Doesn't anyone use the Blue Book anymore?
Unfortunately in public education they preach high standards, but increasingly cater to high graduation rates....you can't have both.
Not a troll - but if they can't read, then why do you call them "students"?
You might as well say, "Half of the warm bodies I babysit each day can't read a sentence".
As Kingsley Amis put it, “More will mean worse.”
Someday soon there may be a Presidential Candidate who doesn't even know how many states there are.
I read the article. It was more of a long winded whine. If you want to have educated students then start teaching. Having read the article I wouldn’t hire the professor to trim my lawn.
You can’t ignore the fundamentals from first grade through high school and then expect the student to suddenly gain the basics in college.
The education system is about having your ticket punched. Students remember just enough to pass the test and then forget it as soon as it was over. I found this out early when I had to proofread the paperwork from a guy with a masters in English.
Then society bought into the whole "equal outcomes" malarkey. Now we are supposed to believe that everyone can be a leader and that no one need ever stoop so low as to hoe a turnip (that what illegal aliens are for, right??).
Now, if the position is: My father was a leader and therefore (of course!) I shall be a leader as well -- and you (my poor fellow) come from a long line of turnip hoers and so it would be foolish for anyone to allow you to ever be anything else ... well, that sort of thinking is certainly bad.
But I'm so sure it's quite as bad as the idea that everyone ought to go to college and be positioned for a career at the top of the heap. That sort of misapprehension does no one any good. Simple fact: some folks aren't fit for much more than turnip hoeing.
I went back to school myself in the last couple of years, to get the 2-year degree to go with experience I already have. (i.e., get a Networking assoc. degree to raise my salary in the field I’m already in).
In the single English class I had to take, we started with 24 people. By the end of the class, there were about 8 left, I think 4 adults (all 30+), and 4 right out of high school. The rest of the young ones had either dropped the class as ‘too hard’, or had plagiarised a paper, and had left rather than automatically flunk. There were a couple adults that just couldn’t ‘get it’. The teacher was not grading the class hard at all. I was writing papers in an hour and getting A’s on them. (Yes, I write well, but I’m no lit major) So, it wasn’t that the bar was too high. It was simply that a large part of the class didn’t read or write well, and didn’t understand why it might be necessary down the road. They didn’t put in the work necessary to the class, to put it very bluntly. The ones who did the work, and were willing to learn, all got decent grades. Yes, a couple of them had to work hard, and stretch their abilities a bit, but they put in the effort, and got rewarded. The teacher went out of her way to help them, too.
The two adults that just couldn’t be bothered to do anything new went home complaining that it was ‘too hard’ and “I don’t need to know how to write”. Now, some may think they had a point, but, seriously, the teacher was really only requiring good high-school level work. Where is this country going when adults—*adults over 30*—can’t be bothered to learn how to read and write and communicate effectively.
I was rather surprised by all this, really. I know that I sometimes expect too much of people, but, until taking this class, I didn’t realize it was this bad.
Horribly depressing.
The truth that must be repeated and repeated and repeated: This tragic horror is PRECISELY what government schools were designed to produce. Just read John Dewey. It’s all there. The GOAL has always been a semi-literate, dispirited, passive herd—rather than the independent, unruly, free-thinking populace the U.S. had in 1789.
My wife, who is an intelligent woman, graduated high school without ever writing an essay. It just wasn’t required.
When she started her freshman year of college her grades were horrible because she didn’t know how to do the work. Fortunately she met a good looking guy who was a whiz at writing.
When I was in high school (5-9 years ago) most people didn’t know basic math skills, our business teacher had to spend 1-2 weeks on balancing a checkbook and even then 50%+ of the students couldn’t grasp the difference between debits and credits.
Heard on the radio news this afternoon that 40% of the HS students in a nearby city flunked a math achievement test, part of NCLB. Now the kids have to take remedial classes this summer.
This country continues it’s inexorable march towards third-world status. I figure 3-6 years.
I do think that too little time is spent on grammar in pre-college, and it should be retaught in college before students are allowed to take other English courses. Too many universities go right to writing critical essays before going over the basics, and students cannot write without the basics.
I also bet that a lot of these students become better writers later in college. In other words, of course the students are not the best writers in the first couple of courses, but they should get better the more they write which comes later in other courses. Maybe this author only teaches the first basic course and expects master degree work.
This was an enjoyable article to read. I went to college for a couple of years and did poor to average while majoring in pool and beer. I then realized I needed to get my head on straight and I joined the Navy for 4 years (1967).
While I was in a hurry to get away from college, the Navy sent me TO college for 18 months at a language college and associated schools. The difference was skipping class and slacking off were not really available options. AND, for the first time in my life, I had to, and learned how to, study.
After the service, I returned to college and it was a snap. I did 2 years in 1 1/2 years and was on the Dean’s List the whole time. I enjoyed the classes and the instructors enjoyed me.
Joining the military was the best thing I have done for myself so far during this lifetime.
I teach an “advanced” high school class one day a week. I am amazed at the lack of writing skills, even with otherwise very intelligent students.
The NEA and the government education systems are like the UN: The more money we pour into them the less effective they get.
You don’t suppose all that money encourages corruption, do you?
Although I work at a college, I do not spend much time in the classroom. Once taking classes, I can offer a few observations:
1) The majority of students seem disengaged and disinterested. No, I don't think that has changed much in twenty or thirty years. But with the proliferation of electronic gadgetry, several of my teachers have banned iPods, texting, etc in class - students can become even more distracted in class. I even had a class last semester where a student took a call *in class*. It was not an emergency and the student just kept on yacking.
2) More students can't read and write at a college level. This has become worse over time. The college where I work has more sections of remedial reading and writing than ever before - and the total college headcount is steady and stable. One of my classes had required oral presentations. I cringed and indeed felt sorry for some students, as they could barely read their presentation notes. Papers that students write don't just have minor grammatical and syntactical errors, they are at times incoherent, halting, poorly organized, etc. And the sad thing is that once a student reaches the college level, it takes some pretty intense services and some self-initiative for them to become proficient readers and writers.
3) More students do not have well developed research skills. Query ten students on how often they have used JSTOR versus Wikipedia and the majority will say Wikipedia over JSTOR. With all the research tools available, students seem to think they can just google a topic, cut and paste some phrases and off they go. I do not use Wikipedia for anything more than getting to external sources on a topic - it certainly is not something that should be used as a primary source in most scholarly writing. Add to this a general inability to properly cite sources using, for example the Chicago Manual of Style and it is really pot luck what a professor might get from a student.
4) More students will confront teachers over grades. I worked my butt off the Spring semester, but there are large numbers of students that don't do that and still expect a good grade - and will confront the teacher on that. This is very different from twenty years ago and more higher-ed institutions are having classroom management training for faculty to deal with unruly students.
-PJ
I started my college career almost ten years ago at community college as a homeschool high school student taking some classes on the side. Did two years’ worth of classes in three years there, two years in three at the school I chose to complete my degree (while working full time) then two years at grad school and finally finishing off my last two classes for my master’s this year, having taken a short break to get married.
So I have been every kind of nontraditional student except for the “returning to school after ten years” sort. I’ve been a normal student too. And it is pretty horrifying. I got used pretty quickly to a high grade in any class with writing, just because most of my classmates couldn’t write. I’ll tell you, it really annoyed humanities students that a computer science major was kicking their butts at history, philosphy, and English.
My experience was that some people were too stupid for college. But most were intelligent. They had merely not been taught and challenged. Some had the skills, but no ambition to use them. More simply had no idea how to do what was asked of them.
Writing classes were just the place where the deficiency was most obvious. In other classes, they were just as unprepared, but it’s harder to tell stupid from lazy from unprepared in biology or math. I blame the government education system. It’s producing thousands and thousands of people every year who are suited for nothing more than holding stop signs in construction zones.