Ed et al.,

To very badly misquote Tolkien, "Ask not the linguists, for they shall
say both yea and nay." 

More seriously, though:

One of the problems I see with the Washington list (as well as many
others) is that it shows no awareness that the critical thinking skills
strongly encouraged elsewhere in curricula as necessary and valuable are
just as necessary and valuable in their application to language -- that
thinking *about* how people come to divide words into categories, and
give names to those categories, and argue about those categories, is
better than just knowing the names. The list contains a wide variety of
disparate elements ranging from annoyingly picayune ("Use of a diagonal
slash") to maddeningly vague ("Correct use of punctuation") without ever
suggesting that students by a certain grade level should be able to look
at a text analytically and argue for picking one kind of construction
over another. That kind of ability is a prerequisite for some of the
items (the vague ones, usually), but it's never foregrounded.

Now, obviously teaching that kind of critical approach has to be keyed
to the students' age. We encourage rules of civility in first grade
without delving into ethical philosophy or psychology; students can
learn that it's not acceptable to try to badger others into conformance
with their desires long before they can formulate theories about
insecurity as the motivation for the badgering. But the material in the
early years can lay the groundwork for later development. We want the
students to engage in "thinking about language" just as they engage in
"thinking about nature" in early science units.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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