Of Education

I was leafing through the criteria of the current course in Swedish and noticed a rather funny-looking goal. "Pupils use literary handbooks when necessary". ("Literary", in this case, is a bad translation, since "språkliga" was a tad bit difficult to get right) I expect they were referring to thesauruses, dictionaries, and grammar books. Not that odd, perhaps, but it struck a thought to me.

 

Why would someone, who has spoken a language since birth, require a "literary handbook"? Language is an intuitive thing, as can be seen when toddlers learn language without even thinking about it. One day they just go "Mum", or "Dad", or "Caw" or whatever they might say. Now if you think about it, these kids have been making guttural noise ever since their vocal chords were fully developed, yet one doesn't consider it language until they actually speak intelligibly. 
Our languages are all structured with abstract rules and very obscure ideas. When you learn it properly, these things tend to come naturally. In your native language, you never even think of the order words come in, or what tense they are, or how they change depending on person or whatever. It's just there, it's always been there, and it's always understood.

Now I realize that I've read a whoole lot of books in my life - at least relatively to others of my age, who rarely even touch a book like it were the plague. Grammar and vocabulary comes even easier when you've worked with a language that's written. A language, something as fluent, as variable and as dynamic as a language, surely cannot be learnt by rules, stiff from ages of discussion and compromise. I mean, sure, I agree that certain rules are obviously just... You can't write that your silly. My silly what? It's not a bombshelter, it's a bomb shelter. Etcetera. But when we get into the most intricate and complex of rules, these are the kind of things that don't exist in reality. You do not consider the tense, the very most deep grammar of your text? Is that the way you learnt to speak your language fluently?

Personally, it is not. And I fail to understand why we think that language is best taught the way that it is so rarely taught "for real".