Why study grammar? We might think it a basic necessity for educating young students—elementary students, and perhaps into middle school—but of little importance by the time of high school, the competent student having gained the adequacy in composition and speech necessary to make him or herself understood to most persons in most situations. Beyond this, any extended study of grammar seems to be for the aesthete or dilettante: not someone to be taken seriously and therefore not a subject worthy of close, careful inquiry.
Certainly, many who pride themselves on their study of the liberal arts do so out of pretension. But, in truth, a real study of the liberal arts—a study that seeks habituation in clear and deep thinking—suffers none of the pretensions which inhibit our ability to understand the world in which we live common to the typical person of today. Any who study these arts in earnest cannot but learn humility: for the object of study, language, always exceeds our total mastery of it. At the foundation of such a linguistic study is grammar: for all the validity and soundness of logic, and all the persuasiveness of rhetoric, rely upon the structures of signification which are discovered in an exploration of grammar.
Thus, two core Grammar courses—which incorporate much from the paired arts of logic and rhetoric, especially as the second aims for the improvement of our abilities in composition—looks at these significative structures not merely in terms of rules, and correctness, but with an eye attuned to the reasoning which governs our linguistic systems.