I'll make this my final post on the matter since I don't really want to push this thread any further off-topic than it already is. Didn't get anything of the Normans until secondary school, and that was at age 11 onwards. Viking invasions, Alfred, et al...nope. Maybe Hadrian's Wall, but the main focus on the Romans and Greeks was through small projects, nothing that in-depth or informative (and only in primary school). Yes, the Minotaur was far more important than Thermopylae or Alexander the Great...not! Okay, all the myths and legends have great significance, but it seems a slice-of-life look at those cultures took precedence over the bigger picture, and major turning points in history. After primary school, the Romans and Greeks ceased to exist...
Just a few random "devil's advocate" ideas that touch upon some of the responses here. (I should add that I am all for improved standards of education, and I certainly like to observe good grammatical practice.) 1. You don't need a fully prescribed grammar for language to "work." Of course, we need some kind of general framework, but being able to break it and still be understood is one of the beauties of the wonderful English language. 2. Don't be too quick to discount new dialects. Text speak is a distinct and workable dialect that does exactly what a lot of its predecessors did; namely, engender a feeling of inclusivity (while lots of pidgins/creoles were primarily functional in nature, they subsequently came to allow for this inclusivity). 3. We are not right! Pick up this thread, write it down on a bit of paper and travel back in time a few hundred years and you'd be labelled a linguistic heretic. Language changes, grammar changes. And to prescribe a grammar that will change again is folly. Teach grammar, sure; just don't prescribe it as fact. The very fact that we are here debating this "quiz" is testament to the fact that we all use a wonderful, changeable and living language. I have nothing against levels of grammatical understanding being raised in schools. But... somebody telling me I can't have a dangling preposition is something I just won't put up with.
Oh, grammar is debatable because there is an underlying construction to any language that allows all sorts of amazing things someone learning it as a second language (or third, etc) may not realise. Prepositions can go to the end of a sentence in the English language while allowing the sentence to retain full meaning because the underlying 'rules' allow that. English isn't limited to SVO (subject verb object), although placing the verb before the subject can sound a bit pretentious, and only Yoda has the required coolness to pull it off constantly. Dialects come about because people 'know' the 'rules', and are able to break them without confusing people around them (well...I wouldn't be able to understand Brum, but that's just me!). There, fixed that for you.
