Comment by lurk2
> Why can't people test against that?
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
Another user deleted their comment:
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.