Am I just an old pedant or...........

[OldPedant54]

While searching for someone on Facebook, I stumbled across a profile of someone who described herself as "Vice Principle and head of English" (sic). This is so replete with irony that it is hard to know where to begin by way of comment. Is my pedantry getting the better of me or do our children deserve better?

I remember being in a supermarket when we lived overseas (English speaking country) when my then ten year old dd pointed at a sign for 'stationary' and said, 'Well, it's certainly very still!'.
She pointed it out to staff, but was told that no one else had noticed, so it didn't matter! I honestly don't think they knew what the mistake was.
Grammar and punctuation weren't seen as important at my school, back in the dark ages, but I think times have changed. My DDs have certainly been taught in more depth than I was.
Just as some people can't spell, or don't worry about grammar, there are those who can't help noticing mistakes.

Can we really blame government micromanagement for this? It seems to me that it is primarily down to academics in university departments of education, who for many years pushed the idea that correct spelling, grammar and punctuation were elitist and irrelevant, and that teaching them and correcting errors would turn children off writing and destroy their creativity. Efforts by governments to counter this were long resisted by academics involved in curriculum design. I suspect there are still many primary school teachers and headteachers who see them as either impossible to teach properly, or as not worth teaching, even though the curriculum now requires it.

A big problem with the poor spelling and punctuation of teachers is that it means children frequently see incorrect usage, which undermines what they have been taught. We all know how seeing an incorrect spelling can make us question our own spelling knowledge (there are studies that have confirmed this), and I suspect the same is true for punctuation.