I have some first hand experience with abysmal writing and reading expectations in schools--I am a 5th grade teacher.
First, regarding reading. There is a major push in schools to focus on short, contemporary, and informational text. I was told by a Language Arts Specialist that I should never "waste time" with anything longer than 3 pages long. And let's be honest: modern short, informational writing demands so much less brain power than the greatest works of literature. I do my best to counter this nonsense in my own class (we read ten novels over the course of the year--we're just starting Treasure Island now), but there's sadly only so much a single teacher can do against this wave of stupidity.
Second, regarding writing. There's a huge push to get kids to write longer pieces as fast as possible. 1st graders are expected to write a paragraph. My 5th graders are expected to write a multi-paragraph essay.
You may wonder, "what's wrong with this?"
Well, the students can't write a coherent sentence yet. And so you get what you show in your example: lots of words that are empty, with very little substance or craft. My own fifth graders came to me unable to explain what makes a complete sentence. And yet, they've been writing full paragraphs for years.
In short, we are skipping the basics, the foundations. We ask they put up a large word count and don't bother to ask: does it mean anything? Are the thoughts organized? How do you move from one idea to the next, carefully leading the reader through an intelligent guided tour of your thoughts on the subject? Are the sentences themselves crafted with intelligence and care?
And now, with the advent of AI into the sphere, the problem will only get worse and worse.
And I have created a personal rule my students must follow regarding technology in writing:
You are not allowed to use any digital tool unless you can do the task on your own correctly. This means no spell check until you can spell virtually 100% of all words correctly on your own. No grammar check until you know the rules of grammar and can write complex sentences correctly in a variety of ways. No revision tools until you know how to revise and edit your paper on your own, by hand.
For all practical purposes, since I teach 5th grade, this means no digital tools at all right now.
Sadly, I can't force these rules on any other teacher or grade level. But at least I can guarantee that in my class, for 1 year of these students' education, they will learn what it means to write and think clearly.
They’re even dumbing down the Bible with awful modern translations. I am not religious but I if I want to quote the Bible I go for KJV. And because we read it when I was a kid, I was easily able to read Shakespeare later. Listening to Moby Dick recently I realized that young people probably can’t understand the sentence structures and definitely not the allusions.
In all fairness, it's not quite as simple as "dumbing down the Bible". The standard modern reference translation is the New Revised Standard Version, which uses standard American English. One of the issues with the King James Version is that some of the translations are inaccurate, and this isn't just a matter of stylistic preference -- the mistranslations have genuine theological implications. I'm not a Biblical scholar, so I can't give you the details on this, but for people who care about understanding the **exact** meaning of the text, this is obviously important.
Of course I agree that as a literary text the King James Version is unparalleled, and every serious student of English literature should be familiar with it. (This also goes for the Book of Common Prayer.) It is one of the foundational texts in the history of the language, and in fact is arguably the single most important work in English just because of how many people have studied it through the ages. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss modern translations as "dumbing down"; they are based on an enormous amount of careful scholarship, and if anything are more precise and accurate than the KJV.
You’ll never know the “exact” meaning of the text for which we do not have any of the original manuscripts never mind how thinking and understanding of the world has changed over several millennia and the fact that all translation is an art and you can’t even translate something as simple as “I have a headache” literally from one language to another.
I cannot tell you how excited I was a few years ago when my daughter's new school required a workbook that included sentence diagramming. Thank God she will at least know what a (#@*$#@ adjective is.
You absolutely killed it with this article, Liza! I wish I could say that this problem isn't as bad as it seems and you needn't worry, but unfortunately, I cannot. You are absolutely right! Our kids can't write, and they can't think either for that matter. As we all know, our public education system is broken in many ways. One of them is that the written word and teaching students to think critically about what their reading has been devalued. Now they can just get on their computer, find a free AI generator from companies like Google or Microsoft and presto! An instant A on the test! They had to do no work at all or do any thinking for themselves to figure out what the meaning of a passage in a book or the main takeaways about an event in history might be. Nor do they actually have to read real books anymore. Now they can just learn about reading and writing from woke garbage, spark notes or song lyrics from fifth-rate hacks of "musical artists" like Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar. It's not supposed to be that easy! If you make it easy for them, they'll never learn how to properly structure a sentence, add new and better words to their vocabulary or understand concepts like allusions, plot twists, foreshadowing, personification, hyperbole, metaphors, irony, or alliteration! They'll remain at a third-grade level of reading and writing for life! Nor will they ever learn how to figure out what's going on in a given story for themselves.
I don't know about everyone else here but if I ever have children someday, that's NOT the way I would want them to learn how to read, write and think! First-off I want them to read REAL books! I want them to learn sentence structure and critical thinking from great works like The Grapes of Wrath, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Romeo and Juliet, Murder on the Orient Express, A Haunting in Venice, Goodnight Moon, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, A Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Flea, Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Go Down, Moses, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, The Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Mother Goose Tales, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Raven, and A Midsummer's Night Dream. NOT trash like White Fragility, How to Be An Antiracist, Orientalism, or the Hate U Give, some sparks note they found on the internet or the latest hot garbage by the likes of Beyonce, Taylor Swift, John Mayer, Bruno Mars, or whatever Sound Cloud rapper of the week that might be popular that year. I want them to actually know how to write two page essays, figure out the meaning of an allusion in a work of literature and what its meant to symbolize and be descriptive, specific and expressive with their writing all by themselves. Not just write something like: Ya man, English Lit is like so dope! Shakespeare and Chaucer are straight fire u know. I just love reading themm becaussee there so much fun. Romeo and Juliet made mee laff so hard bruh. lol lmao. Pretty soon that's the kind of stuff they'll be vomiting out.
Also, what's with the changes to the SAT? So, you're basically going to spell out for them what the correct answer is so they can be nice and comfy and not use their brain at all? You're doing them a huge disservice! So, what are they going to do when their out in the real world at their job and they need to type up a report or a memo to their boss or they're serving in the military, and they're asked to decode a message or to figure out what two enemy soldiers or terrorists are alluding to when speaking to one another? What if their car breaks down, they have a bad accident at home or they get lost on vacation? How are they supposed to figure out how to resolve the situation and get help if they've never had to think about anything a day in their lives? You're not going to have AI there to help you when you're getting mugged, or when you need to figure out how to put together a presentation for your superiors at work! Pretty soon they'll revise the SAT again and it will literally say "the correct answer is..."
As a history major, I've seen first-hand how devalued our field and the skills that come along with it are as well. Your average high school or college student's understanding of American or world history is shockingly poor. I'm not kidding that I once heard a high school student I was working with at a past job say we fought Germany in the Revolutionary War! I also remember telling a high school classmate of mine about Ulysses S. Grant and he replied, "I thought he was a rapper." Same goes for my peers in college. They failed to understand simple things like historical context, seeing complexity because more things in American or human history for that matter are not black or white, but within the many shades of gray and presentism, that you should NOT judge people from the past by our standards today. That is NOT a way to understand them. They also believed so many common myths about historical events and people or just flat out didn't know what they were talking about! That's what happens when you learn your history from a broken education system, YouTube and memes. :(
For example, I often heard people say America is a stolen country. No, most of the land in this country was acquired through peaceful trade with the Native Americans or through conquest. The idea that taking over another country is wrong is a modern idea that has only existed for the past eighty years or so. The right of conquest was universally recognized by all nations until its formal reputation in 1949. The way it was prior to that was if you had the military strength to take and hold a piece of land it was yours's to keep. Another example, many of my peers had an overly simplistic view of the American Civil War. They saw it as a simple case of the good North fighting the bad South who committed treason just to hold other human beings as property. The Civil War was most certainly NOT that simple. Slavery was don't get me wrong an important issue and certainly one of the causes of the war, but it was only one cause among many nor was it the only reason the South went to war in 1861 or succeeded. Your average Union soldier fought not to abolish slavery but to preserve the Union and your average Confederate soldier fought not to preserve slavery but to defend their home from what they saw as an invasion.
This was revelatory. I tutor kids as well, and advise them on college admissions/scholarship essays. I have found the EXACT same phenomenon. Smart kids who are motivated to write simply can't create coherent and compelling thoughts. Their products are awkward, verbose... and basically meaningless. Why do I want to study engineering in Spain for a semester? Because it will allow me new and exciting educational opportunities and allow me to grow as an engineer!
Yes... but HOW?
I find myself asking these kids the same questions again and again, and they struggle to explain themselves, even verbally. I suspect the problem might be even bigger than writing, but I'm glad to see you're raising the subject.
Students can't write because they don't read anything that is well-written. God forbid we ask them to expand beyond anime, text messages, and Twitter captions. The lower our expectations, the lower the quality. Education is now focused on "getting jobs," not on producing young adults who are capable of intellectual curiosity, research, critical thinking, or discernment.
I never really clicked with the standard English curriculum and only found my stride as a writer, and my appreciation for literature in general, after I left school. I am sure my writing style reflects that and I won’t claim I will ever be more than average - whatever that means. I am still only an amateur relatively. I simply want to point out though that English curriculums have probably been in a gradual decline for a while. It is simply only obvious now.
I am a millennial- not gen z - and my teachers were at least on their face trying to teach these skills. However, anecdotally - in my case - they were a bit too narrow minded in some cases to teach kids with different strengths and perspectives. The fact that I was able to find a way to be a total writing nerd only after leaving all of my schooling - says a lot to me about how much the curriculum needs to work on teaching all types of kids- not just the standard English nerd.
Thank you for proving those examples. It explains why as a public library director, I received so many badly written letters of application from people with masters degrees.
This reflects exactly my experience having recently returned to academia as an adjunct professor of music history. It is incredibly depressing to see the writing abilities of some of my second-year students. The best are what I would consider competent, though hardly distinguished; whereas the worst don't seem to understand what a sentence is (frequent fragments and run-on sentences), nor do they have any apparent comprehension of grammar (e.g. using the present tense to talk about dead people) or how to logically construct an argument. I try to be generous given their backgrounds, but it's a constant moral dilemma trying to figure out the limits of my generosity given my responsibility to future professors they will have if I pass them. At the same time, I worry if I am too strict, future adjunct teaching at this university (the only one in my area) might be at risk.
bias, bc I was a liberal arts, poly science major who relied on writing skills to complete college and not good in STEM. But most of the storytelling ability I have today is from all those books I read for 28 years of education ( I was nontrad so college took me longer) and since. I am paid as a writer and teach students that write for their college newspaper. But at the same time I understand the STEM route and most likely would recommit to this if I was starting over. Still every singe word you wrote is true and I think it's a great big pity students coming out of HS can't write w/o the ai app. or Grammarly. We won't really know the effects however bc that will come in a couple of decades.I would be sad to be at the winding up part without the ability to read, love of reading, writing, and everything written content. That's very specific so bias. What's the answer though?
I have some first hand experience with abysmal writing and reading expectations in schools--I am a 5th grade teacher.
First, regarding reading. There is a major push in schools to focus on short, contemporary, and informational text. I was told by a Language Arts Specialist that I should never "waste time" with anything longer than 3 pages long. And let's be honest: modern short, informational writing demands so much less brain power than the greatest works of literature. I do my best to counter this nonsense in my own class (we read ten novels over the course of the year--we're just starting Treasure Island now), but there's sadly only so much a single teacher can do against this wave of stupidity.
Second, regarding writing. There's a huge push to get kids to write longer pieces as fast as possible. 1st graders are expected to write a paragraph. My 5th graders are expected to write a multi-paragraph essay.
You may wonder, "what's wrong with this?"
Well, the students can't write a coherent sentence yet. And so you get what you show in your example: lots of words that are empty, with very little substance or craft. My own fifth graders came to me unable to explain what makes a complete sentence. And yet, they've been writing full paragraphs for years.
In short, we are skipping the basics, the foundations. We ask they put up a large word count and don't bother to ask: does it mean anything? Are the thoughts organized? How do you move from one idea to the next, carefully leading the reader through an intelligent guided tour of your thoughts on the subject? Are the sentences themselves crafted with intelligence and care?
And now, with the advent of AI into the sphere, the problem will only get worse and worse.
And I have created a personal rule my students must follow regarding technology in writing:
You are not allowed to use any digital tool unless you can do the task on your own correctly. This means no spell check until you can spell virtually 100% of all words correctly on your own. No grammar check until you know the rules of grammar and can write complex sentences correctly in a variety of ways. No revision tools until you know how to revise and edit your paper on your own, by hand.
For all practical purposes, since I teach 5th grade, this means no digital tools at all right now.
Sadly, I can't force these rules on any other teacher or grade level. But at least I can guarantee that in my class, for 1 year of these students' education, they will learn what it means to write and think clearly.
Good writing is a product of frequent book reading. I don't think kids read much today other than abbreviated text messages.
They’re even dumbing down the Bible with awful modern translations. I am not religious but I if I want to quote the Bible I go for KJV. And because we read it when I was a kid, I was easily able to read Shakespeare later. Listening to Moby Dick recently I realized that young people probably can’t understand the sentence structures and definitely not the allusions.
In all fairness, it's not quite as simple as "dumbing down the Bible". The standard modern reference translation is the New Revised Standard Version, which uses standard American English. One of the issues with the King James Version is that some of the translations are inaccurate, and this isn't just a matter of stylistic preference -- the mistranslations have genuine theological implications. I'm not a Biblical scholar, so I can't give you the details on this, but for people who care about understanding the **exact** meaning of the text, this is obviously important.
Of course I agree that as a literary text the King James Version is unparalleled, and every serious student of English literature should be familiar with it. (This also goes for the Book of Common Prayer.) It is one of the foundational texts in the history of the language, and in fact is arguably the single most important work in English just because of how many people have studied it through the ages. But I don't think it's fair to dismiss modern translations as "dumbing down"; they are based on an enormous amount of careful scholarship, and if anything are more precise and accurate than the KJV.
You’ll never know the “exact” meaning of the text for which we do not have any of the original manuscripts never mind how thinking and understanding of the world has changed over several millennia and the fact that all translation is an art and you can’t even translate something as simple as “I have a headache” literally from one language to another.
I cannot tell you how excited I was a few years ago when my daughter's new school required a workbook that included sentence diagramming. Thank God she will at least know what a (#@*$#@ adjective is.
You absolutely killed it with this article, Liza! I wish I could say that this problem isn't as bad as it seems and you needn't worry, but unfortunately, I cannot. You are absolutely right! Our kids can't write, and they can't think either for that matter. As we all know, our public education system is broken in many ways. One of them is that the written word and teaching students to think critically about what their reading has been devalued. Now they can just get on their computer, find a free AI generator from companies like Google or Microsoft and presto! An instant A on the test! They had to do no work at all or do any thinking for themselves to figure out what the meaning of a passage in a book or the main takeaways about an event in history might be. Nor do they actually have to read real books anymore. Now they can just learn about reading and writing from woke garbage, spark notes or song lyrics from fifth-rate hacks of "musical artists" like Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar. It's not supposed to be that easy! If you make it easy for them, they'll never learn how to properly structure a sentence, add new and better words to their vocabulary or understand concepts like allusions, plot twists, foreshadowing, personification, hyperbole, metaphors, irony, or alliteration! They'll remain at a third-grade level of reading and writing for life! Nor will they ever learn how to figure out what's going on in a given story for themselves.
I don't know about everyone else here but if I ever have children someday, that's NOT the way I would want them to learn how to read, write and think! First-off I want them to read REAL books! I want them to learn sentence structure and critical thinking from great works like The Grapes of Wrath, The Adeventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, Romeo and Juliet, Murder on the Orient Express, A Haunting in Venice, Goodnight Moon, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, A Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Flea, Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Go Down, Moses, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, The Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Mother Goose Tales, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Raven, and A Midsummer's Night Dream. NOT trash like White Fragility, How to Be An Antiracist, Orientalism, or the Hate U Give, some sparks note they found on the internet or the latest hot garbage by the likes of Beyonce, Taylor Swift, John Mayer, Bruno Mars, or whatever Sound Cloud rapper of the week that might be popular that year. I want them to actually know how to write two page essays, figure out the meaning of an allusion in a work of literature and what its meant to symbolize and be descriptive, specific and expressive with their writing all by themselves. Not just write something like: Ya man, English Lit is like so dope! Shakespeare and Chaucer are straight fire u know. I just love reading themm becaussee there so much fun. Romeo and Juliet made mee laff so hard bruh. lol lmao. Pretty soon that's the kind of stuff they'll be vomiting out.
Also, what's with the changes to the SAT? So, you're basically going to spell out for them what the correct answer is so they can be nice and comfy and not use their brain at all? You're doing them a huge disservice! So, what are they going to do when their out in the real world at their job and they need to type up a report or a memo to their boss or they're serving in the military, and they're asked to decode a message or to figure out what two enemy soldiers or terrorists are alluding to when speaking to one another? What if their car breaks down, they have a bad accident at home or they get lost on vacation? How are they supposed to figure out how to resolve the situation and get help if they've never had to think about anything a day in their lives? You're not going to have AI there to help you when you're getting mugged, or when you need to figure out how to put together a presentation for your superiors at work! Pretty soon they'll revise the SAT again and it will literally say "the correct answer is..."
As a history major, I've seen first-hand how devalued our field and the skills that come along with it are as well. Your average high school or college student's understanding of American or world history is shockingly poor. I'm not kidding that I once heard a high school student I was working with at a past job say we fought Germany in the Revolutionary War! I also remember telling a high school classmate of mine about Ulysses S. Grant and he replied, "I thought he was a rapper." Same goes for my peers in college. They failed to understand simple things like historical context, seeing complexity because more things in American or human history for that matter are not black or white, but within the many shades of gray and presentism, that you should NOT judge people from the past by our standards today. That is NOT a way to understand them. They also believed so many common myths about historical events and people or just flat out didn't know what they were talking about! That's what happens when you learn your history from a broken education system, YouTube and memes. :(
For example, I often heard people say America is a stolen country. No, most of the land in this country was acquired through peaceful trade with the Native Americans or through conquest. The idea that taking over another country is wrong is a modern idea that has only existed for the past eighty years or so. The right of conquest was universally recognized by all nations until its formal reputation in 1949. The way it was prior to that was if you had the military strength to take and hold a piece of land it was yours's to keep. Another example, many of my peers had an overly simplistic view of the American Civil War. They saw it as a simple case of the good North fighting the bad South who committed treason just to hold other human beings as property. The Civil War was most certainly NOT that simple. Slavery was don't get me wrong an important issue and certainly one of the causes of the war, but it was only one cause among many nor was it the only reason the South went to war in 1861 or succeeded. Your average Union soldier fought not to abolish slavery but to preserve the Union and your average Confederate soldier fought not to preserve slavery but to defend their home from what they saw as an invasion.
This was revelatory. I tutor kids as well, and advise them on college admissions/scholarship essays. I have found the EXACT same phenomenon. Smart kids who are motivated to write simply can't create coherent and compelling thoughts. Their products are awkward, verbose... and basically meaningless. Why do I want to study engineering in Spain for a semester? Because it will allow me new and exciting educational opportunities and allow me to grow as an engineer!
Yes... but HOW?
I find myself asking these kids the same questions again and again, and they struggle to explain themselves, even verbally. I suspect the problem might be even bigger than writing, but I'm glad to see you're raising the subject.
Students can't write because they don't read anything that is well-written. God forbid we ask them to expand beyond anime, text messages, and Twitter captions. The lower our expectations, the lower the quality. Education is now focused on "getting jobs," not on producing young adults who are capable of intellectual curiosity, research, critical thinking, or discernment.
I never really clicked with the standard English curriculum and only found my stride as a writer, and my appreciation for literature in general, after I left school. I am sure my writing style reflects that and I won’t claim I will ever be more than average - whatever that means. I am still only an amateur relatively. I simply want to point out though that English curriculums have probably been in a gradual decline for a while. It is simply only obvious now.
I am a millennial- not gen z - and my teachers were at least on their face trying to teach these skills. However, anecdotally - in my case - they were a bit too narrow minded in some cases to teach kids with different strengths and perspectives. The fact that I was able to find a way to be a total writing nerd only after leaving all of my schooling - says a lot to me about how much the curriculum needs to work on teaching all types of kids- not just the standard English nerd.
Excellent post.
Thank you for proving those examples. It explains why as a public library director, I received so many badly written letters of application from people with masters degrees.
Because they don’t read.
This reflects exactly my experience having recently returned to academia as an adjunct professor of music history. It is incredibly depressing to see the writing abilities of some of my second-year students. The best are what I would consider competent, though hardly distinguished; whereas the worst don't seem to understand what a sentence is (frequent fragments and run-on sentences), nor do they have any apparent comprehension of grammar (e.g. using the present tense to talk about dead people) or how to logically construct an argument. I try to be generous given their backgrounds, but it's a constant moral dilemma trying to figure out the limits of my generosity given my responsibility to future professors they will have if I pass them. At the same time, I worry if I am too strict, future adjunct teaching at this university (the only one in my area) might be at risk.
The problem in modern essays is the same problem in modern fiction: neither can answer the “So what?” question.
bias, bc I was a liberal arts, poly science major who relied on writing skills to complete college and not good in STEM. But most of the storytelling ability I have today is from all those books I read for 28 years of education ( I was nontrad so college took me longer) and since. I am paid as a writer and teach students that write for their college newspaper. But at the same time I understand the STEM route and most likely would recommit to this if I was starting over. Still every singe word you wrote is true and I think it's a great big pity students coming out of HS can't write w/o the ai app. or Grammarly. We won't really know the effects however bc that will come in a couple of decades.I would be sad to be at the winding up part without the ability to read, love of reading, writing, and everything written content. That's very specific so bias. What's the answer though?