I don't even have a good feel for how well the British are at speaking English.

On average, no weller than Americans.

Oops.

In my defense, I edited that sentence to change its structure, and just forgot to change that word from ``well'' to ``good''. Oh, good.

I mean ``well''!

In thirteen years of education, those six lessons were the only formal instruction in English grammar any of us had.

I had several years of school where grammar was taught, but it ended by the time I was in 6th grade (10 - 12 years old). I don't think that kids that age really have the ability to relate formal rules like that to natural language, to abstract anything that natural and ingrained. They should teach basic grammar at a young age, so that you have some basis for what later seem like arbitrary rules (like ``well'' vs. ``good''), but then teach it again, more in-depth, once you get older.

I think this may be the basis for no longer teaching much grammar at all, in that kids simply don't or can't comprehend it, so it seems like it's just not working. I know that I didn't start to understand grammar at all well until I took German in my last two years of high school, and I still don't know it that well.