From an English textbook "Voyages in English, 6th Year", copyright 1951. Looks like a bakelite tube radio on that windowsill. A modern set back in 1951.



Had this book in 6th grade in 1966 (Yes, this school had no budget for newer books, like every school). This book had a section for creative writing, and another section for grammar. My teachers only did the grammar section, as it was on the annual standardised tests There was no way to do computer scored tests of creative writing back then, or even today. .

Nice find.

English grammar as a subject disappeared from schools here in the late 1960s thanks to the New Age hippies running the Education Departments who asserted that grammar didn't need to be taught because could be 'absorbed'. After decades of complaints from employers and universities about the atrocious standard of written English among their hires and students, it was reintroduced about 5 years ago over the objections of teachers, who subsequently were required to go back to school to learn grammar and punctuation themselves.

Yes and now we have a new Language to all Learn here , It's called Cantonese, So I'm not sure correct English is so important these Days, Plus it's so Multicultal here everyone speaks another Language. often 2 or 3 but not correctly

Oddly enough, I had this fool from Deliveroo park across my driveway tonight. I made the order for him to shift his arse nice and short - he understood every word, despite being from the sub-continent, and didn't waste any time shifting his illegally parked car. These inconsiderate morons are worse than cab drivers the way they park cars and those electric bikes.

My son has two young kids, they were about 3 and 4 when this happened.

Son is tracking the pizza delivery guy (as you do) and, noticing he was having trouble navigating the streets around Naremburn, said casually "this guy's a bit of a dufus"

Of course, when the pizza guy arrives at the door, 4 year old miss announces to him:

"You're a dufus!!"

I ordered pizza last night from Dominos. They cooked the goods quick enough but I noticed on their website, where you can watch where the delivery driver is, he was heading pretty much anywhere except where he was supposed to be. He was Anglo and seemed new to the job. He must be one of those made unemployed by the coronavirus lockdowns and managed to get a job with Dominos - one of the companies that has hired more people due to changing shopping patterns. He seemed willing to please but he does need to learn how to read a map.

I had to find addresses all day and drive to them in my first job fresh out of school, but for the first couple of days I found it VERY hard!

I sympathise with both Dufus and your guy, Brad,.

Probably the importance of correct English has diminished since the 1950s in Australia, If you watch old documentaries or TV shows of the 50s and 60s you will hear a definite  British tone to many of the words, But now we have people from all over the world living here and so the Accent has changed.  I remember when I first went overseas and everybody my age at the time could speak at least 2 languages and I felt a little ignorant that I could only speak English. I was 21 at that time. Now of course computers have also created slang English and very few don't use slang. You will also see Slang in news Articles where once that would of been unheard of, As time goes on proper English will become less important than being able to communicate in 2 or 3 languages. Particularly here where we  have people from all over the world living here .A Multicultural  City can be a very interesting place to live in.  Some of those suburbs from our past were dead boring  and dead end places to live ,,

Pete

he understood every word, despite being from the sub-continent

In practical terms, English is still the lingua franca there, which is why so many help desks are dumped there and why we have so many of them here, especially in Sydney (Optus!). They usually have no problem understanding me, but I often have a hard time understanding them.

In my English classes, we had to make schematic diagrams of sentences.


I imagine this got me used to schematic representations of stuff, especially electronics.

Checked out You-Tube's 'closed-captions' last night: They said it would be 'auto-generated' from the content. The words appeared on screen without punctuation but, pleasingly, synced to soundtrack, telling me that the stream was slightly delayed to give the Google audio-to-text computer a head-start. It made surprisingly very few mistakes - it once was confused by 'there' & 'their', but from thereon (no pun intended ) was able to correctly place 'there' & 'their' based on context, as the patented Google 'TensorFlow' machine-learning modules kicked in!

In my English classes, we had to make schematic diagrams of sentences.

Never had diagrams in my day, but in Year 3 we parsed every word in a given sentence. Left column the word, right column its description, attributes, relationship, etc.

Checked out You-Tube's 'closed-captions' last night

Some of those automated ones are absolutely hilarious, when the words are misheard by the conversion software.

"..grammar..disappeared from schools here in the late 1960s..[it was] asserted that grammar..could be 'absorbed'"

I didn't know that, but I believe it, that much of grammar is automatic. How does the slow neural brain do it? Probably with quantum-computing?
There's an 'arms-race' between Google & IBM's 'Watson' to make machine voice assistance indistinguishable from a live operator - the machines taking into account context, slang, idioms...

much of grammar is automatic

Spoken language of a mother tongue is learned by ear. Kids are corrected by adults when they use the wrong word or tense, etc. Written language is different ball game. Try to write coherently in a foreign language, especially a strongly inflected one like (say) Polish, without an understanding of its grammar. English is not strongly inflected but foreigners, whose mother tongues are not inflected, commonly make mistakes, both in speech and writing, with such basic things as tense, number, pronoun gender and the use of the definite and indefinite articles.

As a volunteer, I have done reading recovery tutoring for primary school kids and have also tutored reading and writing for adults in evening classes at TAFE. Of the two, the kids were much easier. They are little learning machines that just need constant encouragement until the light eventually comes on. The adults were very difficult and progress, if any, was very slow. After 3-hour sessions of that I was exhausted.

-/\/\/\/\/- is futile. <-- How's that for a sentence with a schematic diagram?