The Trump Vision for Education in America

Education is one of the Trump campaign's important positions

Until November 9, 2016, I never imagined there would be any reason to consider what Donald Trump had in mind for education in the USA. I was surprised to see that “Education” was one of sixteen important “positions” on the Trump campaign website which has now been dismantled in favour of  https://www.donaldjtrump.com (This post is updated from my original comments on November 10, 2016.)

The Trump plan has only one theme:  choice

The Trump vision for education has one theme:  “choice.”  I have to admit I find “choice” to be a very appealing notion in education, in particular because it necessarily implies variety. (Singular, silver-bullet solutions in education seem to inevitably produce more problems than solutions. See "Everything Works!") In the Trump plan, “choice” means “public or private schools,” “magnet schools and charter schools.”

What does "choice" mean in practice?

Each of these varieties of education carries its own particular baggage and connotation.  After he had spent three torturous and tedious years at a public high school which enjoyed an ambience somewhere between a gulag and maximum-security prison, my son finally agreed to transfer to a private school.  Private schools are incredibly expensive, but the best money I’ve ever spent on anything.  Short version, private schools = big money. “Magnet schools” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school) are associated with the early days of desegregation and “busing”; meaning inner-city Afro-American kids being bused long distances out to the suburbs—a situation no-body liked apparently. Anyone with any inking about “charter schools” can predict exactly where the Trump plan is heading—the defunding and dismantling of public education.  When I googled “charter schools,” three of the first four hits to come up were ads for the CSUSA Corporation:  http://www.charterschoolsusa.com. 

K-12 education modeled on Trump University

The Trump vision is to turn K-12 education over to the for-profit business sector.  In other words, kindergartens, grade schools and high schools in the USA will become versions of the now-defunct Trump University which, post-election,was still on trial for defrauding students. The campaign web site provides a talking-points road map for how to get to for-profit education.

Are CEOs of charter school corporations about to get $20 billion richer?

Step one, sentence one, of the “Trump Vision”:  “Immediately add an additional federal investment of $20 billion towards school choice.” Kinda sounds good, if you don’t actually read the words.  The promise is not to add “$20 billion” to education, the money is going to “school choice” which sort of sounds like the money is going to end up in the pockets of the CEOs of the aforementioned corporations.

Is the plan to add $20 billion or cut $20 billion from education?

Where is the money coming from you might ask? Sentence two:  “This will be done by reprioritizing existing federal dollars.”  If you are familiar with how to read political bureaucratize, you will know to translate this sentence as “No-one knows”  or, more to the point, "We're not saying." Unfortunately, the most logical possibility is that the money will come out of existing education budgets.  Just in case you thought, as I did on first reading, that Trump would add $20 billion to the education budget, he is most likely (though no one knows for sure) promising to cut $20 billion from public education.

$24 billion cut from education for the poor and disabled?

On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to argue with Trump’s vision and his plan to “Establish the national goal of providing school choice to every one of the 11 million school aged [sic: school-aged] children living in poverty.”  Before we get too excited about Trump’s “vision” we should note that this is a rehash of a Republican plan presented in January, 2014.

Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a former education secretary, and Tim Scott (S.C.), one of only two African Americans in the Senate, will propose far-reaching “choice” legislation on Tuesday that would take the $24 billion in federal money spent annually to help educate 11 million students in poverty or with disabilities and convert it into block grants to the states, among other changes. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/gop-measure-would-promote-school-choice-with-federal-funding/2014/01/27/7fd52e7e-8778-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html) 

Oh, oh!  Could Trump’s reprioritized, “additional $20 billion,” actually be the money now being spent on the poor and the disabled?

Defunding and dismantling of public education--by the numbers

In case my description of the Trump plan as “defunding and dismantling of public education” sounds hyperbolic, consider the numbers.  The Trump plan calls upon the states to surrender “$110 billion of their own education budgets toward school choice.”  The total budget for K-12 education in the USA now is $620 billion.  Trump is proposing that roughly 18% of the public schools’ budgets be cut.  If you think public schools in the USA are struggling now, imagine what they will look like after losing close to one dollar in every five of their funding. At the same time, we will see the proliferation of  American kindergartens, grade schools and high schools modelled on Trump University. 

Should Canadians care about the decline of education in the USA?

Should we in Canada care?  I’m not sure.  Unless of course, somewhere down the line, we are told, in the process of renegotiating NAFTA, that funding a public education system gives us an unfair trade advantage, and we will have to stop it if we want to do business with our American neighbours.

Does Knowledge Require Truth?

The absolute truth

I spent a career telling university students that if they encountered someone who claimed to know “The Truth,” they should run in the opposite direction because what would follow was bound to be religious dogma or a schizophrenic rant based on an encounter with God—the kind of truth that could not be checked or verified or even questioned. The notion of absolute truth disappeared after Nietzsche announced that “God is dead” in 1882 and Einstein followed up with a “theory of relativity” in 1905.  Marx’s claim that “religion was the opiate of the people” made it plain, at least for we egg heads who occupied the universities, that the Twentieth Century was going to have to get by without “The Truth.”

The tree of knowledge

The problem I faced as a professor was that my job was to be the serpent in the garden, encouraging young people to take a bite out of the apple from the tree of knowledge (no, not that kind of Biblical, carnal knowledge, just ordinary knowing things).  How could I claim to be passing on knowledge without at the same time claiming that what I was teaching was true?  Luckily, for me, I taught literature which had already been described as “The lies which tell the truth.”  This paradox allowed me to evade the issue of “The Truth” and even “the truth,” but the question still dogged me.

The correspondence theory of truth

Every five-year-old knows the difference between the truth and a lie, but once you’ve got a university degree under your belt, chances are you’re not so sure anymore.  The five-year-old knows that if Mom asks “did you eat the cookie?” and you’ve still got crumbs falling from your lips, the truth is “yes, I did” and the lie is everything else . . . Martians, the imaginary friend, the dog and plain old “nope.”  This is known as the correspondence theory of truth, and it is the default theory, which means if you have never thought of this question before this is what you think.  A statement is true if it corresponds to “reality.”  Did I mention that right after Nietzsche killed God, Einstein killed reality? 

Relativity, skepticism and the absence of truth

The reason the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t really work is that for the last hundred years or so, since Einstein said “E=Mc2,” and physicists admitted they really don’t know what “matter” is, we’ve all been pretty uncertain about what is and isn’t reality.   Actually, for as long as human beings have been able to record their thoughts on the question, we have been uncertain about the nature of reality.  The Greek philosopher Pyrrho took his skepticism and disbelief in reality so far that, we are told, his disciples had to go before him moving objects out of his way so that he wouldn’t walk into them. Nowadays our disbelief in reality isn’t so much of the walking-into-walls variety, but our certainty that we are uncertain has become widespread.  The problem is that this uncertainty gets translated into a vague belief that there is no truth or the idea that truth really doesn’t matter anymore.  Truth, in the postmodern era, is the baby that has gotten thrown out with the bathwater.

Coherent truth

However, in the absence of absolute, God’s honest truth, and corresponds-to-reality truth, what is left to us is an imperfect form of truth known as “coherent truth.”  Something is true because it is coherent in relation to something else that is true because it is coherent in relation to something else that is true and so on.  Truth prevails as long as there is no break in the chain, no spot where something believed true upon which other truths depend is proven false, then the chain of truth must be reconstructed.  More frequently, as we follow the trail of coherent truths we arrive at a moment where we have to shrug and admit that we just don’t know.  This moment and gesture (the shrug) are known in rhetoric as “an aporia.” 

Truth only applies when there is meaning

Why would I accept such a seemingly weak form of truth?  In the first place, there is a limited category of things which we can call true or false.  Wandering in the forest, you would never stop before a tree and declare “this tree is true!”  Entering a room you would never find yourself saying “this chair is true.”  We only apply the question of truth to things which have a meaning.  Only when there is a meaning can we say that something is true or false.  It is impossible to say that something is incoherent yet true.  

Heuristic truth

In fact, there is a form of truth, that some people would consider an even weaker form of truth, which I accept.  I accept it as the only kind of truth that is available to us. It is called “heuristic truth.”  “Heuristic” is a tricky, and even dangerous, word.  It derives from the Greek for “find” or “discover.”  Heuristic truth is the kind of truth we discover through trial and error, though dialogue, though logic, through deductive and inductive reasoning, from experience and evidence and examples, because, in the simplest of terms, it makes sense; it is coherent.

If you google the word “heuristic” you will find definitions like “temporary” or “a short cut” to the truth.  Maybe, but human life and the history of our species are temporary relative to the time frame of our universe.  “Short cuts” are all we have time for.

Heuristic pedagogy

Heuristics is also a form of pedagogy.  It is how we learn, not just in the classroom but in life.  We keep adding new information, and adjusting what we believe to be true.  The only test available to us is that we keep trying to put it all together and if the result is coherent, it is the truth so far.

The Acropolis: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato and Aristotle

This is a picture of me standing on the Acropolis,  a few weeks ago, looking down on the theatre where the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were first presented.  Here in Athens, this is where truth was first invented by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.

The Sour Bibliography

How Many Americans Think Planet Earth Is 6000 Years Old?

A Short History of the World

Most people these days think of H.G. Wells as a science-fiction writer, in fact as one of the pillars of the genre together with Jules Verne, but his best selling, most popular work in his lifetime was A Short History of the World which he wrote in 1922.  In the opening paragraph of this brilliant and monumental work, Wells writes:

A couple of hundred years ago men possessed the history of little more than the last three thousand years.  What happened before that time was a matter of legend and speculation.  Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or the autumn of that year.  This fantastically precise misconception was based  upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith.  Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time.

The Universe is 6000 years old

The idea, which Wells describes, of the Universe having been created 4004 years before Christ was first established by the Archbishop James Ussher in the 17th century.  Since that time it has remained a logical assumption that if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible’s description of creation, then you must also believe that the planet is in the neighbourhood of 6000 years old.

How many Americans think planet Earth is 6000 years old?  When I asked a version of this question on Quora, the blasé, un-challenged answer that came back was 30+ million. 

Is evolution news?

The question of evolution became “news” once again in the wake of the Republican primary debates, when it was noted that none of the candidates would admit to believing in a scientific as opposed to Biblical explanation of human existence.  Dr. Ben Carson, in particular, was singled out for criticism because he is a doctor, and therefore a scientist.  To reject evolution, as many commentators have pointed out, is to reject science.  It’s pretty much impossible for someone to believe in scientific descriptions of the behaviour of molecules and DNA, and still not believe in evolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm-dKc9O0Nc

When asked directly by Bill O’Reilly, if he was, in fact, “a creationist,” Dr. Carson responded, “I know a lot of people say I believe the earth is 6000 years old. They have no basis to say that.  I don’t know how old the earth is.  It says that in the beginning ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ period.”

Why can't US politicians say "the Bible isn't literal truth"?

Dr. Carson’s answer was evasive and disingenuous.  The really important question is why couldn’t Dr. Carson, a recognized scientist, say that in our day scientific research has displaced the literal interpretation of the Genesis story of creation.  For as long as the Bible has been studied, it has been understood that the Bible can be interpreted literally or allegorically.  With scientific advancement, the Bible can still be read as an allegorical text whose primacy lies in the moral lessons of its sub-text rather than in its literal, historical accuracy.  Who are Dr. Carson’s imagined constituents who cannot accept the allegorical truth of the Bible over a literal interpretation?  Who are these constituents who cannot accept what Wells describes as a “universal truth,” accepted for at least the last 100 years among the literate, that our planet is older and our universe took longer to create than described in the Judeo-Christian Bible? 

Do they really exist?  When I asked myself this question, I concluded that this constituency can only exist within a population that doesn’t read.  The question becomes one of literacy.  

If you read scientific explanations or, for that matter, if you actually read the Bible, it becomes pretty obvious that the Genesis version of creation should not be taken literally although, like every good myth or legend, it does have some basis in fact.

How many Americans can't read?

How many Americans can’t read?  Here, for me, is the real shock.

According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.

[Since I first wrote this post, and continued to research illiteracy in the USA, I have discovered numerous claims that the American literacy rate is 97.7%, 99.9% and 100%.  In each of these three cases, the CIA World Fact Book is given as the source.  I have not been able to find literacy rates for the USA in the World Fact Book.]

The USA is the richest, most powerful and, allegedly, the most advanced country in the world, but in terms of literacy, based on the CIA’s World Fact Book, the average literacy rate for the world as a whole is 86.1%; making the USA slightly below average in terms of literacy.  The USA has better literacy rates than countries in dire poverty, facing protracted civil wars, and those countries which actively prevent women from learning to read,  but at an 86% literacy rate the USA lags behind China (96.4%), behind Cuba (99.8%),  behind Greece (97.7%), behind Jamaica (88.7%), Mexico (95.1) and Russia (99.7%); in fact, behind most of the stable nations in the world.  

Can democracy survive without literacy?

How do you conduct an advanced, sophisticated democracy when so many of your citizens can’t or don’t read?  As Wells points out, nations were able to exist and thrive through the invention of paper, then print, and in the USA in particular by being able to communicate across great distances using telegraph and railways and steamships.  How can you conduct an advanced, sophisticated democracy when so many citizens are prepared to believe that our Universe was created in seven days, 6000 years ago, because that is what they have been told, and so many leaders are prepared to kowtow to such beliefs?

Civilization and progress

Reading Wells' Short History of the World, you realize that civilization has progressed on our planet because of the double-edged swords of empires, technologies, religions and economies, which can spread knowledge, unify diverse peoples and promote peace and stability, but can equally create hegemony, inequality and injustice, and ignite civil and tribal wars capable of drawing the whole world into their vortex.

With a presidential election in the USA in ten days from now, I assume we will soon be relieved from the daily barrage of Donald Trump’s name and image and bombast—unless he marries a Kardashian (a possibility I would not preclude).  When you read the history of empires—Persian, Mongolian, Arab, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, European—it is impossible not to notice how the USA today shows all the signs of a well-established pattern of collapse:  irreparable internal divisions, widespread injustice and inequality, declining or stagnant quality of education, xenophobia and protectionism, imbroglio in foreign wars which the population neither supports nor understands, declining attachment to shared beliefs (including and especially in the American case in democracy itself), internal conflicts based on race, religion and economic class, decline in respect for leadership and the political class as a whole, economic decline and extreme indebtedness, an oversized military putting a strain on the overall economy, a marked decline in the physical and mental wellbeing of the average citizen (obesity, alienation, paranoia, drug addiction, etc), endemic egoism and radical individualism.  That Donald Trump is an icon of egoism and the reductio ad absurdum of radical individualism is of little importance, but what is truly nation-shattering is that so many Americans see him as representing them, as representing their thoughts and feelings and attitudes.  That is a fact and a fracture from which the USA will not soon recover.

PS:  I really got this election prediction wrong!

Something Rotten in the State of Grammar

Descriptive versus prescriptive grammar

I still haven’t recovered from the revelation that “grammatical mistake” isn’t a mistake.

English grammar is basically pattern recognition.  Once we recognize an established pattern in the language we attempt to maintain it.  Prescriptive grammar (which attempts to dictate how people should speak) eventually derives from descriptive grammar (how people actually speak).  Of course, “ain’t no denyin’,” that what some grammarians might take for egregious, fossilized errors, Everyman accepts as just “speakin’ plain.”

Can a mistake be grammatical?

It may be swimming against the current, spitting into the wind, and [insert your own cliche here] to challenge the evolution of the language and attempt to manipulate prescriptive grammar, but that’s what we pedants do.  Inspired by the expression “grammatical mistake,” I have come to surmise that there is something rotten in the state of English grammar.

Adjectives that end in "al"

I first conjectured that the problem could be located in how we use and misuse adjectives that end in “al.”  Typically a noun is used as an adjective and then we add “al” to give the adjective a new meaning, as shown here:

Noun Adjective “al” adjective

economics economic economical

politics politic political

logic                logic logical

rhetoric            rhetoric rhetorical

mathematics mathematics mathematical

grammar         grammar grammatical

Adding "al" changes the meaning of the adjective

The pattern shows that adding “al” changes the meaning of the adjective:  a “logic lesson” versus a “logical lesson,” a “rhetoric question” versus a “rhetorical question,” a “grammar book” versus a “grammatical book,” an “economic study” versus an “economical study.” 

My number of “al” adjectives (above) is quite small.  Like the proverbial blind monk attempting to describe an elephant by feeling its tail, I was perhaps considering an untypical sample.  Scientifically, I should be considering all “al” adjectives.  Ooops! Have you any idea how many words in the English language end in “al”?  The internet mocks me again by providing various lists of words that end in “al.”

This list offers 3544 “al” words:

http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/al/

Meaning of the suffix "al"

This site offers 1272 words that end with the suffix “al,”  and adds that the suffix “al” means “relating to,” as if to mock me once again for thinking “grammatical mistake” was a mistake.

https://www.learnthat.org/word_lists/view/1272

What can we say about words that end in “al”? Most of them seem to be adjectives.  Nouns like “cereal” and “offal” are among the rare “al” nouns, but they also serve as adjectives.  It would be an exaggeration, if not an outright mistake,  to categorize “al” as a suffix in all the instances listed, if we mean by “suffix” something added to an already existing or independent English word.  

Is "al" a suffix?

For example “leth” is not an word, but “lethal” is.  

http://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/leth

I would imagine that there is an etymological explanation that can trace “leth” as a Greek or Latin source and “al” as a suffix, but the issue I am trying to grasp is what happens within the English language when you add “al” to an existing adjective.  There are many “al” adjectives which have no form or root in English when you remove the “al.”

Among those that do, the adjectives seem to consistently show change.  What does the change mean?

humour         humoural

metaphysics metaphysical

physics         physical

abdomine abdominal 

chorus choral

allegoric         allegorical

analytic         analytical

commune communal

terminus         terminal

ecologic         ecological

structure         structural

Return to Baker and 1901

My conclusion is that Baker is still right and we should avoid “grammatical mistake” and, for that matter, “grammar mistake” in favour of “an error in grammar” or simply use the adjective “ungrammatical.”  The conspiracy of errors that we call modern English has created yet another obvious flaw because educated native speakers of English have lost track of how to use adjectives.  Instead we have come to blithely accept that “grammatical mistake,” “grammar mistake,”  “ungrammatical mistake,” and "mistake in grammar" all end up referring to exactly the same thing.  “Logical fallacy,” “illogical fallacy,” “logic fallacy” and "fallacious logic" would also all have to have the same meaning (and thinking about it, I have concluded that the phenomenon should still be called "sophistry").  We have muddled the subtleties and precision which, I assume, changes in spelling were originally intended to convey.

“Grammar Mistake” or “Grammatical Mistake”: Which Expression Is Correct?

I  asked a version of this question on Quora, naively and mistakenly assuming that I would launch a groundswell  of support to stop people from using the expression “grammatical mistake.”  It seemed pretty obvious to me that something was either “grammatical” or a “mistake”; it couldn’t be both.  The word “grammar” is used as a noun modifier (actually every noun in the language can be used as a modifier), which we use for “grammar book,” "grammar teacher,” "grammar lesson,” so clearly the correct expression must be “grammar mistake.”  Imagine my surprise with the unanimous responses that there is nothing wrong with “grammatical mistake.”

I must admit that I was trying to be a bit too cute in how I formulated the Quora question:  “Isn’t the expression ‘grammatical mistake’ a grammar mistake?”  As a number of my respondents pointed out,   “grammatical mistake” isn’t a grammar mistake because it combines an adjective and a noun.  That’s how grammar works.  The expression may be semantic nonsense but that doesn’t mean it is an error in terms of grammar.

In truth, none of my correspondents would join with me in calling the expression nonsense, and would only go so far as to say that it might be taken as an oxymoron.  As Billy Kerr, patiently and clearly explained:

“‘grammatical’ has two distinct meanings.
Grammatical is an adjective: 1. relating to grammar. 2. well formed; in accordance with the rules of the grammar of a language
Mistake is a noun.
The adjective (in sense 1 - see above) modifies the noun. It’s perfectly grammatical (in sense 2) for an adjective to modify a noun, since that is the purpose of adjectives.
If sense 1 did not exist, it would not be ungrammatical, it would just be an oxymoron.”

Of course, "sense 1" does exist, so I can’t even save face by claiming that the expression is an oxymoron.  Could I claim it was ambiguous, a bit confusing?  Maybe, but not really.  When literate, native speakers of English unanimously claim that something is correct English, then it is correct English.  That’s how language works.

Still I was disturbed. Was it just that I didn’t like being wrong, especially about the English language?  Probably.  Why did I think “grammatical mistake” was a mistake?  Searching online I discovered this answer:

"The expression 'grammatical error' sounds, and is, in a sense, paradoxical, for the reason that a form can not be grammatical and erroneous at the same time. One would not say musical discord. . . . Because of the apparent contradiction of terms, the form grammatical error should be avoided and 'error in construction,' or 'error in English,' etc., be used in its stead. Of course one should never say, 'good grammar' or 'bad grammar.'"(J. T. Baker, Correct English, Mar. 1, 1901)
from http://grammar.about.com/od/fh/g/grammaticalerrorterm.htm

This discovery wasn’t all that reassuring since I found it on a web page called “grammatical errors” and it meant I was about 115 years out of date, and even Baker wasn’t willing to call “grammatical error” a mistake, just an expression to be avoided.  To add to my misgivings Baker’s example of “musical discord” was an expression I could imagine myself using.  Then there was my Quora correspondent  Bernard Glassman who acutely observed that the problem I was alleging would also have to apply to “hypothetical question” and “logical fallacy.”  Ouch.  I had never complained about “logical fallacy” but the expression suffered the same contradiction as “grammatical mistake.”

Reading (in fact, misreading) Edward Anderson, a third Quora respondent, I suddenly considered another possible meaning of “grammatical error.”  Could it mean that grammar was wrong?  Not anyone’s individual use of grammar was wrong, but that the rules of grammar themselves were wrong at some other level—in terms of semantics or logic or efficiency or clarity.

I have certainly sympathized with students who found it plainly stupid that “my brother is bigger than me” is ungrammatical and “he is bigger than I” is grammatically correct.  Traditional prescriptive grammar has created some fatuous notions like “split infinitives” and not ending a sentence with a preposition (on the grounds that you can’t do those things in Latin).  The most recent grammar controversy even has a name, the oxymoronic “singular their.”  Prescriptive grammar (pre-controversy) dictated that “Every student handed in his assignment on time” was correct grammar even if every student in the class was a woman.   This might be an example of a “grammatical mistake” but, of course, it’s not what people mean when they use this expression.

I haven't let go.  I need to pursue this conspiracy we call grammar and standard English further and deeper and wider.

In the interests of full disclosure, here are the responses of my Quora correspondents:

Billy Kerr, Native English speaker, from the UK.
127 Views

No, because “grammatical has two distinct meanings.
Grammatical is an adjective: 1. relating to grammar. 2. well formed; in accordance with the rules of the grammar of a language
Mistake is a noun.
The adjective (in sense 1 - see above) modifies the noun. It’s perfectly grammatical (in sense 2) for an adjective to modify a noun, since that is the purpose of adjectives.
If sense 1 did not exist, it would not be ungrammatical, it would just be an oxymoron.”

Bernard Glassman, Once a teacher of English, always, and annoyingly, a teacher of English.
103 Views

If "grammatical mistake" is itself an error in grammar, is calling something a "hypothetical question" equally erroneous, since it is, in fact, a question? What, then, is a logical fallacy? (This is getting to be way too much fun, but I would love to hear some other examples of those two, contradictory, meanings of “-ical.”)

Selena York, Business, Marketing, Finance, Insurance, Advertising, Consulting, Management,
8 Views

I always thought it was “grammatical error”. Either, or -

Kimberly Masterson, Editor, proofreader, writer in the United States
15 Views

Thanks for the A2A. Grammatical mistake is acceptable. My personal opinion is that grammatical error sounds better. Both are grammatically correct.

Edward Anderson, 7 years of Grammar School
29 Views

Interestingly, however, even if we stick by your chosen definition of #2, which is by far not the most commonly used one, the term “grammatical mistake” is still not a mistake in grammar. It is a syntactically well-formed phrase consisting of a noun and an adjective that modifies it. It is, at best, an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp,” “military intelligence,” or “president trump.”
In fact, there are entire classes of what you refer to grammatical mistakes, where the grammar is unassailable, yet still there is a mistake. We see them far more often in computer programs than in natural language. There’s the banana problem, where you run off the end of an array (so called as an homage to the grade-school child saying, “I know how to spell banana, but I don’t know when to stop.”) Then there’s the off-by-one error, where you store information in an array as if it’s zero-based, but retrieve it as if it’s one-based. The more formal term for these is not “grammatical error,” however; it’s semantic error.
You see, in English, “grammatical error” in common usage does not mean an error that is grammatical. It means an error in the grammar. And semantic error does not mean an error that is semantically well-formed; it means an error of semantics.

Billy Kerr 
Actually sense 1 existed first. “grammatical (adj.) 1520s, of or pertaining to grammar," from Middle French grammatical and directly from Late Latin grammaticalis "of a scholar," from grammaticus "pertaining to grammar".
So etymologically speaking, you have the timeline backwards.

Malathy Garewal, Never learnt the grammar, but am a voracious reader and love the language.

95 Views • Malathy has 30+ answers in Grammar

Thanks for the A2A.

No, I do not think so.

I do understand the reason for the question, but I think here ‘grammatical’ is used as a qualifier for the kind of mistake made. Though I personally would prefer to say that something is grammatically wrong.

As for your reasoning of ‘grammatical’ versus ‘ungrammatical error’, think of substituting ‘typographical’ or ‘spelling’. While I can say something is a ‘typographical error and not a spelling mistake’, it would not be right to say ‘untypographical’. Hope that makes sense.

This Professor Should Be Fired for Defending What I Believe In

I call it the “ad hominem dilemma.”  Just to remind you, an “ad hominem argument“ is a logical fallacy defined as trying to win an argument by attacking a person rather than the ideas that person is trying to present or represent in a debate.  The dilemma I have just coined occurs when you like an idea, but you don’t like the person presenting it, or you like a person but you don’t like the idea or argument.  In an ideal world the dilemma disappears because you always agree with the ideas of the people you like—though you might want to have your intellectual rigour checked.

So you might feel torn when you discover that Hitler liked apple pie, and you like apple pie, but you don’t want to be identified as one of those apple-pie-eating Nazis.  Like me, you might have wanted to tear out your hair when Wayne Gretsky announced he was supporting Stephen Harper in the last federal election—you remember, the election Gretsky couldn’t vote in because of Conservative policy preventing non-residents from voting.  Tells you what years in the California sun can do to an otherwise sane Canadian hockey player.  

Then there’s the Donald Trump (aka Drumpf) phenomenon.  You may have heard the claim that an infinite number of monkeys pounding on the keys of an infinite number of typewriters (i.e, keyboards without computers) would eventual type the complete works of Shakespeare.  Trump Drumpf gets so much media coverage, without ever spelling out the details of his proposals, that eventually he is bound to make some vague promise that you agree with, and there you are facing the “ad hominem dilemma.”

Many women were dismayed by the outcome of the Jiam Ghomeshi trial.  It seems pretty obvious that consensual sex does not mean you are consenting to be choked and punched in the head,  but how the obvious was represented at trial was anything but clear.  Ultimately, the acute “ad hominem dilemma” has been provoked not by Ghomeshi himself (okay, being an anus is not a provable crime, but still he has been proven an anus) or by his accusers, but by Marie Henein, Ghomeshi’s lawyer.

Marie Henein should be a feminist icon, a heroine for all womankind, a tough, skilled, astute defence lawyer at the peak of her profession.  In fact, she is all those things and has become them by defending people accused of some pretty heinous crimes, including crimes against women--because that's what defence lawyers do.  Both Michelle Hauser in the Whig ("Mansbridge hit journalistic low point") and Tabatha Southey in the Globe ("Upset about the Jian Ghomeshi verdict? Don’t get mad – get informed") have broached the dilemma which Henein has provoked

The issue of my concern will seem trivial, insignificant and certainly pedantic by comparison to the justice system's futile struggles to prosecute sexual assault.  The object of my obsession is the course plan; what is usually referred to in colleges and universities as the syllabus (the “silly bus” that carries students from the beginning to the end of the course?).  Who cares about syllabi?  Well, I guess people of my ilk who know how to pluralize "hippopotamus"--pedants (which is generally an insult even though it just means "male teachers.")

I used to really care about course plans . . . a lot.  I didn't call them course plans or syllabi, I used to call them "the contract" and I would do this really pumped-up, earnest presentation in the first class explaining that this document was a contract between me and my students, that they had the right to object and make changes if they could persuasively argue that something I was requesting was unreasonable or there were better alternatives.  If the first class and "the contract" went well, chances of the course as a whole going well were vastly improved.

Then the worst happened. University administrators began to agree with me that course plans were really important.  The Chair of our department announced a new policy. In the name of providing the best possible education to our students, in future we would all submit our course plans for review at the beginning of each semester.  My colleagues and I objected to this new policy on three grounds:  1) it was redundant; the information that might concern the department was already available in the form of course descriptions which were regularly updated, 2) the requirement to submit a more detailed description of what we would be doing with students to an administrator seemed more like surveillance than pedagogy, and 3) it would lead to bureaucratization, the uniformisation and rigidification of all course plans.  Redundancy was undeniable, but we were assured that in no way did this new policy suggest increased surveillance or bureaucratization.  The new policy was implemented.

The first time I submitted a course plan, the department Chair took me aside--at the department Christmas party--to tell me she had reviewed my course plan and determined that I hadn't scheduled enough classes for one of my courses.  I had been teaching the course for ten years and the number of classes had always been the same.  How was this not surveillance, I wondered? A year later, under a new Chair, I was notified that the same course plan contained one too many classes.  Luckily for me, as a tenured professor, I could and did blithely ignore the instructions in both cases.  

A more damaging outcome for me was the bureaucratization of the course plan.  With each passing semester I received increasingly insistent and precise instructions on the form and content of each course plan circulated through the Faculty of Education and seconded by my own faculty. The upshot was that as I presented my course plan to students I realized that what they saw before them was a replica of every other course plan that had been presented to them that week. The chances that I could credibly describe the plan as a mutual contract were nil. Even the possibility that I might convince the students there was something distinctive in the syllabus, something worthy of their concentration and interest, was minute at best.  They would view the course plan as bureaucratic red tape, imposed as much upon me as it was upon them, and they weren't wrong.  In the name of "providing the best possible education for students," I was deprived of a useful pedagogical tool.

In recent weeks, reading reports online about Roberty T. Dillen Jr., an associate professor of "genetics and evolutionary biology at the College of Charleston," who was facing suspension for refusing to change his course plan for the university's suggested course "outcomes," I thought "a messiah, a Prometheus willing to sacrifice himself to give fire to university teachers everywhere!"  I read the article in which his Dean accused him of playing "Silly, Sanctimonious Games" and described complaints against Dillen Jr., including his self-confessed, impish penchant for deliberately misinforming students and refusing to answer their questions. Then I read Dillen Jr.'s defense of his resistance: "Why I’m Sticking to My ‘Noncompliant’ Learning Outcomes."

My ad-hominem dilemma:  despite my conviction that course plans should be the purview of teachers not administrators, everything that I have read (especially his own words) leads me to the conclusion that this Robert T. Dillen Jr. is really an ass.  His only motivation seems to be that he likes being an ass and his pleasure was redoubled by the fact that he could get away with it.   As a tenured professor he can be an obfuscating, obstreperous lump of inertia who doesn't even have to logically defend himself and no-one can do anything about it, or so he thought.

Dillen Jr. has been teaching for 34 years.  He was consulted, advised, warned, and presented with alternative "outcomes" which he rejected. Still he manages to feign bewilderment, as if he were the only calm rational mind in this brouhaha rather than its provocateur, and asks rhetorically:  "How could such an apparently minor disagreement escalate so far, so fast?"

I am irked, in the first place, because Dillen Jr. could not have done a better job of undermining all university teachers in their efforts to control the presentation of their own courses.  When university administrators argue that the syllabus must be administered by the university and not left in the hands of eccentric egg heads, Dillen Jr. will be the precedent they cite.

But I am also outraged by a university professor's vain display of elitist, aloof, opinionated incoherence.  In lieu of "course outcomes," in his syllabus, Dillen Jr. inserted a quotation from a speech given by Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University in 1896.  In his apologia, Dillen Jr. offered three justifications for use of this quotation as the learning outcome of a biology course:  1) he and Woodrow Wilson were born 10 miles apart, 2) both he and Wilson "were Presbyterian professors"  and 3) that Wilson "seems to be so universally despised." 

Here is the Wilson quotation which Dillen Jr. used as his "course outcomes" and cannibalized for his rhetorical self-defence:

Explicit Learning Outcome. "It is the business of a University to impart to the rank and file of the men whom it trains the right thought of the world, the thought which it has tested and established, the principles which have stood through the seasons and become at length part of the immemorial wisdom of the race. The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen, and make fit. The business of the world is not individual success, but its own betterment, strengthening, and growth in spiritual insight. ‘So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom’ is its right prayer and aspiration."— Woodrow Wilson, 1896

Beyond the ludicrousness of his justifications, the gross absurdity of Dillen Jr.'s using this quote as the cornerstone of his refusal to accept and adjust to authority is that the quote and the Princeton Commencement speech from which it is taken and even the Bible quote which it cites (and Dillen Jr. re-cites) are all explicit refrains of the theme that the individual must accept and submit to the direction of higher authorities, including "the social world in which they are to have their life"--exactly what Dillen Jr. is refusing to do.

No-where in his exposition does Dillen Jr. show any interest in what his students might (or might not) be gaining from his stubbornly repeated use of Wilson's quote (encouraging Princeton grads to enlist for the Spanish-American War) for his "course outcomes."  The university's decision that Associate Professor Robert T. Dillen Jr. "would be suspended without pay for the fall 2016 academic term" strikes me as a set back for all good teachers and a gift to the students of genetics and evolutionary biology at the College of Charleston.

Addendum

Princeton University decides to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from its building because of racist history.

Creedence heard it through the grapevine.

The Sour Bibliography