I look at what we're seeing in our colleges and in our workplaces. Skills that were once assumed to be basic to any high school graduate are absent in far too many university freshmen. I've lost count of the number of cashiers that could not accomplish a simple "count back" of change if the register didn't tell them how much the correct change should be. For pity's sake; that is simple counting. It's basic, rudimentary math that I was expected to know how to do in elementary school.
My home-schooled daughter and I took an advanced writing course at the local college a few years ago. This was a course for students with ample writing experience, with the purpose of working on book-length projects. We were both shocked by how many of the students in this
advanced course didn't know some of the basics of writing mechanics. Honestly, by the time a student reaches college Writing 101, they should already know such things as changing a speaker in dialogue requires a new paragraph, general usage of upper and lower case letters, basic punctuation, etc. In an advanced writing course, all of that should be old hat, andthe course should be able to focus on manuscript content.
My son works at a mini-market right next to the University of Arizona. Granted, his business is not one that attracts the best and brightest of clientele, but his opinion of the UA students is that, if this represents the future leaders of our nation and our industry, we're in deep doo-doo.
Our local school districts lobbied to allow students to use calculators on the standardized testing, primarily because they did not want to look bad when a large number of the children failed the math portion. Apparently, our schools do not teach math skills, they teach calculator usage.
In the midwest a few years ago, a teacher failed a number of students on an essay project because they plagiarized their work straight from the internet. From the sounds of it, the only editing these students did was to remove the real author's name and add their own. The parents went to the school board and whined that this was unfair, and the teacher needed to give the kids another chance. The school board agreed, and the teacher ended up resigning over it. She stated the parents and the school board essentially rewarded the kids for cheating, and if they were not going to allow her to teach, she wasn't going to stay in the profession.
A 2002 National Geographic
survey of young people, aged 18 - 24, in 9 countries found the United States scored second to last in knowledge of world geography. Almost 30% of the Americans could not locate the Pacific Ocean, Earth's largest body of water, on a map. Nearly half could not locate the state of New York, our Nation's third most populous state.
I haven't tried in a while, but I think I could still fill in the state names and major geographic features of the U.S. on a blank map, something we were required to do in the fifth grade.
Computers are wonderful, and the internet is an incredible repository of information, but I fear we as a society have grown to rely far too much on electronics, and have forsaken the basic skills we should know. It might be one thing to need to Google obscure, trivial information, but when we don't know even the major features of our own planet, I think we're in trouble.