ABSTRACT
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate does not blame schools for producing pupils unable to write standard English grammatically and ignorant of the literary classics, because it subscribes to a set of views about English teaching which developed in the 1960s and have now gained the status of an orthodoxy. This new orthodoxy finds little value in grammatical correctness and has no place for literature as a heritage. The new orthodoxy was the invention of educational theorists. But it did not long remain confined to their narrow circle. Exponents of the new orthodoxy often use the statement that ‘grammar is descriptive not prescriptive’ as the slogan for their case against prescriptive teaching of standard English. In this way they manage to suggest that anyone who disagrees with them has simply misunderstood the nature of grammar. But the misunderstanding is theirs. At the centre of the new orthodoxy is its devaluation of standard English.
