[Osx-nutters] Writing Off Reading

[Kevin Callahan]

As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will  
have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it  
won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one  
teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many  
students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to  
tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between "then"  
and "than." Yet they got A's.

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or  
write at even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as  
much to the culture as to the schools, is that kids don't read for  
pleasure. And because they don't read, they are less able to navigate  
the language. If words are the coin of their thought, they're working  
with little more than pocket change.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/18/ 
AR2006081800976_pf.html