Cross Purposes

A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.

At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word "personal statements," which have become known as "college essays," and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.

History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.

Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing?

This is an obvious push for the “International Baccalaureate”....the most worthless piece of crap high school curiculum I have ever seen. Supposedly these fine US students are learning the same things as their ‘world wide counterparts’ ( whatever the hell that means). Fact is most of these IB students will never pass an AP exam with more than a 1 or 2. Many will never even make the second year of college. And most will have been exposed to the type of Marxist philosophy that our Dear Leader loves so much.

For years, among smarter students, there has been a revolt against what could be called “junk education.”

Start with a textbook. In most subjects, if you just put in just the important course material, you wouldn’t have a book, you would have a pamphlet. So publishers insist that books be 90% fluff, so that students have to sort through it to get to the 10%, if that, of important information.

Reading such a book is a waste of time. To make matters far worse, since the 1960s, textbook publishers have tried to restrict the level of reading proficiency to the fifth grade level, even for high school textbooks. When an author gives them a textbook, their editing software automatically replaces complex and specific text with simple and non-specific approximate synonyms.

Then they make “political corrections” to avoid offending anyone, especially the easily offended.

This is like converting “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

To: “87 years ago England’s religious nuts took America from the Native Americans, so they could make money from African slaves.”

This isn’t education, it is crap. No wonder students don’t want to “study” such garbage.

If you want intelligent students to learn in school, you much teach them useful information, that is both concise and challenging.

I like to point out that in the 1950s, English proficiency among black students had risen to near the level of white students, with the use of phonics instruction. But because it was then, and remains today, philosophically entertaining to the left, the “whole language” study of English was introduced to the schools.

Almost immediately, English language proficiency among black students plummeted, to where it remains today, yet the advocates of “whole language” still insist that it is superior to phonics, and must be universally used.

This clearly indicates that such advocates have no pattern recognition, any more than they do for the countless failures of socialism in any other area.

Sadly, this is not surprising. Many times the professor's writing is not much better than the students. At CampusReform.org, we highlighted a situation yesterday where a student is has to write a paper in response to Obama's first book, Audacity of Hope. When the student tried to argue Obama's points, he noticed that he only received partial credit. When he agreed with Obama, he got full. While this is another example of liberal abuse on campus, the syllabus that the student sent us is badly written and has numerous grammatical errors.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.