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I am 48 years old and just finished a teaching certificate program; I and most of my classmates intend to teach in the primary grades. When I went to primary school, 40 years ago, we learned the parts of speech -- subject, verb, adjective, adverb, prepositions, and all that. Through taking French, I also learned principles of verb conjugation and tense, as well as conventions like accents and noun gender that prevail in other languages.
Oddly enough, most of my early-mid 20ish classmates had no such background. They had their primary education in California in the '80s, and apparently in those days none of those things were taught in pulbic school. In short, most of my fellow student teachers had no background in linguistics -- the structure of language -- at all. Concepts like active and passive voice are things most of them have only vaguely heard of. And these are -- THE TEACHERS OF TOMORROW! Scary.
Actually, a bunch of them do teach well. And this kind of language structure is, once again, on the curriculum for the lower grades. But a whole lot of them will be learning it as they go, the night before they teach it to the kids....
Oh, and in my opinion, English belongs to the Brits. We Americans get to sling it around, too, but nobody can make English sing like an educated Brit with something to stay and a full head of steam.
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