More than 20 years ago my husband would come home complaining that the people he worked with (college grads) could not write a decent sentence in English. These would have been Boomers. It is epidemic now, but originally was caused by the decline of literacy in the U.S. more than half a century ago.
When you study the history of how reading was taught you find that in the 40s the reading programs began dropping phonics, and by the 50s they were dominated by the kind of “See Spot, look, look,” mediocre curriculum that basically ruined our educational output. Now we have a hard core of 40% that can’t read, another 40% that don’t like to read, and the top 20% to carry the load of the information society.
Every generation claims the younger generations are worthless. My dad’s sure did.
I work with kids just out of school. They aren’t lazy, they are learning. Most of them are very talented. They work here because they want to stay in the same town where they went to college while they beef their resume. They’ll go from $30k to $100k in 3 years. It’s the nature of the business.
I’ve never had an issue with communication with them but this is a building full of functioning autistics. We speak a different language anyway.