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Tim Murphy 04-29-2012 06:44 PM

A College Degree
 
Ok, let's try a more serious thread.

The biggest problem I have had as an employer and venture capitalist is that kids can't write a simple, declarative sentence, let alone a letter or serious proposal. I'll get a letter from a senior attorney beginning "Myself and Darrold Rath have reviewed your proposal..."

I studied English at Yale, and I learned to write pretty well. I got a good job in advertising and public relations straight out of school, where I learned to write a hell of a lot better, under the supervision of an old newspaper man, than Yale ever taught me. I think it was the old saw that a liberal arts education teaches you nothing, but it teaches you how to learn everything.

Now we have a situation where 50 percent of our recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed, dispensing coffee at Starbucks. And they can't write a declarative sentence. They are graduating with student debt of $28k, and what hope have they?

I think two things are radically wrong with our colleges, first, the immense growth of college administration. What are we doing paying these bureaucrats the same total amount we pay our professors? In my neolithic time it was probably ten per cent. The second thing is that our professoriate has been taken over by my generation who don't give a shit about teaching kids how to read, to write, to think. They just want to brainwash them about racism, diversity, what have you. They want to keep the young adjunct professors on starvation wages, and they use every dime from public funds, especially student loans, to feather their own nests.

I am an outsider looking in, having never drawn a salary from a college, but this is how a small business man sees the corruption of higher education.

Max Goodman 04-29-2012 08:23 PM

Formal education has a tough time competing with people's everyday experience. If a teacher tells you one way of doing something and then you repeatedly hear others doing it differently, how long does it take to forget the way you were told--or, if you remember, to doubt the importance, if not the accuracy, of the lesson?

I'm not only referring to the way students hear people speak. They're exposed to grammatical errors in advertising, in print, in many circumstances where they could reasonably expect examples worth following. Even a local library, of all places, until recently had a recording asking you, when you called, to chose the extension of the person "for whom you wish to leave a message for."

Orwn Acra 04-29-2012 09:02 PM

It doesn't matter if you can write well. No one cares. I've never been employed by anyone who could compose a grammatically correct sentence. Like Tim, I worked in PR and marketing almost right out of college. Unlike Tim, I had a higher-up who seemed threatened by my ability to write. She loved to put commas all over her sentences and had never used a semi-colon correctly. One day she wrote this awful company bio and sent it to me to double-check and told me to "not dumb it down". I told her it was dumb enough and left it at that.

As of last week, I dispense coffee for some fancy shop in SoHo. And you know, the pay is pretty much the same (I got luck that way) and way less stressful.

Perhaps I have had bad luck in employment, but I no longer think that writing well is an advantage.

John Whitworth 04-29-2012 09:17 PM

It is exactly the same here. The fault is in those bastards who took over education in the 1960s. I remember a schoolteacher telling me how he was forbidden to teach the children grammar because, you see, English didn't have any grammar because it wasn't Latin. He got his own back by teaching grammar secretly when he knew the headteacher was out of school.

We now have a Secretary of State for Education, the bleessed Michael Gove, who thinks more or less the way I do. He is doing his best but the massed troops of educationalists and teachers' trade unions are dead set against him. The teachers themselves can neither write properly nor do simple arithmetic because they were never taught to themselves in their appalling comprehensive schools. There would be one advantage in becoming part of the German Empire of the European Union because they never bught into this crap. How could they? German britles with obvious grammar like a teutonic hedgehog. However we were supposed to have WON that damn war.

I connect this with the rise of free verse.

Charlotte Innes 04-29-2012 10:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Whitworth (Post 243441)
German britles with obvious grammar like a teutonic hedgehog. However we were supposed to have WON that damn war.

"Britles?" I like it! Sorry, John. I have to read my stuff at least 10 times to catch typos... And I have to force my students to read over their work just once.

They also write all the time.... on laptops, cell phones, iPads... whatever electronic gadget they have to hand--in "techno-speak," of course. I have to take away all electronic gear at the beginning of my classes, to get their attention at all. Make of that what you will. I actually love technology, but sometimes I wonder about its effect... Overall, I have maybe five students who write really well, and care about revising their work. However... I'm lucky I teach at a small private school, and can give students my full attention. The public schools are overcrowded in the extreme, and I suspect it's really hard for teachers to enable their students to write properly and in depth.

Charlotte

David Rosenthal 04-29-2012 10:35 PM

Tim,

Where was is it I read recently that Yeats and Auden couldn't punctuate and Frost couldn't spell?

David R.

Michael Cantor 04-29-2012 10:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy (Post 243419)
The second thing is that our professoriate has been taken over by my generation who don't give a shit about teaching kids how to read, to write, to think. They just want to brainwash them about racism, diversity, what have you. They want to keep the young adjunct professors on starvation wages, and they use every dime from public funds, especially student loans, to feather their own nests.

Oh, it's worse than that, Tim. I understand that reason and logic have given way to rants and wild assertions.

Quincy Lehr 04-29-2012 11:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tim Murphy (Post 243419)
The second thing is that our professoriate has been taken over by my generation who don't give a shit about teaching kids how to read, to write, to think. They just want to brainwash them about racism, diversity, what have you. They want to keep the young adjunct professors on starvation wages, and they use every dime from public funds, especially student loans, to feather their own nests.

Oh, yes, because tenured faculty would rather not hire full-timers (huh? I've never heard that), and teaching about racism (which, as an American historian, I do rather a lot) is counterposed to teaching writing and thinking? Huh? Really?

Actually, Tim, where writing's concerned, a few cases of dramatic improvement aside, by university, it's a bit late to acquire basic skills in subject-verb agreement and what have you. I should be able to expect a base line of competence in college freshmen. I can't and don't. Is this because I don't think it's important? No. Because I'm a left-winger? F&^k no! I would put most of the blame on an underfunded and overly regimented primary and secondary education system that actively discourages initiative among the students and moreover is in large part the creation of the political right. (The AFT and NEA are right to protest the batteries of tests that students have to take. There's little evidence they improve learning, and they add a great deal of dead time to a given year as students cram.) There, too, I observe enough student teachers that I see some very good things happening, but education isn't a priority in this country. It just isn't.

Ned Balbo 04-29-2012 11:19 PM

The problems in higher education run very deep, and it's risky to engage in caricature. Higher education isn't uniform across states, regions, or levels of selectivity. The core problem is money vs. resources. Human resources are undervalued, and faculty who are neither stars nor professors at top-tier institutions shoulder course loads and class sizes that make excellent teaching difficult. Money is funneled to non-academic purposes, while more and more adjuncts are hired and ill-used. Some students are ill-prepared and, in Humanities areas, resistant to learning since intellectual flexibility, argumentative skills, and respect for the written word are in short supply across the culture, even among well-intentioned people.

David Rosenthal 04-29-2012 11:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ned Balbo (Post 243458)
The problems in higher education run very deep, and it's risky to engage in caricature. Higher education isn't uniform across states, regions, or levels of selectivity. The core problem is money vs. resources. Human resources are undervalued, and faculty who are neither stars nor professors at top-tier institutions shoulder course loads and class sizes that make excellent teaching difficult. Money is funneled to non-academic purposes, while more and more adjuncts are hired and ill-used. Some students are ill-prepared and, in Humanities areas, resistant to learning since intellectual flexibility, argumentative skills, and respect for the written word are in short supply across the culture, even among well-intentioned people.

And for the record, all of these problems, or analogs of them, begin in kindergarten.

David R.


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