Did everyone in my generation miss out on grammar teaching at school?

I learnt what verbs, adjectives and nouns were, and that was about it. I even remember one teacher being suitably outraged when he discovered the level of ignorance in the class ... but not quite outraged enough to do anything about it. And I know I’m not alone. Many of my contemporaries seem to have had the same (lack of) experience.

For me (and, it turns out, for quite a few of the people I’ve talked to about this), the saving grace was learning foreign languages. When I realised that my knowledge of French, Spanish and Latin grammar dwarfed my knowledge of English, I realised something was very wrong and decided to do something about it.

Should I have bothered, though? Does it really matter? So what if we can’t all conjugate our verbs correctly? If someone says ‘He done well’ instead of ‘He did well’, I still understand what that person means.

Well, from a purely mercenary point of view, it matters to the people who do get it badly wrong, because it will cost them. You may have been able to get good academic grades with poor English, but you’re unlikely to get very far in a job application.

But I think there’s something more fundamental at stake. The English-speaking world is huge. Imagine what would happen if we abandoned all attempts to control the language through education.

Some might argue that it would free the language to evolve in its own way, unfettered, and not held back by the fossilising effect of the classroom. But I believe we would soon be in a world where we would be unable to agree on a common meaning for even the commonest forms of words.

Education in general would become more difficult and law – which relies on unambiguous and clear language – would become almost impossible. Ultimately, the language would dissolve into a myriad of dialects, making it impossible to communicate with even our closest neighbours, or with different generations. Books would become unreadable within a few years of being written. For society to function at all, we would be forced to develop a common language – one with a clear set of rules and a well understood vocabulary. So maybe it’s not quite time to abandon the one we already have.

The real tragedy for those of us in the ‘missing link’ generation, though, is that things seem to be so much better in schools nowadays. Children are once again learning the basics of English grammar. Those of us who missed out had better make sure our own skills are up to scratch before we are upstaged by the next well-educated generation...