Bravo to President Trump for instituting, this week, English as our official language.  By his executive order, Trump took a hugely important first step, among others, toward reclaiming a seriously inadequate primary education for our children and youth. It is at the primary level that our children and youth best properly learn the English language for life—or don’t.

It’s far past time to recognize and defeat the multi-generational effort by the Department of Education to scuttle the basics in teaching English literacy and, furthermore, to undermine even our public and personal speech at its core. By abolishing English grammar and memorization—most critically in primary education—our children and youth are condemned to a lifetime of partial or entire illiteracy in English, both read and spoken.

My husband is a Latin teacher in a small Catholic seminary college in Louisiana. He and all of his colleagues in teaching have found, for years now, that most of the young men who enroll in his class have no grounding in English.  The majority do not know what syntax or grammar, or parts of speech, even mean.  His students generally do not read beyond what they are forced to read, and they certainly have no clue as to how to tackle Latin, the primary linguistic descendant of English, to include grammar.  My husband is forced to teach, on the fly, primary English in his own class concurrently with Latin. Is this hard? Is this even possible for post-secondary teachers? Are the older students not already set in their ways of learning (or not)?

English grammar, once the instructional baseline in our language, had been traditionally taught in America as a proven method and vehicle for individual and civic communication. But now, grammar is moribund in most public, and in the majority of independent, schools. Essentially, this English language expertise purge is the fruit of the federal government’s political take-over of primary education. In the political context, the redaction of English grammar by the educational establishment, the U.S. Department of Education, was a first step in a gradual, now inter-generational effort to weaken our popular literacy and render our public and political communications inchoate.  What a supreme power play! And at such expense!

A good example of what is happening with our English grammar can be easily seen and heard in the current use, or misuse, of parts of speech.  To dive deeper: the busy-as-a-beaver “cancel culture” has even caught up with destroying competency in English speech.

Take the part of speech identified in English grammar as a preposition. As prepositions are one of the eight principal parts of English speech, they have a hefty share of relevance in our speech and writing. And, as prepositions go, so goes our national language. Also, prepositions deploy heavily idiomatic usages that also must conform to the syntax at hand.

Therefore, if you haven’t memorized (become familiar with) prepositions as idioms, that is, known them beforehand as habitual phrases, you won’t get them right:

Prepositions in English are highly idiomatic. Although there are rules for usage, much preposition usage is dictated by fixed expressions. In these cases, it is best to memorize the phrase instead of the individual preposition.

Keeping our prepositions in good usage is now under general cultural abuse. To illustrate, confusion over prepositions is now commonplace… even in professional advertising campaigns. Picture this type of statement (look at home renovation networks or even car ads) as an egregious instance of prepositional dysfunction: “I am so excited with my new faux marble backsplash.”  Or even, “I am so excited for my new faux marble backsplash.

Is your backsplash excited, too? Are you excited on behalf of your backsplash? Has your backsplash won the lottery? If you haven’t memorized idiomatic prepositional phrases (as was ever the case, in correct repetition to school children), you won’t make sense.

Or hear this, from a du jour advertisement on your tube, tablet, cell, or monitor: the “happy couple” are “in love” with their new EV. He/she says: “I am so excited for this car!”  She/he chimes in, “I am excited for it, too!”  Are they excited for their car because it is a happy car, about to get a drive with its prospective owners? Correction, please: he/she is excited about their car.

The above illustrations may sound trivial, but the danger is not; my examples of prepositional dysfunction represent a much greater weakness: the literacy level for US adults is below the sixth-grade level—our children used to have English grammar down by the sixth grade—for over 54% of US adults:

• On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2025.
• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2025.
• 54% of adults have literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below a 5th-grade level).
• Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
• 34% of adults lacking literacy proficiency were born outside the US.
• Massachusetts was the state with the highest rate of child literacy.
• New Mexico was the state with the lowest child literacy rate.
• New Hampshire was the state with the highest percentage of adults considered literate.
• The state with the lowest adult literacy rate was California.
• On average, nationwide, 66% of 4th-grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013.

The reintroduction of grammar and memorization in elementary education would be a basic step in reversing the illiteracy trend. Sarah Morris, a Doctoral Academy Fellow for the Department of Education Reform at The University of Arkansas argues for memorization, as “It’s not realistic to look everything up.”

English literacy was ever-presumed in America to be a fundamental civil/human requirement; that is, presumed by our ancestors. In literacy, they succeeded, whereas we have not. If we can’t command our own language, we will lose any battle. Let Trump’s dismantling of the DOE begin in 2025.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.