Pretty Much Illiterate

Then there’s this tale of woe (read it all for the full horror):

College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.

“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”   Wilson described that she is trying new pedagogical methods to convey the same information.  “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”

Yeah, I know all about that.  I think I’ve told the story of how Connie (as Global Director of Training at a Great Big Accounting Firm) had occasion to review some of her earlier training materials.  These, she discovered, were about 80% text and the rest graphics.  Only five years later, the ratio had been completely inverted:  80% graphics and the rest text.  (And just so we know who we’re talking about, the trainees all had Masters degrees in either Finance or Business.  Not yer typical Fem Studies or Art History grads, these.)  When she tried to arrest that development and include more text, all that happened was that the training became less effective:  less absorption and poorer retention.

So none of the above are at all surprising to me;  only the extent is somewhat shocking.

At some point, all learning, innovation and civilization itself is going to plateau (or worse, #Muslims) instead of increasing with each generation, as before.

Socrates had it nailed.