Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.

However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.

I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.

I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though

English is my first language. However, I had an undiagnosed learning disability until college.

That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.

The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.

To be generous, what this meant is either that you were below the reading level for the book or you misunderstand the core skill of reading and using style in the English language. Reading and understanding when rules are broken leads to knowing when they can be. We don't skip Shakespeare because the language is funny and archaic. Reading these authors is both a part of style and content literacy for the English language. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing them.

There is a difference between understanding a book’s contents and being able to read the book without having it rewrite your understanding of the English language such that you have no idea what is correct and incorrect because your grasp on that was tenuous in the first place. Children are expected to avoid being rewritten at stages where they are extremely impressionable and are easily rewritten and then they are blamed for it. It is fairly sadistic thing to do to children.

No, it's all a part of learning to read and understand language.

If a child is having that much trouble with it, which would be unusual at grade-level, then the book is above their level. At that point, the child should probably be screened for a delay.

How this generally works is that young people ingest these books, and by doing so their language ability increases to be able to flexibly understand (and use, if stylistically appropriate), non-standard grammatical forms.

I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.

People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/

Well colloquially "pet" itself is a past tense. Depends on the register of the language. And "wrong" is also an adverb. It would help if the educators explain when to use "wrong" vs "wrongly" vs "wrongfully" since all could be adverbs; or you could read enough to figure out the subtle differences.

I had recently looked up “wrong” to check out of curiosity, and DuckDuckGo only said it was an adjective, so I had stopped using it as an adverb. It turns out that the dictionary states it is an adverb, but you need to click to go to an actual dictionary to see that since the definition given by DuckDuckGo is only a partial definition. Thanks for making me double check.

That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.

Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds.

Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently. (Is Huck exaggerating to you the reader? This is a critical intuition to get about all writing to make you more literate, not less.) You learn to understand through different writing styles, which is another absolutely critical step in becoming literate.

Just thinking about a world where we take your advice above makes my stomach turn it seems so wrong to what the point of reading these books even is…

> Are you being sarcastic?

I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me.

> Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a different perspective, that they will present differently, and even perceive differently.

I did not learn this. I am in my 30s and I had no idea that this was the point until reading your comment. In hindsight, what I learned from books like this is that nothing made sense since I would be told one thing is correct and then be forced to read things that normalized the opposite and by the time I finished reading, I had forgotten the correct way. Expecting a child that knows nothing and is literally a blank slate to learn this lesson from a forced reading of this book is expecting too much. It certainly was in my case. It is a disservice to the child and is contrary to the goal of establishing English literacy.

> Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books

I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).

If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.

If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.

A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.

I feel pretty bad for you reading your comments, it sounds like you had a very bad educational experience that caused much more confusion than it should have.

It sounds to me like you may be neurodivergent in some way that made these two parallel aspects of literacy, literature and grammar, hard to disentangle during your education. It sounds like a failure of the education system to adequately guide you or take your particular ways of thinking into account, not a problem with the sort of underlying philosophy of what books we read in school.

I think the problem was that you were forced to learn formal grammar, not that you were forced to read Huck Finn.

A better question is, did the adults forcing children to read such books provide a safe space for the child to ask seemingly stupid questions such as "why did this character in this book talk in ungrammatical sentences" not wholesale rejection of such books.

I think you’re pointing out a real problem, but the solution is backwards. English, like any language, is not a formal rigid system like a programming language. “Undoing” the supposed ‘rules’ of language with good literature shows that the true rules of language are more complex and nuanced than the heuristics we use to teach children, and that these exceptions create richness, variety, and culture. Ultimately it really is “what sounds right” no matter what the rules say.

People get plenty of this outside of school. If they get it in school too, they will always be confused, like I was.

I got it in school and was not confused.

Hmm, I get where you're coming from and I'd agree if it was math or physics or chemistry but I'm not so sure about languages.

I learned English as a second language and while I did have formal lessons, the most bang for buck learning came from stuff like Huckleberry Finn and forums and random songs (especially hip hop) and cartoons. Not because they are "good english" but precisely because they are "bad english" but still capture the spirit of the language. The meaning is there and it's English as used by native speakers. i.e.: It helped me internalize the language. Maybe it was because I had no one around to practice informal English and I needed that and it's different for native speakers. Dunno.

I can't say it didn't confuse me but I know it didn't negatively impact my scores. Despite not doing my homework and not even having the required textbooks or studying properly, it was the subject I had the easiest time and best grades aside from math or programming. And it's not like the bar was low - we had to pass C1 on the CEFR and I've easily passed C2 and have almost 100% on TOEFL and similar.

Also I'm not particularly gifted with languages - I don't know grammar at all and I struggle speaking all the time even in my native language.

> it's English as used by native speakers

I do not speak that way and I do not know anyone else who speaks that way.

That said, being relatively average at English as a student because I was constantly confused by the literature I was forced to read did negatively affect my test scores.

Well yeah, it's not everyday English maybe but it's still English. By that I mean that those are examples of which and how many of the rules in the system can be broken or let's say - creatively interpreted and still fit in that system.

"bad english" by expert native speakers is different than "bad english" from poor native speakers is different than "bad english" from still-learning non-speakers. IMO the first two both benefit your understanding of the language and help with reading comprehension because they expand your personal knowledge base of how many ways you can convey the same meaning in English with different words, order, grammar, etc and that is crucial for a flexible language like English.

But your reply reminded me of a friend that's very good with languages but only languages that have a rigid structure - he's from the UK but he struggles with English yet he's amazing in German and Chinese and several others I don't remember.

For me, books like Huck Fin were how I learned English, I don't think we even had grammar lessons(some weird teaching style that was popular in CA at the time).

I personally did not find the slang & creative language used in such books confusing.

I disagree. Reading style ("flaws") is a major part of literacy. Even for people with learning disabilities.

If you aren't on the reading level for a specific book, that's another issue.

Reading level is ambiguous here. Are you referring to whether someone can read the book, comprehend what it says and discuss it, or whether they can do all of that without having their understanding of the English language rewritten? Young children can easily do the former if you do not mind the latter happening. However, it is rather sadistic to put them in such situations and then expect them to pass exams for proper English. It is even more sadistic to do this to them, when they are at a point in their lives where they still need to gain a firm grasp of what is correct, such that it affects their test scores and can affect their prospects for getting into good universities.