I learned English grammar when I took Greek and Latin in college. I agree with this piece completely.

I attended a workshop this month on our incoming college students for fall 2024. A local high school teacher gave a presentation in which she said that the 10th grade students are reading on a 1st-2nd grade level--I still find that hard to believe--and she shared strategies for helping them. I asked her afterwards if there was any instruction in basic sentence structure and grammar: what a subject is, what an active/transitive verb is, what an adjective is, etc. She said that there is not.

I advocate learning other languages for their own sakes. Learn to read Italian or German so that you can sample Dante or Goethe in their own tongues, AND so you can converse with natives of those countries. But I agree that it's imperative to have a sense of how your own and every language works, and foreign language learning will do that. Sure, we all "know" the rules of English, but in fact, if 16 year olds are reading at a 6 year old level, they don't know the rules of English, and they don't know the fundamental elements of those rules. Those basics can help anyone make sense of a difficult sentence or passage; without them, how does one begin to parse something hard?

That seems like a doctor who never learned basic biology, or a coach who doesn't know the rules of their sport.