of them, so couldn't pass on what they didn't know. I taught university students who didn't know fairly basic grammar until they were told. Again, it didn't make them less able - none of us know what we haven't been taught. Those people will be in their 30s and 40s now.
Younger people are much more likely to be taught grammar nowadays, and stay in education for longer than ever before, so yes - schoolchildren are taught grammar - in a lot of cases probably to a higher standard than many of their parents and/or grandparents.
