During my fairly limited language education, I am rather glad that I had a good grasp of grammar as a result of being at school in the 50s and 60s.For my sins I have been formally exposed to the teaching of French, German, New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew and I have had cause to try and teach myself a little bit of Italian, Latin and Bahasa Indonesia.
It would seem to be fairly apparent that just to get into language you have to understand how you name things (nouns); how they act (verbs); and how they might be qualified (adjectives and adverbs); you probably need to know who owns what (possessives and genitives); and have some idea about what time it is (tense).
This is a fairly significant syllabus, even if it is fairly minimal.
I am not so convinced that you need to understand about gerunds, adverbial participles, the future perfect, and other ephemera...you do need to know about how to find out about this stuff...but hours of classroom time, that should also be involved in encouraging the appreciation of literature, developing the ability to evaluate written and spoken language...should not be being wasted (now that phrase/clause is a grammatical nightmare!) on rote learning only.
