Our culture-killers.

The latest evidence from Queensland supports the view that many of the nation's children are being denied adequate knowledge of their centuries-old culture. Culture begins with language. Corrupt language, by malign neglect of grammar, proceeds to remove from the curriculum most of what our adolescents need to know about our predominantly European cultural traditions, especially history and literature, and you've created a culture-free ("prejudice"-free) generation whose minds you can engineer as you like (though happily such engineering couldn't save the USSR, where they had a 70-years' go at it).

At the federal level, and in some of the states, ministers of education are attempting to reverse this idiotic process, underway since the 1960s.

Not in Queensland. As the Australian recently pointed out (13 June), the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ) has produced a teachers' guide to grammar, full of the most basic errors, ideologically driven. University of Queensland Linguistics Professor Rodney Huddleston described it as "the worst published material on English grammar" he had seen. Nouns are labelled adjectives, verbs are called adverbs, "won't" and "capable of" are described as verbs, and so on. ETAQ declined to issue a new edition of the book, merely listing the errors on its website. It even disputed whether they were errors. The book is the work of one Lenore Ferguson, editor of ETAQ's journal Words'Worth, its title the product of a highly original wit.

As Dr Kevin Donnelly, executive director of the Melbourne-based consultancy Education Strategies, pointed out:

That the material is flawed is partly because of the priority given to a functional linguistics approach to grammar. Functional grammar, similar to critical literacy, is imbued with the view that language has to be analysed in terms of power relationships. Students have to be taught how standard English is used by more powerful groups in society to oppress others. With functional grammar, children are no longer taught things such as parts of speech or how to parse a sentence; instead, the focus is on so-called real meaning and real contexts where language is defined as a socio-cultural construct.

Nouns become participants, verbs are described as process and adverbial clauses and phrases are changed to circumstances. Such is the dense and arcane terminology associated with functional grammar that former NSW premier Bob Carr had it banished from the curriculum.

Language, literature, history: at stake is our cultural memory as a nation.