Bill,
You may well be right in your assessment that the Braddock report didn’t change all that much. It simply put a sort of official stamp on an attitude towards grammar. I too was educated before the Braddock report, but I went to fairly conservative Lutheran schools, a gymnasium-like school for high school and junior college and a determinedly liberal arts school for my last two years. We got a lot of grammar and used it, largely because we also got German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and used grammar in those classes as a tool for analyzing texts. So I can’t claim that my experience of grammar is common.
The problem I’ve faced as a linguist in an English department is not so much with my literature colleagues as with my English Education colleagues. I’ve tried to work with them and get them to work with us in linguistics so that we can correlate our grammar class and our language and society class with their methods classes, but the response has been one of disinterest, verging on hostility when I’ve pushed the issue. They spend one week on grammar in one methods course, and what they do is driven by state standards, which are written by English Ed and El Ed faculty and officials. My students complain to me that they’re not getting anything on grammar and its applications in their Ed courses but they know they’ll have to teach it. I do a little with methods, but not much because I don’t have the expertise, and the students are the ones feeling the frustration.
Language and literature education is currently afflicted by, maybe in bondage to, a philosophy of teaching and of curriculum that simply doesn’t make room for grammar.
Ed sees our disagreements on matters like terminology as the source of the problem, and I know I oversimplify—sorry, Ed. I’m convinced that this zeitgeist is what we’re up against, a much less tractable foe.
Herb