- Opinion
- 4 de February de 2025
- No Comment
- 10 minutes read
Grammar and Impostors

Grammar and Impostors
Grammar isn’t just about expressing ourselves correctly and structuring our thoughts coherently. It also helps us unmask impostors

Last December, an email landed in my inbox promoting a training course for teachers in adult education. Since it was sent to my XTEC account—the official email assigned to all teachers affiliated with the Departament d’Educació—I assume it was dispatched via a database including those of us working in a CFA (Centre de Formació d’Adults)1. This suggests that, while the Departament was not the sender, it had at least facilitated the email’s circulation. The actual organiser was the Institut de Desenvolupament Professional2 (IDP), an institution within the University of Barcelona, formerly known as the Institut de Ciències de l’Educació3. The email contained a link to the course description, laid out in the usual format (objectives, content, methodology, etc.). At the bottom, it was stated that the Departament d’Educació i Formació Professional was co-organising the course and that the certification would count towards professional advancement in future competitions or calls issued by the Departament.
So far, nothing out of the ordinary. But my focus here is not on the 20-hour course’s objectives. Judging by certain buzzwords in the description (globalised learning, competency profile, learning situation, methodological transformation), the goal was evidently to push the now-familiar repertoire of pedagogical prescriptions—those same strategies that have, as we all know, propelled the Catalan education system to unparalleled excellence, as consistently confirmed by every external evaluation. No, my concern is not with the objectives but with a truly staggering failure: the introductory text itself. In fact, to call it a text is an act of generosity, given that it fails to meet any of the basic criteria for coherence, cohesion, or even correctness. It is astonishing how, in just over 3,000 characters, one can accumulate such an arsenal of linguistic crimes: grotesque syntactic incoherence, conceptual nonsense born of expressive incompetence, basic typographical errors, redundancies and absurd repetitions, glaring punctuation mistakes, erratic capitalisation, agreement errors, mangled prepositions, zeugma gone awry, possessive determiners floating without an identifiable possessor, ignorance of elementary prefixation rules, lexical poverty, and laughable semantic distortions, persistent issues with prepositions, whether due to omission or incorrect usage; inconsistencies in the presentation of certain data; in sum, a relentless and merciless assault on grammar and, needless to say, on any notion of style in writing. Ah, and as the final flourish, the ostentatious presence of jargon and convoluted expressions from a pseudo-scientific lexicon to which the pedagogical establishment has traditionally been so fondly attached.
This is the reality: the University of Barcelona and the Departament d’Educació addressing teachers with a text that is not only unreadable but utterly inappropriate by any standard. As a citizen, I find it outrageous; as a philologist, I find it disgraceful; but as a recipient of the course, I find it insulting, as though I were being treated like a fool. How is it possible, I wonder in dismay, that institutions such as the University of Barcelona—my dear alma mater—and the Departament d’Educació, our common professional home, should allow their names to be dragged through the mud by texts of this nature? Let’s be clear: this is not an ad hominem critique. I do not know who authored this ‘non-text’, nor do I care. My point is that this is not an isolated case but the symptom of a larger problem: a fundamental neglect of language, a disdain for grammar that mirrors a broader disdain for knowledge itself—one that has been cultivated for decades by constructivist pseudo-pedagogy, now the dominant ideology in our education system. And yet we lament our students’ poor reading comprehension and limited expressive abilities. But tell me, where do you think this illiteracy is being incubated? “In faculties of education”, comes the whispered answer—one that has circulated for years. Is it not time to say this out loud and demand a serious debate about the role of these faculties, institutes, and affiliated bodies?
Adult education remains a last bastion of common sense in teaching—openly, I should say, because many secondary school teachers apply the same principles within their own classrooms, albeit often in semi-clandestine fashion. What do I mean by common sense in teaching? Simply this: that in a classroom, there is a teacher who possesses knowledge and skills, and there are students who are there to acquire them. The teacher’s expertise is not a fluke but the result of years of study and professional experience. In adult education, students arrive with significant life experience and well-formed personalities. This creates a certain human equality between teacher and learner, distinguishing the sector from other levels of education. But this equality has limits: professionally, teacher and student are not the same. This is not about rigid hierarchies but about differentiated responsibilities. If a class has one teacher and twenty students, there are not twenty-one people with identical functions, expectations, and decision-making power. If a teacher does not embrace this role, they are unlikely to ever become a competent professional.
As a philologist, I teach languages. As a general rule (exceptions always exist, of course), I know more about this subject than my students do. It is my responsibility to guide their learning using the most appropriate methods—decided by me and my colleagues, since teaching is also a collective effort. Imagine I have a retired cabinetmaker in my Catalan class who struggles with the language of Llull. I have a great personal rapport with him, but when I mark his writing, the page is so covered in red ink that I have to give him a low grade. Now imagine I enrol in a furniture restoration workshop at a community centre, where he is the instructor. Our personal relationship might strengthen further, but in the workshop, would our roles, responsibilities, and authority be the same as in my classroom? If anyone believes they would, let them explain why. In return, I will explain why the Earth is flat, and we’ll call it even.
In general, adult students do not reject grammar. Quite the opposite: most are highly receptive, and regardless of individual learning ability—which varies—their attitude towards knowledge is positive. Knowledge: this is the essence of education. Learning can only take place when both teacher and student share a love for knowledge. Knowledge is acquired and then either consolidated, remembered, or forgotten—everything depends on each individual’s trajectory. But what truly matters is that knowledge is valued, appreciated, and held in esteem, for this is the fundamental purpose of education. Naturally, each person has their own inclinations and will gravitate towards knowledge that is more theoretical or practical, more technological or humanistic, more academic or artistic. Yet within every student lies a small, untapped space in the vast human adventure of knowledge, and the role of the school—of the education system—is to uncover it, awaken curiosity, and, in doing so, guide the learner towards themselves. Yet certain pseudo-pedagogical trends—marked by their hostility to knowledge itself and their obsession with how things should be taught (to sustain the educational innovation industry) rather than what must be taught—can only lead to disaster. And I am not suggesting that the how (didactics) is unimportant—of course, it matters. But the way it has usurped the central role in education at the expense of the what is yet another assault on common sense. This is precisely why, driven by corporatist interests that relentlessly inflate the importance of the how, one can produce ungrammatical, nonsensical texts—texts that, tragically, we have all come to accept as normal.
With my adult students, I often conduct a practical exercise to highlight the importance of grammar. We analyse fraudulent emails—those phishing scams where impostors, posing as bank officials or IT support, try to trick us into clicking on a link. Without fail, these fraudsters lack grammatical competence, and we always catch them through their clumsy syntax, spelling errors, lexical oddities, or typographical blunders. I conclude the exercise with a simple reflection:
“Do you see? Grammar isn’t just about expressing ourselves correctly and structuring our thoughts coherently. It also helps us unmask impostors and avoid falling into their traps”.
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1 Adult Education Centres
2 Professional Development Institute
3 Science Education Institute
Source: educational EVIDENCE
Rights: Creative Commons