To answer Simon’s question,
the problem is that lots of people are entering university/college illiterate from high school
and staying illiterate, and sometimes becoming less literate, through university.
One reason they are graduating high school illiterate is that they are taught
by university graduates, who are illiterate.
There is a desperate desire to keep students, due to tuition needs, hence a general dumbing
down of universities (with exceptions being well-endowed places like Harvard).
Meanwhile teachers faced with illiterate students incapable of doing college level
work stop teaching, more or less. Multiple choice exams replace written exams
or essays, which students can’t do. In some large courses students are informed
that attendance is optional. Freshmen comp requirements are curtailed, so that
students get less training in writing, and so are foreign language requirements
(both happened at my university). The result is a large number of
illiterate graduating seniors who can’t write a grammatical sentence,
not to mention an intelligible paragraph.
I’ve mentioned how a teacher competency test was given the graduating
seniors in education at a local university, all of whom failed it.
The test was published in the Times-Picayune. It consisted chiefly
of paragraphs (about the French Revolution), followed by multiple
choice questions about what it had said. Anybody who could
read at a high school level could pass the test.
Once this level of ‘education’ is in place, students howl bloody murder
when a prof tries to seriously teach; they feel they are being wronged.
Their other teachers don’t treat them this way! This makes teaching
unpleasant and tenure hard to get and of course grading written stuff
is a lot harder than grading multiple choice…
So at the end of the day universities pass along illiterates.
This is an extraordinary act of economic predation,
cause the students think they are getting educated.
Many work full-time to fund the education of which
they have been cheated.
No, the problem isn’t testing, nor is it obscure. People simply
cannot read and write because they are products of
an educational system that didn’t teach them how
and nobody requires them to do it. The system perpetuates
itself. The universities keep them because they need
the tuition and faculty shift to easy stuff because
it’s easier for them and they tend to have a lot
of trouble if they really teach.
Science, math, technical stuff is perhaps different.
I wrote a letter to our student newspaper describing what I was seeing
and calling for literacy testing of all graduating students.
The paper didn’t publish it, nor did they tell me why.
They just went silent. I contacted the faculty adviser
who, after reading the letter, did the same thing.
