Many college kids can hardly write a
proper English sentence, never mind a proper essay. Meanwhile, the essay-writing industry is huge, churning out tens of thousands of illegal documents. Naturally, all
participants in the scam pretend there's no scam, and so the scam can go on.
Here's
a recent, terrifying report from an editor:
My organization decided a few weeks back that we needed to
hire a new professional staff person. We had close to 500 applicants.
Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work
we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year
and asked them to produce a one-page summary. All were college
graduates. Only one could produce a satisfactory summary. That
person got the job.
Here
is a good indication of how bad things already were 40 years ago. One investigator concluded:
If you think America's English teachers have gone
"back to basics" and are solving the literacy problem everyone began
shouting about in the 1970s, think again. Recent studies show that English
teachers know little about the language they're supposed to teach. They get
poor training in writing at college and, as a group, are bad writers.
I am about a decade into my teaching career, but even
within this fairly short span, I have noticed a startling decline in the
quality of written work turned in by my students, regardless of which
institution (community college, private, four year school) the papers are
coming from.
So
what's going on?
Even though half the incoming students are completely
incompetent at the sentence level, colleges pretend it's not so. In this piece that explains why so many young Americans
can't write well, Natalie Wexler states, "Colleges simply assume students
already know how to write sentences." Course syllabi and textbooks all
peddle the fiction that students can produce grammatical sentences at will,
without crude errors like fragments, run-ons, or subject-verb disagreements.
That's grotesquely untrue.
In her
report, Wexler provides a weighty insight: "With the advent of e-mail, writing ability has become more
important than ever, and writing deficiencies have become increasingly
apparent."
It's
not hyperbole to point out that the country's language skills have gotten rotten. PBS concluded:
The vast majority of public two- and four-year colleges
report enrolling students – more than half a million of them–who are not ready
for college-level work, a Hechinger Report investigation of 44 states has
found. The numbers reveal a glaring gap in the nation's education system: A
high school diploma, no matter how recently earned, doesn't guarantee that
students are prepared for college courses. Higher education institutions across
the country are forced to spend time, money and energy to solve this
disconnect. They must determine who's not ready for college and attempt to get
those students up to speed as quickly as possible, or risk losing them
altogether.
Meanwhile,
there is massive fraud top to bottom. The kids cheat (i.e., plagiarize) by
buying essays. There seem to be hundreds of these businesses, some of them claiming to have
hundreds of professional writers. Meanwhile, the college (or the
individual teachers) could easily determine when students are handing in
material above their abilities. The colleges don't try very hard.
If
commonsense safeguards were enforced, the pool of applicants ready for college
might shrink tremendously. The money would stop flowing. Some professors
would no longer have careers. A lot of colleges could become ghost towns.
The
sad tendency started 75 years ago, when the Education Establishment piously
announced a number of stupidities: grammar isn't important, and students shouldn't worry about
correct spelling. I can remember reading an article in Time 40
years ago where two professors said children would pick up language rules from
their environment. Even young and dumb as I was at that moment, I sensed
that these two guys were jive-ass turkeys.
Now
we're probably at the point where lots of kids pay to have their admission
essays written. Maybe they paid for papers in high school. And then
they pay right through their college years. This might add thousands of
dollars to the cost of higher education. But that's not so consequential
if you're already paying $30,000 to $40,000 each year.
If you
want to see some serious sophistry unfolding in front of your eyes, watch
this Huffington Post liberal (one must assume) try to keep
the house of cards standing:
Since academic writing is becoming one of the most
prominent aspects of the educational system, the constant development of the
custom-writing industry is clearly justified. ... [S]ome argue ... that the
content completed by professional writers is not plagiarized. It is completely
unique, well-researched and properly-referenced. When a customer buys this type
of product, he has the right to use it as a source for another paper, or simply
submit it as his own.
Intellectually
speaking, that's Sodom and Gomorrah.
David
Coleman is famous for trying to force Common Core on the public. And
Common Core is famous for not teaching kids to write. According to the Washington Post, "the authors of the
Common Core focused just on the skills that students should have at each grade
level, not on how to impart them. And few teachers have been trained to teach
these writing skills, apparently because educators believe that students will
just pick them up through reading. Obviously, most don't."
Coleman,
having done his dirty work for Common Core, bounced over to take control of The
College Board. His first action was to sandbag "the
essay requirement," the one part that might reveal how
shabby things have become. In other words, he's covering up his own
tracks.
The
main point here is that all sectors of the Education Establishment are
conspiring to sabotage reading and writing skills at all levels, while at the
same time conspiring to cover up the consequences of this sabotage.
Students
don't learn essential skills, and then the testing of those skills is
compromised or hidden. What better way to hide poor writing skills than
to allow a whole new industry to evolve, so students can hire
mercenaries to do their work? Isn't that clever? Crime-wise, it's a
double-helix, so slick, so sick, that even people who think they are not
concerned about education might want to protest.
The
starting point for all of these developments is the poor instruction of reading in the early grades.
Millions of children reach middle school with only limited literacy.
Naturally, their writing skills are even lower than that. Children
need to be good fluent readers, then they acquire a good vocabulary, then they
can move to writing an essay. If reading isn't taught properly, writing
will be an impossible dream.
Bruce
Deitrick Price explains education theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org.
His next book is Saving
K-12,
"a citizen's guide to improving public education," due Nov. 17.
