Last Friday I was talking to a teacher who complained about the disappearing act grammar is performing in our schools. I had to admit that this isn’t a debate that I’m really following, but she did make me wonder what the virtues of grammar are or why schools shouldn’t teach it too much. While trying to figure out the (scientific) discussion, I found this blogpost with probably one of the best written arguments for grammar via this Huftington Post article:

“We don’t put chemistry into the school curriculum because it will make students better cooks, or even because it might make them better doctors, much less because we need a relatively small number of professional chemists. We believe (I hope) that a basic understanding of atoms and molecules is knowledge that every citizen of the modern world should have.”

But this argument made me think about the reasons we want to include coding in schools. Quite often I hear arguments pro the importance of learning how to code in schools so we might have more programmers or maybe because they would become more media literate. I do think the last argument is more sound for both coding and grammar.