For many years schools taught prescriptive grammar, while real linguists and dictionaries had long since switched to descriptive grammar. The dispute finally went away in the 70s. Only conservatives and neocons are still pushing the prescriptive crap.
None of the prescriptive crap made the slightest sense. The prescribers weren’t real authors, just various scholars who had decided to impose rules. Following the rules led to tangled, incoherent and ambiguous writing. The best authors, including Shakespeare, broke the prescriptions constantly. Teachers forced us to read and appreciate Shakespeare, while ALSO forcing us to follow the rules that Shakespeare broke.
No other subject has a dispute between prescriptive and descriptive styles.
What would prescriptive physics look like? We’d be taught whatever some random philsopher thought about force and friction and gravity. We might learn that gravity comes from an apple’s desire to hit heads. If you want a car to have more horsepower, polish its mirrors. Thunder causes lightning. Rain happens when humidity reaches 100%. Oops, we DID learn that in school “science” class, so I guess we WERE getting prescriptive physics along with prescriptive grammar.
On second thought, there’s no distinction at all between grammar and other subjects! We ALSO learned prescriptive history and prescriptive biology. History was utterly divorced from DESCRIPTION of what happened. We learned what the government wanted us to learn, mainly determined by our dual imperatives to hate Russia and hate Natural Law. Biology was prescribed by the same two imperatives. Because we couldn’t allow Natural Law to be right, we ignored the trillions of facts that show design. Because we couldn’t allow Russia to be right, we ignored epigenetics for 70 years. We’ve recently “discovered” epigenes, but we still aren’t allowed to say that Lysenko was right.
Polistra's Mill 