Despite all the “emphasis” on improving education and upon assessment testing in primary and secondary schools, education is anything but improving in the United States… and there’s a very good reason why.  Politicians, educators, and everyday parents have forgotten one of the most special attributes that makes us human and that lies behind our success as a species – language, in particular, written language.

An ever-increasing percentage of younger Americans, well over a majority of those under twenty, cannot write a coherent paragraph, nor can they synthesize complex written information, either verbally or in writing, despite all the testing, all the supposed emphasis on “education.”  So far, this has not proved to be an obvious detriment to U.S. science, business, and culture, but that is because society, any society, has always been controlled by a minority.  The past strength of U.S. society has been that it allowed a far greater percentage of “have-nots” to rise into that minority, and that rise was enabled by an educational system that emphasized reading, writing, and arithmetic – the three “Rs.”   While mastery of more than those three basics is necessary for success in a higher-technology society, ignoring absolute mastery in those subjects for the sake of knowledge in others is a formula for societal collapse, because those who can succeed will be limited to those whose parents can obtain an education for their children that does require mastery of those fundamental basics, particularly of writing.  And because in each generation, there are those who will not or cannot truly master such basics, either through lack of ability or lack of dedication, the number of those able to control society will become ever more limited and a greater and greater percentage of society’s assets will become controlled by fewer and fewer, who, as their numbers dwindle, find their abilities also diminish.  In time, if such a trend is not changed, social unrest builds and usually results in revolution.  We’re already seeing this in the United States, particularly in dramatically increased income inequality, but everyone seems to focus on the symptoms rather than the cause.

Why writing, you might ask.  Is that just because I’m a writer, and I think that mastery of my specialty is paramount, just as those in other occupations might feel the same about their area of expertise?  No… it’s because writing is the very foundation upon which complex technological societies rest.

The most important aspect of written language is not that it records what has been spoken, or what has occurred, or that it documents how to build devices, but that it requires a logical construct to be intelligible, let alone useful. Good writing requires logic, both in structuring a sentence, a paragraph, or a book.  It requires the ability to synthesize and to create from other information.  In essence, mastering writing requires organizing one’s thoughts and mind.  All the scattered facts and bits of information required by short-answer educational testing are useless unless they can be understood as part of a coherent whole.  That is why, always, the best educational institutions required long essay tests, usually under pressure.  In effect, such tests both develop and measure the ability to think.

Yet the societal response to the lack of writing, and thus thinking, ability has been to institute “remedial” writing courses at the college entry level.  This is worse than useless, and a waste of time and resources.  Basic linguistics and writing ability, as I have noted before, are determined roughly by puberty.  If someone cannot write and organize his or her thoughts by then, effectively they will always be limited.  If we as a society want to reverse the trend of social and economic polarization, as well as improve the abilities of the younger generations, effective writing skills have to be developed on the primary and early secondary school levels.  Later than that is just too late.  Just as you can’t learn to be a concert violinist or pianist beginning at age eighteen, or a professional athlete, the same is true for developing writing and logic skills.

And because, in a very real sense, a civilization is its written language, our inability to address this issue effectively may assure the fall of our culture.