Among those educators who honestly strive hard to teach kids to write well, who believe in punctuation, spelling, syntactical, and logical correctness, there are two schools of thought:
1. The correctness school: People in this school tend to prefer modern literature for study to ensure that kids don’t accidentally pick up antiquated usage and infuse it into their writing. This school holds that kids need to study only the ‘correct’ (modern) way, or they will be confused and misuse what they learn.
2. The holistic school: This is where Classical Writing belongs. We teach modern correctness (of course), but we also look at great writers from all ages, and haven’t found that children who imitate Shakespearean syntax, spelling, or punctuation tend to infuse it into their own writing in any way that induces errors by modern convention standards.
Yes, we teach correct conventions for the 21st century as a matter of priority. Yes, we want our kids to spell correctly. We teach that before we teach anything else in the lower grades, but for the higher levels … it’s different.
The English language is not static, and correctness in English right now is not correctness forever. Language does “evolve”, much as we wish it were different. This is easily seen by the changes from Beowulf to Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare to Samuel Richardson to today. Correctness in spelling and punctuation, even in word usage, is a slippery slope, which in some countries changes by state-run commissions sitting down after Fifty years and deciding that now THIS spelling is correct and THIS punctuation is the accepted one. It is done, usually, because the people have changed the way they speak, culture has let common usage change, so language commissions or style authorities make the changes official.
Webster in the 19th century (more or less officially??) changed American spelling with his new dictionary which was intended to reflect in spelling how Americans spoke. This was one of the first deviations from British English, and we continue to change from British English in punctuation and spelling. American punctuation differs significantly from that of British English, and not only that, within this country itself, there are different conventions on punctuation, especially over that much disputed mark, the comma. Some punctuation is truly a matter of following a ‘rule’ learned in school, but in truth, if you want to be hyper-pedantic, much “comma-tation” is a matter of style.
In the US, so far as I know, our official language of English changes when certain self-proclaimed style authorities like the Modern Language Associate or the Chicago Style Manual– our ‘accepted’ authorities–put out new style guides. Publishing houses, reputable journals, and educational institutions adhere to these style guides, not all to the same one, but they all more or less agree with each other, at least in the broad strokes.
Because there is no static quality to language, we should expect change in language (not that we need always embrace it with joy) because it has come and will continue come. As such it is actually a LIE to teach kids that correctness is static, because it is not. It may be early to introduce that concept to a kid who is merely doing CW Primer, but the fact is that kids need to know that language is not math; it is not an absolute for all time, it is a dynamic reflection of the culture, political, religious, and sociological ‘climate’ we live in—for better, and often for worse.
Classical Writing, unlike the schools I mentioned in class 1 above, teaches from ancient as well as modern models of English all the way through the curriculum, even in Aesop, our 3rd-4th grade book. We constantly expose kids to English of yester-centuries, and part of that to keep alive the best of our language from other ages, that which otherwise would be lost.
For most kids, it has been our experience that this is an enriching process. Their language skills grow, and they have more expressive powers than those kids who are only exposed to modern texts. For a few children, who struggle severely with English correctness at a very basic mechanical level, this would not be helpful, but for the majority of kids, I believe our broad model selection to be one of the greatest assets our program has to offer.
Most kids will sooner or later read Beatrix Potter, the King James Bible, or Edmund Spenser for themselves. One way or the other they will be exposed to much language that by modern standards has become ‘incorrect’. I put ‘incorrect’ in quotes first of all because we can’t ‘grandfather’ incorrectness into materials written before the particular incorrectness we are addressing was codified. And secondly there were eras, Shakespeare’s was one, where ‘correctness’ was less at a premium than it is today where correctness sadly seems to be one of the only standards left by which we are allowed to evaluate the quality of a piece of writing.
Don’t get me wrong, we at Classical Writing very much want to be up to modern standards in terms of producing writers who can write to satisfy the standards of the world they live in, but in addition we want to produce flexible writers, who possess a broad battery of verbal skills with which to respond both in speech and in writing to the issues that face us today. This requires broad reading (from antiquity and up) and broad analysis and imitation of some of the pieces read.
To sum up: The reason we decided to write CW is because we had delved into classical education at many levels by reading Cicero and Aristotle and Quintilian, and there was nothing out there that went to those sources and taught the way those sources taught.
Lene