Two out of three (r's) ain't bad?
With all the recent focus on Reading and 'Rithmatic, it looks like 'Riting skills are going down the tubes. Just how bad are the writing skills of today's public school students? And is it related to the reduced amount of time spent in the classroom learning to write? The NYT has the goods- or, rather, the "bads":
Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers. And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.
This sounds like a bad joke. I took AP classes, so I know I wasn't in the regular history and English classes - but we did nothing BUT write papers. How can you get out of high school without writing at least a book report in history class?
Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. The commission's report asserts that writing is among the most important skills students can learn, that it is the mechanism through which they learn to connect the dots in their knowledge — and that it is now woefully ignored in most American schools...
...until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing. Both of the major college-entrance exams, the SAT and the ACT, are being revised to include writing tests, and last year the College Board, which administers the SAT, created the National Commission on Writing to study the issue...
Further, a 2002 study of California college students found that most freshmen could not analyze arguments, synthesize information or write papers that were reasonably free of language errors.
That's just sad. It also explains some of the horror stories floating about of college freshmen who cannot pass remedial writing classes. Come to think of, students who cannot "analyze arguments" are going to be more likely to be seduced by illogical political propaganda, so this also explains the affinity of California's college students for extreme left-wing politics and some of the more boneheaded ideas that are floating around.