Because I’m a writer, I do tend to judge people, to at least a certain extent, by the way in which they employ words, either spoken or written. And because my wife is a university professor, as is another professor temporarily residing with us, the subject does come up occasionally. In addition, because Cedar City is a university town, we all know other professors and instructors. And… given all that, there is one subject about which all those we know in this field agree: the vast majority of students matriculating at the university in the past few years are incapable of writing an essay test – about anything. And most aren’t that much better at writing anything of any length, even with their computer and the internet to help, although some are adept at plagiarism, which they think of as cut and paste.
In the past, while there were some students who had problems with this kind of writing, most students could at least make an attempt that resembled an essay. In the last two to three years, however, the situation has reversed itself, to the point that, in my wife’s current class, at least so far this semester, not a single student appears capable of writing a coherent essay test… or even a three-sentence short answer.
Mind you, this is despite the fact that the university has become more selective in admitting students, and that scores on the ACT and SAT are higher than ever. Of course, that might suggest that the ACT and the SAT have been dumbed down, but I don’t believe that. I’ve talked to many of these students, and they’re intelligent. They just can’t organize their thoughts in written form if they don’t have access to electronic aids, and even when they do, the results are usually pathetic.
Needless to say, this scares me… more than a little.
One of the great benefits of learning to write an essay on a test, or under pressure without computer back-up, is that to be successful, a writer has to organize words, facts, and concepts into a coherent and persuasive form with an underlying structure and logic… and these young people don’t seem to be able to do that.
Part of this is that they also have either great difficulty in remembering facts or no interest in doing so — or perhaps both – and it is difficult to write anything factual that is meaningful without a mental knowledge base. The ramifications go far beyond writing, because without such a knowledge base, individuals have no factual internal framework by which they can judge the world around them, and their judgments and decisions become governed more and more by their emotional responses to what others have said or done most recently. This phenomenon isn’t limited to the young, of course, but it appears to be more prevalent there. How else can one explain the wide-spread lack of understanding about the number of political candidates who flip-flopped on their positions over the course of the last year – and how many people there were who claim that the “media” made it all up?
We’ve already forgotten that electronic books can be re-written without the knowledge of their users, and with a generation that is reading fewer and fewer print sources, and doesn’t seem to want to learn facts in a permanent way, how long will it be before whatever appears in their personal-media-electronica at the moment is the only reality there is to most people?
Or… have we already reached that point?