The teaching of grammar in English schools has been contentious. In the 1990s Carter argued that it was ‘entirely justifiable’ to reject old-style grammar teaching because of its association with transmissive teaching and drilling exercises, with scant evidence to show it improved pupils’ competence (Carter, 1997). It was said to be not only pedagogically and methodologically arid but conceptually ill-founded and fostered grammatical distortions. The proposal to replace it with a grammar that was functionally orientated and responsive to social processes (LINK, 1989-1992) was given short shrift by the government of the time who condemned it for its lack of structure and emphasis upon Standard English. Since then old-style grammar has surged back with vigour.

The paper exemplifies what has been lost. It focusses upon the pronoun and highlights the division between the sterility of the curriculum for grammar and the rich, often controversial, contexts where the pronoun is bound up in complex social processes. It draws upon a variety of sources. Philosophically, Buber’s I and Thou (1923) and Honneth’s The I in We (2012) aimed at countering the assumptions of ‘possessive individualism’ endemic in Western liberalism (Macpherson, 1962). Anthropologist Goffman (1953) drew attention to crofters’ shyness on the Scottish isle of Unst: ‘Perhaps the clearest evidence of crofter circumspection in self-references is to be found in their use of the term ‘I’. If a sentence could be phrased in such a way as to omit the term, it was omitted’. The use of the ‘I’ in academic writing has been questioned by linguists like Ivanic (1992) who ‘reject the idea that academic writing is objective and impersonal’. Fairclough’s analysis of advertising narratives (2002) demonstrated how ‘synthetic personalisation’ is employed to move the reader though a discourse of ‘us’ (e.g. the university), to ‘you’ (e.g. the potential applicant), to the false and premature mutuality of ‘we’ - ‘to give the impression of treating each of the people handled en masse as an individual’. The salacious weekly magazine That’s Life regularly uses cataphoric referencing to tempt the reader inside the cover. Said’s thesis (1978), that ‘orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’, is mirrored in the requirement that English schools teach ‘British Values’ where pronoun-use in the construction of Britishness is key: ‘They are the values that unite us’ (PM May, 2015). The speeches of former Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, demonstrate that he used the inclusive ‘we’ (nosotros) and avoided formal Spanish pronouns in favour of yo and tú. Such discourses draw attention to differences and variations in cultural norms and help make judgments about historical shifts in language-use since Brown and Gilman’s reflections on the ‘pronouns of power and solidarity’ (tu/vous) in the 1960s.

Arguably much of this is relevant and could be made accessible to pupils of school-age and would develop their ability to reflect upon the functionality of grammar in broader contexts than sterile parsing exercises: ‘Circle all the pronouns in the sentence below’ (National Curriculum, 2016). This might range from their observation of teachers’ use of the inclusive / exclusive ‘we’ to the moral and political landscape that underpins gender identity today, now less focussed upon ‘s/he’ distinctions and more on the politics of non-binary descriptors (Feinberg, 2016), from which new pronouns have been born (zi/hir). One wonders if neutering reflection upon the inherently ideological nature of grammar teaching is part of a larger project to inhibit criticality in pupil and maintain them as ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1995)?

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