Why is it...

[ravan]

... that when younger (i.e. under 20) kids (especially girls), post or comment in journals or on message boards they *REFUSE* to use any capitalization, paragraph breaks, sentence stucture, sentence punctuation, or anything other than stream of (marginal) conciousness driveling?

An excerpt:
... from someone in england i think well u know what this is the one country where u have freedom unlilke any other where freedom of religion no matter what it is is supossed to be welcome by anyone anything and everything and i have one thing to say to u if u dont like us kiss it because this is america we live breath walk talk and enjoy every minute of our freedom ...
This was from one giant paragraph, that had at least two more separate thoughts or "points" contained in it!!

What the heck are they teaching school these days?? I had to read the above snippet and its attached crap three times to figure out where to chop it as one "idea". I guess she's so free, that she doesn't need to concern herself with being comprehensible!! (Yes, it was signed with a female name, which has been withheld to protect the guilty.)

I can forgive spelling errors. I make enough typos and word swaparounds myself - homonyms can be nasty on insufficient caffeine. But this crap is just so far outside the bounds of readable that it is painful.

This kind of illiterate is "representative" of America? Aaaaaaghh!!

Comments

Why Johnny Can't Think

[dubhain.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

What you're describing is the '3-Rs' approach to education coming back to haunt us by biting us hard (and constantly) in the arse (yes, I know it's a mixed metaphor. Sue me).

I recall one of my college Profs bemoaning the fact that her students were getting dumber every year. Not less intelligent, mind, but dumber.

Some time in the early 'seventies, the 'back to fundamentals' approach to education in the U.S. triumphed, and rote-memorization took the place of critical thinking as the number-one priority in schools nationwide.

This apparently, according to said Prof (and several others I asked about it afterward), led to college students, after a given year, who had exceptional memorization skills, but who were increasingly inept, with passing years, in critical thinking skills. They could parrot, apparently, but had one hell of a time applying what they were parroting to real-life situations and being able to understand (intelligently discuss?) what they were being taught.

The cutoff year she mentioned, BTW, was 1983.

The most earth-shaking example I encountered was during an 'Intro. to Logic' class. The Prof. (not the one who complained, but one of the ones I asked afterward about this 'phenomenon') had written a test which required almost no memorization whatsoever, but a thorough understanding of the material as applied to various given applications. I, back taking the odd class several years after High School, passed with flying colors. The rest of the class failed miserably, with one or two moderate-scoring exceptions. Understand: this wasn't a badly-written or badly-designed exam. It was, in fact, a rather good one, and he was an excellent instructor (you try and find a valid way to teach conditional proofing without first teaching set theory. He did). The former 'star pupil' in the class summed-up the kids' agreement nicely:

"The problem with this test is that he expected us to think. He can't do that. We're not supposed to think. He's supposed to write shit up on the chalkboard for us to write down and lecture. We're supposed to copy the shit he puts up there and the shit he lectures about down, and read the book. We memorize all that shit, then on the test, we're supposed to copy it all back onto the paper. If we do it right, he gives us an 'A'. But he didn't do that. He expected us to think about the shit he taught and answer the questions. That isn't right. It isn't fair. We memorized every fucking thing he gave us, but he expected us to think, and he can't do that! I'm going to go to the Dean's office and file a complaint. I'll get him fired for this if I have to! This is fucking with my goddamm degree here, all because this asshole wants us to fucking think!"

I kid you not. That's nearly word for word what she said. (She didn't call him an asshole though. She called him something somewhat incestuous.) I mentioned the tirade to him later, keeping identities out of it. He just sighed and shook his head. Then he agreed that his students had been steadily losing critical thinking ability over the years. I asked him when it started. He thought for a minute and came up with...1983. So did every other Prof. I talked to about it.

So we stopped teaching our kids to think critically and simply expected them to become parrots and rote-memorizers. They now think in sound bites, and parrot whateverthehell the government and network talking heads tell them on the 'tube. And their children, as you describe, take it a step farther. There's no need to learn to form coherent sentences and paragraphs. There's no need to learn to structure your thoughts so as to communicate intelligibly. "Just write-down what's on the blackboard into your notebook, Johnny, then memorize every word. If you can do that, and write it back out on the test form under the right question, you'll get an 'A', and you'll be a smart, smart boy!"

We're living in the information age, and we're bringing-up our children to be defenseless....

[mlion.livejournal.com]

Oh, Ravan, you shouldn't have gotten me started on that.
I worked with a lot of college students when I was a supervisor at the UO. Got to be good
friends with a lot of them.
And the brightest ones couldn't construct a classic five paragraph paper to save their souls.
They weren't taught how to do it in high school. Ever. So, I gave more lessons than I care
to think about in how to write 5 page papers. It was amazing to me.
My favorite prof/advisor noticed the same thing Dubhain did, and still demanded his students
think in class. He managed to get away with it, even, though he did have to spend a whole
class period in intro to Theater about how to write a five para critique...

[jilara.livejournal.com]

What's even worse (and amazes me) is that this sort of crap sometimes gets published. In places where it shouldn't, like small-press magazines. Or even worse, reference books. I posted a scathing review of a kimono reference book on Amazon, because the author couldn't be bothered with minor things like punctuation and spelling. You couldn't even find the subject of the sentence with a divining rod, in a lot of cases. And this was PUBLISHED in a $50 book! As a professional writer, it offends me. The other day, at work, I was explaining to a couple engineers that writing "like they talked" was not acceptable, and they couldn't seem to understand why not---sigh.