[Osx-nutters] Writing Off Reading

[Patrick Coskren]

On Aug 22, 2006, at 12:59 PM, mmalc crawford wrote:
>
> On Aug 22, 2006, at 8:42 AM, Kevin Callahan wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> This is truly sad.
>
> On the other hand, it augurs well for job security later in life...

I wonder, though.  The older generation has *always* said this about  
the younger (in part because there have always been, and always will  
be, idiots to point to).  These days, wiith more kids going to  
college, who's to say it's not just a matter of kids getting into  
some college somewhere who once would have stopped with a high school  
education?  Or just a function of the fact that there are *always*  
kids who skirt the system to get good grades: star athletes, willing  
cheerleaders, wealthy scions.   Sure, these are all anecdotal points  
unsupported by any actual evidence, but so's the original article,  
and hey, it got him published in the Washington Post.

Frankly, it just sounds to me like the standard cry of "kids today!"  
expanded to fill an Op-Ed.

On the other hand, I'm not denying that there are problems with the  
educational system.  But this article doesn't have much useful to say  
about them.

-Patrick