And that’s why they’re building a new state-of-the-art bunker under the new White House ballroom.
As Gen Z ditch books at record levels, students are arriving to classrooms unable to complete assigned reading on par with previous expectations. It’s leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations.
One shocked professor has described young adults showing up to class, unable to read a single sentence.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.” […]With students struggling, academics have been forced to adapt—a move critics describe as “coddling.”
For her part, Wilson has turned to reading passages aloud together, discussing them line by line, or repeatedly returning to a single poem or text over the course of a semester—in part so students can begin to develop the skills to read critically on their own and be prepared for their post-graduate career.
The real question is why aren’t the brain dead illiterates still back in grade 7 … who lets the losers into university?
I remember the university acceptance exams and they were 2 hour and 3 hour tough tests.
I also remember walking up hill, both ways, to and from school …. barefoot in the snow of course!
And we were poor … my parents were poor, too poor to have children so the people next door had me 😉
“The real question is why aren’t the brain dead illiterates still back in grade 7 … who lets the losers into university?”
The university does, obviously. Gotta have butts in seats, or the Uni goes broke. Why do you think we have entire Canadian universities filled with nothing but foreign students? Go to U Waterloo and count white kids some day. There aren’t any. Because white kids graduating from Ontario high schools can’t compete with the foreign students. You have to have a 4.0 GPA or they won’t even look at your application.
Because Ontario kids are stupid? No. Because Ontario kids pay $8K for tuition, and foreign students pay $28K or more. That’s why. They pretend it’s all about academics, but they’re lying. It’s about the money.
I work for a “professional services” firm in Waterloo. Very few of our coops and new hires are not either Chinese or Indian – more so Indian now, used to be Chinese.
I was shocked at the poor quality of students in my daughter’s K-8 school in Toronto in the late 1990’s. Thankfully, I was able to get her into French Immersion classes which were smaller and required that the students had at least B+ or better grades. Then we moved to Alberta and for high school, she was enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program. The IB program started in 1980, I wish it had been around when I was in the K-12 system. I DO realize that Toronto’s K-12 system must deal with immigrant students who do not speak English, but mainstreaming them does not help them or others learn the curriculum.
And audio books aren’t helping.
But Ai is helping! … along with its Ai voicing. Nobody needs to learn anything anymore, or need to read anything anymore. Ai has learned it for you, and can speak it for you. This has freed-up Gen Z to spend their time on more important things such as Tiktok and Free Free Palestine! Land Back to Indigenous! Whitey Racist!
Too muntz ego i cudn’t spel pilut, now i r un.
“With students struggling, academics have been forced to adapt—a move critics describe as “coddling.””
Yes, because TEACHING THEM TO READ would be -crazy!- This is university, they don’t teach.
This is not a new thing, by the way. In the 1990s I used to teach the illiterate sons and daughters of privilege how to pass the MCAT exam to get into medical school in New York. Princeton Review courses. It was pretty fun. Watching the kiddies slllloooooowly learn to READ the question before deciding to spend half an hour calculating a trajectory.
I discovered that while most could read the words and sentences, many of them would read a paragraph and have no idea what it meant. Like, at all. They were Dick-and-Jane level.
“Run Spot, run! Spot has a ball! The ball is red!” Then you ask them who Spot is, and they say “duuuh…” and can’t come up with anything unless there’s a picture. These were high school graduates with 3.85 GPAs by the way, not kidz from da hood. Nobody ever explained to them how to extract useful information from text.
To be fair to the dumb little Zoomers, at 69 I’m still discovering basic stuff I should have learned in high school. If I had known that 40 years ago it would have made a difference. Usually with woodworking, but sometimes with finance and public life.
Public school and high school as presently constituted are nothing more or less than a babysitting service with a side order of political indoctrination and a heaping serving of mental abuse for the main course. Does anybody else get that feeling toward the end of August that life is going to be over in September? You see the back-to-school! advertisements and have a moment where all the joy runs out of your life? Those are not the signs of a positive life experience, know what I mean? More like a mild form of PTSD.
Yes, public schools are failing. They’ve been failing my entire life, and they will continue to do so. They are based on a factory model designed for making cars, from an idea that I think came from Otto Von Bismark. Train the youth for the industrial world, so that you’ll have more workers. They don’t need to think, the elites will think for them. That’s what school is.
I’m told young people can’t read cursive writing. One day we won’t know the difference between Latin and a written letter from the 1970s.
“I’m told young people can’t read cursive writing.”
They can’t -write- in cursive. They print. But they also can’t read typeset books. First year uni, can’t read all the way through a Tom Swift novel, or a Hardy Boys. For real.
“They can’t -write- in cursive. They print. But they also can’t read typeset books. First year uni, can’t read all the way through a Tom Swift novel, or a Hardy Boys. For real.”
Can’t read the time on an analogue clock, either.
We did this to ourselves. I have long thought that it was the teachers who are responsible for most of our current social woes…a bunch of woke, PC (mostly women) propagandists more concerned with pushing their socialist agenda than actually teaching our kids to read and write.
I can’t write in cursive. But you should hear me talk!
May the curse be with you.
I’m just sitting down to a four-curse meal…
iirc we can thank the dyke kathleen wynnedfarm for that serious derailment.
People who can’t disseminate info are easy to manipulate and indoctrinate.
Thank Marxist teachers.
But especially parents who were too busy counting their money and fondling their possessions.
A cull is imminent.
Yes on both counts. Don’t forget “No Child Left Behind” and all that (including the new, computer/internet based learning — which a lot of homeschoolers are doing, because it’s easier than wading through the material themselves, my child is self-taught! phenomena; yeah, not smart).
This is but one reason why many companie no longer demand university degrees for many white-collar positions. Such degrees do not ensure that candidates have a real education. Companies can get as good or better employees with two-year skill-based diplomas.
Well. It’s not as if they’ll need to knowing how to read a complex sentence when they find themselves doing the hard farm work they swear White folk won’t do for the Chinese oligarch who bought them in bulk to till his North American plantation. The occasional bullet in the head of a slave who asks too many questions or collapses from hunger or exhaustion after doing farm work for 84 hours a week for a bowl of rice a day will make their master’s wishes known just fine, no reading comprehension in English necessary—much less Chinese.
Not to mention that Illiteracy makes it harder to organize slave revolts.
Their efforts will leave their owner back in the Middle Kingdom, perfectly literate in modern Mandarin and in classical Chinese, free to while away his hours studying classical Chinese texts and writing tracts on why Chinese world dominion has ensured harmony of all things under heaven, and that it’s no longer Chinese who need greet each each other not with “How are you?” but “Have you eaten today yet?”
you are aware mr slater, give it 200 years (or less, technology always accelerates things) well, suffice to say
‘given enough time pretty much anything can happen’. you forgot to mention all traces of n american history have long, long since been purged. the julie christie film ‘farenheit 451’ describes the process.
one part of the process could include killing off an entire genertation of those who ‘lived in a different time’ and may dare describe it. (chirese exput at mass mudduhink their own peepull. except this makes it REAL easy, ie not their race. and besides if no one can read, the business of destroying all printed works is moot.
Shout out to Farenheit 451; it’s a great book. The ending is dystopian but hopeful.
And there is no reason why a laborer shouldn’t be able to read a book or an academic to build something with their own hands, and both to be able to manage their own affairs. We need to get back to that; I for one am tired of hearing people make excuses as to why we can’t; yes, it will be hard with the forces of the world arrayed against it, but nothing ventured nothing gained, and at least you tried.
pffft. my reading experience? try this.
l was violently STRUCK in grade 1 for . . . . . . . having my face in a book. BLAT!!! WRONG ANSWER !!!
problem was, l learned to read basically instantaneously and DARED to lOOk ahead in that dick & jane drek.
gawd l remember thinking, ‘is THIS all there is to reading???? anyways its KRITTER CONTINUE
oopsie. so kritter the autisitc dummy gets belted @ 6 yrs of age. (also lm not a prettyboy, use horsefaces were fair game to this day).
soooooooooo in MY day you are criminally assaulted for doing what youre there to do.
My youngest son was soooooooo bored in his upper, upper, middle class public school first grade classroom … that when he finished his work an hour before the allotted time … his teacher gave him stained glass window coloring books to fill in. We have stacks and stacks of colored stained glass window pictures to certify the utter stupidity of public schools and (some) public school teachers.
Yes, we tried to get him moved out of THAT classroom … but were fought back HARD by the Principal.
the bunker? ah. well. now THATS a macdonalds l wdnt mind working at.
Gosh…how many people who applied to go to Pepperdine, but were rejected can read a sentence? I’m guessing most of them.
Professor Jessica Hooten Wilson just handed a whole lot of people a civil suit.
Pepperdine? Do they call their team the “Salt Shakers”?
Here…let’s take it a step farther:
Acceptance Rate: Reported between 30% and 63% in recent data, with some sources indicating lower, more selective, and more competitive rates.
GPA: The mid-50% for admitted students is 3.64–3.88 (unweighted).
SAT/ACT: Mid-50% SAT scores range from 1330–1420, while ACT scores range from 30–32.
____________________________________
If you can’t read a sentence, you cannot get a 1330 on an SAT. And, while Pepperdine states that they don’t admit based on race, just under 50% of Pepperdine admissions are minority.
GPA inflation at bottom tier HS’s are a real thing. Suffice to say my B+ HS GPA from a top rated public HS in 1974 … would translate to a 4.6 GPA at most HS’s today. And yes Jane … we read GREAT Western Lit. … The Scarlet Letter, A Separate Peace, Fahrenheit 451, 1984 …
The lower the acceptance rate, the more “selective” and “exclusive” the institution.
Ha ha. Learn to
coderead.“Learn to code” was always an annoying phrase anyway. Developing sound software at an industrial scale is difficult, requiring considerable experience, training, and talent. Most people who were told “learn to code” would never make it as software developers no matter how keen they were.
Perhaps, but coding ability is an IQ test.
Logic, structure, deduction, ..
Bullshit.
Please expand your argument.
Is writing ability an IQ test?
I would say no.
Just because somebody is illiterate it doesn’t mean they’re stupid.
You misspelled … “copy and paste”
“Developing sound software at an industrial scale is difficult, requiring considerable experience, training, and talent.” Yes. If you have any incentive to do it properly. Israeli high-tech solutions work. They have to. The alternative is a Second Shoah.
In supposedly more enlightened westerm countries, the people being told to “learn to code” were working-class White men considered useless as anything but cannon fodder for the next mad “nation building” scheme.
Everything else could be outsourced to Red China, the know-it-alls said, including coding for systems whose failure or compromise would be catastrophic for the client (such as, just for example, the IT infrastructures of the armed forces of the western world).
Think of the money we’ll make for shareholders, the know-it-alls said.
Why yes, we have second passports issued by countries where it’s aleays sunny, where you can buy a wife young enough to be your granddaughter for a couple of thousand bucks American—tops—and the PLA won’t bother going to round up White men to march into the rice paddies, they said.
Doesn’t everyone who matters? they said.
Not only can they not read, they no longer understand the structure of even slightly complicated sentences, and how different rearrangements of that sentence structure can greatly affect its meaning. Something I was taught in grade school (do they even teach the “diagramming” of sentences these days)?
This can be remedied by giving them a copy of Strunk and Whyte’s “The Elements of Style.”
Perhaps one could also give them a copy of Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.”
Both books are real page turners!
As for changing the meaning of a sentence by rearranging words, don’t forget that even punctuation can save lives!
For example…
Let’s eat children.
Let’s eat, children!
Strunk and Whyte was used by all my HS English teachers like a Baptist Preacher uses The Bible. Their book of English writing style is just as compact as they demand your writing should be. I’m still trying to learn the lessons of … brevity.
”But I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying REAL HARD to be the Shepard”
https://youtu.be/nPJQLmlIzpE?si=rCInXXntcQ85Ff5L
Brevity is the soul of wit, said Polonious, ironically, in Hamlet.
Not that I would accuse you of long windedness.
I kid.
Ok, yeah, Shrunk&White is in my library…
But…but…there’s brevity (aka. get to the point you’re wanting to make) and learning to master a flowing, descriptive style (that’s why we need to read Hemingway AND Austen).
Hey, unknown jane, you English Major friend (and I love your comments here)….
A fellow English Major here (First class honours a long time ago).
I heartily agree,
I enjoy Hemingway to Vonnegut for brevity, but indulge in Dickens et al for the lovely flourish of stylistic overindulgence.
Heck, I still prefer the King James Version of expression.
Plenitude!
Plenitude, few swallowed…
Grammar is racist, people!
Back in the good old days, and not in Canada, I learned grammar from grade 2 and on. What a wonderful gift to for me/us, to understand the structure of language (at least to some extent).
I would assume in today’s Canada (and in many other Western countries), the “teachers” have no idea what the difference is between word classes and phrase classes.
Truly sad.
Tormenting teens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
l learned heaps more french grammar than engrish.
future anterior imperative etc. oyph. aka
mon ma mes
ton tas tes
notre notre nos
votre votre vos
leur leur leurs
leur leur leurs.
see? l can still conjugate after 60 years lol or is that rire rire rires!!
I’ve seen more impressive conjugating in porn cinemas. Not necessarily on the screen, either.