Michele sent this from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, pp 156-160:
A thirteen-year-old girl is relating her day in French class.
“What’s the point of grammar?” asked Achille . . .
“You ought to know by know,” replied Madame Never-mind-that-I-am-paid-to-teach-you. .. ”The point is to make us speak and write well.”
I thought I would have a heart attack there and then…. To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop. ..If she had shown us some concrete examples of things we need to know about language in order to use it properly, well, okay, why not, that would be a start…We already knew how to use and conjugate a verb long before we knew it was a verb. And even if knowing can help, I still don’t think it’s something decisive.
Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. . . when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see …it quite naked, in a way…When you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the core of any statement. It’s magnificent, don’t you think? Nouns, verbs…
…Can you teach children to speak and write correctly through grammar if they haven’t had the illumination that I had? Who knows. In the meanwhile, all the Madame Fines on the planet ought rather to ask themselves what would be the right piece of music to pay to make their pupils go into a grammatical trance…
“Well,” I said, ”when you’ve read Jakobson, it becomes obvious that grammar is an end in itself and not simply a means; it provides access to the structure and beauty of language, it’s not just some trick to help people get by in society.”
….I got two hours of detention…on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.