Category Thirteen: The Random, Wayward Musings of an Unsigned Writer

Is it just me, or are we getting dumber? Upon recently conversing with my roommate, it seems I am not alone in feeling this way.

My roommate and I both do a little assistant teaching at Iowa State. Some of the things we are seeing are not only frightening, but staggering.

I was always under the distinct impression that there was someone, somewhere made a list of things you needed to be good at before you could go past the twelfth grade, namely the three “R’s”- Readin’, wRitin’, and aRithmetic.

These skills seem to have gone the way of the dodo-- bye, bye! Misuse of words such as there, their, they’re, its, it’s, affect, effect, which, witch, and countless others run rampant throughout college kids’ work. These aren’t all freshman either, these are juniors and seniors.

Many factors could be to blame for this sad state of affairs. It’s possible that public education has slipped under the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy where the proverbial bar has been set so impossibly low that you don’t even need a concrete grasp on the English language to earn a high school diploma.

Or it could be lack of efforts on parents to push lazy kids to achieve more than the bare minimum. We could blame Sony and Microsoft for making videogames infinitely more enticing to youngsters [this includes college kids apparently] than reading Great Expectations or Hamlet.

Maybe kids are watching too much Dateline NBC and blame ADHD and a lack of a Ritalin or Adderall prescription. Maybe they are too sedated on anti-depressants or hopped up on caffeine to think straight.

Or maybe it’s a combination of all or none of these things. The fact is, kids are getting behind and the bar is being increasingly lowered. Grammar skills are being tossed by the wayside in favor of text messaging short hand and an over reliance on spell and grammar check in Microsoft Word.

I think we need to get back to the basics. You need to walk before you can crawl and I think that college kids should be able to write a coherent and complete sentence before receiving their diploma and venturing out into the big, bad world where that same bar that was lowered for educational standards is set so impossibly high in corporate America.