They rarely teach for its own sake but most of the time [they] use teaching as a way to manipulate.
Is it idiomatic to omit the second "they" in the above sentence?
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The sentence is not idiomatic. It is not clear what its refers to. Its, like his, her, their, is a ‘possessive pronoun’, so we expect it to refer to a noun. What noun does its refer to? Teach is not a noun in your sentence, so idiomatically it cannot refer to that. One’s best guess is that its refers to a noun that is in a sentence that comes before the one you ask about.– green_ideasCommented Dec 16, 2017 at 17:01
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2 Answers
This ellipsis may be pushing the boundaries of good communication, but it is perfectly proper grammatically to use a single subject for multiple verbs.
"Mary wrote and sang the songs heard that night" is idiomatic and grammatical.
However, in your example, there is a fairly extensive bit of other material separating the verbs, and a skilled writer would likely respond to that separation either by repeating the subject or by bringing the two verbs closer together or by using parallelism. I might re-write as follows:
"They rarely teach to educate but instead teach to indoctrinate."
I want to stress that I am not taking a position on grammar. I am making a point on style.
It's pretty good with or without the second pronoun; I'd leave it out but it's not “wrong”.
Personally I'd add rather after the but.
