17 Comments

1. richard mcenroe:

Excuse me, Mr. Dinosaur, but it is hardly the job of the schools to teach Americans of youth to read and write. It is our job to teach them self-esteem and an affirmative self-visualization.

Even if they can’t spell any of that.

Dec 6, 2004 - 7:54 pm 2. mudmarine:

I’m sorry to be negative, and I say this as a high school dropout (who has been quite successful regardless.) But sometimes I think it is all going to hell. The problem is, there is no embarrassment anymore. You know, the thing that prevents me from writing more.

Dec 6, 2004 - 8:02 pm 3. Morgan:

Roger, are you sure they weren’t educated at school? There is no mention of school in the article.

If I’m reading this correctly, poor writing is something that comes on suddenly when a person enters Corporate America.

Evil Corporate America, Corruptor of Syntax. How may I help you?

Dec 6, 2004 - 8:46 pm 4. rastajenk:

Hey, I’ve got an idea: we could raise property taxes so we can pay teachers more so they will be more willing to teach better, cause everybody knows they aren’t getting the job done on the current payscale.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Dec 6, 2004 - 10:44 pm 5. David Thomson:

The degree programs of many ìprogressiveî colleges are fraudulent. A more consecrative milieu would be far more demanding. This is one of the central, and usually ignored, reasons why liberalism dominates the academic community. A bachelorís degree today is often nothing more than a license to steal.

Why are credentials so important? Why donít companies simply test their prospective employees and ignore their questionable diplomas? It is because of affirmative action lawsuits. God help the employer who promotes a highly qualified white candidate over the mediocre minority possessing a bachelorís degree. They will most assuredly be ripped to shreds in a court of law.

Dec 7, 2004 - 1:55 am 6. Vulgorilla:

What?!?! Corporate America has to teach their newly hired employees how to read and write?!?! Who woulda guessed. The public schools do a great job of teaching all that warm and fuzzy Political Correctness, along with all that wonderful “self-esteem and an affirmative self-visualization” that Richard McEnroe writes about above in an earlier comment. It’s too bad that the public schools don’t teach the skills needed to be a productive member of society. After all, who cares what language the ballots are printed in if the voter can’t even read? What did you expect for your high property taxes? Competent graduates from our public school system? Wow….you really need to reset your expectations. With no way to enforce order and discipline in the classroom, most teachers have given up….but then public schools are just taxpayer supported day care, right? The lawyers have seen to that.

Dec 7, 2004 - 6:41 am 7. Fausta:

Having mangled a sentence or two, I strive to improve my writing. Clearly that’s a sign that I didn’t attend a school that worked on my self-esteem and an affirmative self-visualization, as Richard puts it.

Dec 7, 2004 - 7:33 am 8. Terrye:

This is just great.

Kids can’t read and write when they hit the job market and schools are worried about whether or not a Christian teacher might actually be allowing children read the Declaration of Independence.

They should be worried about whether or not they can read period.

Maybe the Times would like to write an article on how the Teacher’s unions are more worried about their pension funds than the illiterate.

Dec 7, 2004 - 7:38 am 9. Terrye:

That should be “children to read”…..

Don’t blame me I am a poduct of the American educational system.

Dec 7, 2004 - 7:41 am 10. Peg C.:

Corporate America is populated by Americans (by and large) and they cannot write their way out of a paper bag, it is true. I get cross-eyed trying to make sense of notes from management in particular (many technical people actually write better).

However, I find the writing in much of the MSM to be barely any better and they have editors. What’s their excuse? What passes for writing in a lot of newspaper articles is execrable. Not only are syntax and copy-editing apparently a thing of the past, but titles and headlines frequently bear no relation to the content, and the content is disorganized, spotty, and frequently brings up people’s names with no explanation of who they are.

The crawl (scrawl?) at the bottom of Fox’s screen very often has the most obvious misspellings.

This is all a torment to anyone who takes pleasure in reading good writing, but it seems ubiquitous now.

Dec 7, 2004 - 9:26 am 11. Kyda Sylvester:

I write frequently to my elected representatives. You should see some of the return correspondance (not to mention the position papers). I’m not talking about content here, but style, vocabulary, punctuation, snytax, usage. Sometimes I want to correct the letter like a school assignment and send it back, it’s that bad.

One of the biggest problems, it seems, is the inability to be concise and succinct (of course almost anyone can benefit from a talented wielder of the blue pencil). I once wrote my Congressman’s office requesting tickets for the White House tour. The reply was a page and a half long and amounted to “we’ll try”.

Dec 7, 2004 - 10:43 am 12. charlotte:

Most of you half it wrong: Corperate america IS repsonsable for it’s illegitamate employes who cant read and write good enough. If it paid it’s fare share of taxes to be redistribbuted to schools across this country then teachers and principles wuold half a better chance of teaching better, of coarse. Its plainly loggical. But bush and his christain crusaders wont buzinesses to keep all the money to themselves and keep most children ignerant and illegitamate. Why you ask. Becuase students who can read and write good dont wont to work demeening jobs for corperations that are taking over the world and they vote as proggresive sickular democrats. Bad edducation = good supply of opresed laber and corperate stooges = bush christain and biz hedgemy of the world.

Dec 7, 2004 - 10:50 am 13. Peg C.:

LOL, Charlotte! Although lefty trolls write like that and they don’t know any better.

Dec 7, 2004 - 1:10 pm 14. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

I haven’t had any problems with employees lacking basic literacy skills; however, I’ve sometimes observed people who lack the ability to read documents critically. I’m thinking of two different occasions where fairly senior and intelligent employees missed clear warning signs in proposals from other companies (detected by others before serious harm was done.) There are also many people who lack the ability to write in a clear and convincing manner…this is essential, of course, in most kinds of sales and marketing jobs (for external communication), and in most other jobs for (internal communication). Presentation skills are also extremely important in business.

Dec 7, 2004 - 2:12 pm 15. Ed Poinsett:

My son graduated from the Academic program at his high school ten years ago. That summer, I had him help me with a small carpentry project. He did not know which was larger – 5/16 or 3/8. He also had no idea how to figure it out. The teachers were demanding more pay.

Dec 7, 2004 - 11:19 pm 16. Old Grouch:

In an earlier life, I did part-time work at an educational-band radio station operated by a not-first-rank-but-still-respectable private university. The station was run by the university’s “Communications Department,” (which also had courses in journalism and public relations).

Even 25 years ago, it had become a standing joke that the best (meaning clearest, most succinct, and most grammatically accurate) writing was to be found in memos written by the station’s chief engineer, a graduate of a big-city technical high school who had dropped out of Purdue after two years (”because they wouldn’t teach me anything I wanted to know”).

The writing by the students (who were, generally, bright and committed) was frequently appalling, and some of the stuff by the faculty wasn’t a great deal better. The cry, “and this is supposed to be a Communications Department?” was frequent and dispiriting.

Dec 8, 2004 - 10:14 am 17. David Gillies:

It’s not just literacy that’s a problem. Modern educational systems are turning out people who have next to no facility in any core skill. Of particular concern to me, as an engineer in academia, was the poor grasp of elementary mathematics possessed by many undergraduates in their first year. Students were being accepted into an Electronic Engineering degree course without knowing, for example, how to factorise a quadratic equation or differentiate a simple polynomial. Many of them required remedial teaching. General consternation was felt when, in a test to gauge the new intake’s competence level, several students simplified sin x/cos x (=tan x) as in/co. To be 18 or 19, having presumably passed an advanced mathematics exam and still not be able to correctly answer questions such as this is indicative of a dreadful problem in secondary education.

Apart from that, the general level of literacy was execrable (engineers and scientists have to write a good deal more than is popularly imagined). I’m not talking about simple betises such as confusing ‘effect’ and ‘affect’. No, I had to grade work from young adults who seemed incapable of grasping subject-verb agreement. The comma was a mysterious thing, to be scattered, about the page at, will; the semicolon a near-divine object whose workings were not vouchsafed to the unititiate. Proper construction of multi-clause sentences was almost unkown, with sentence fragments abounding. Which was a nuisance.

Political correctness being what it is, I couldn’t simply scrawl, “this is the biggest load of utter bollocks I’ve ever read in my life,” and fail them ignominiously. It wore you down, I tell you. A period instructing the little buggers (I called them my ’special needs class’) was almost equally enervating, and usually led to heavy drinking punctuated with bitter imprecations upon the state of British education.

Dec 8, 2004 - 2:38 pm

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