and get rid of that rot known as the Department of Education.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
College students, mind you.
Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
...
What’s changed?
The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.
No, it's not all the phone. It's also what 'education' has become in our schools, which has little care for actual education. It's 'Everyone Gets A Trophy!', it's "We can't hold this student back just because he can't read!" and all the other crap.
It's letting kids they know aren't ready for college in, because 'equity' and because that keeps that money rolling in, and screw that the kids are going to drop out. Or worse: they're letting students slide through college, including MEDICAL STUDENTS get through(if they're the right skin color/sex/whatever the current excuse is) not knowing what they need to know. And people have, and will, die because of it, and the idiots in charge don't care, not as long as they get their reputation of being Good Humans Who Care About The Right Things. You know, like the bastards who let "We Suppport Decolonization And Trans And Gay And Getting Rid Of Jews" 'student' groups insult, belittle, threaten, and attack Jews and other students/staff who won't kiss their ass get away with it.
Oh yes, this pisses me off. Partly because it's screwing lots of kids out of their possible future, from grade school on; partly because it makes it harder to find someone who can do a job; partly for the simple reason that if I wind up in a hospital I want to know the staff isn't going to kill me because they're incompetent, hired because "We don't have enough 'X' employees and it'll cause problems if we don't get more." And partly because it includes teachers who see their job as, as one put it openly on his social media, "I only have a few months to train these kids to be Marxist revolutionaries", not dumb things like how to think, and reason, and learn some important facts and history.
And that's all the time I've got to yell about this right now.
