College isn't for everyone - Education

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 2003 by W.J. Reeves

The end result is that students emerge from college with a diploma which the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold would characterize as "The Grand Thing without the Grand Meaning"--i,e., merely a piece of paper.

Literacy. One would expect that, at the very least, colleges would not graduate students whose writing would be generously regarded as poor. One would be wrong.

Learning to write is supposed to be taken seriously. Sean Cavanagh, in an article entitled "Overhauled SAT Could Shake up School Curriculum" (Education Week, July 10, 2002), announces that the SATs will now include a writing test. Such a requirement sounds rigorous, but appearances are deceiving.

At one time, I scored the essay section of the GMAT, the required test for entrance into graduate schools of business where one would acquire an MBA. The test-takers were college graduates from every state and from countries around the world. Fully two-thirds of the essays I scored would not have passed my freshman composition class, yet I was expected to give a score of 4 (Passing) to such writing and, apparently, the graduate schools of business accepted such students. Access again had reared its ugly head. No graduate students=no graduate school.

Diversity. Since diversity is desired, many English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students are admitted to colleges. Once there, they must take an English composition class. In my experience, the majority of these students speak English only when compelled to. They sit in my classes, all together, in self-imposed segregation, speaking in their native language.

Outside the class, at home, and everywhere in their existence, they converse in a language other than English. These students need to spend several years in an adult education program focused on the basics of the English language before applying to an institution of higher learning. Some of these ESL students work quite hard, but lack a basic understanding of the language. There is pressure put on professors to pass on to the world of work college graduates whose grasp of the English language is, to be kind, "shaky."

This is not to say that the ESL students are worse than the homegrown functional illiterates whose command of their own language is less than commanding. During the 1960s, I taught seventh-grade English in an inner-city junior high school. Now, I offer lessons on syntax and diction which I created for that junior high class to my present college classes, and I encounter failure in excess of 50%. Failing more than half of my class at the end of the semester would be asking for a public flogging. A recent case at Temple University, reported by Robin Wilson in her article, "The Teaching Equation Didn't Add Up" (The Chronicle, March 29, 2002), involved a tenured professor of mathematics who was fired for being an "extremely harsh grader" who was "rode" to his students. Another professor at the university remarked that "he noticed that if somebody flunks a lot of people then the administration doesn't like that, and I do what I think will not put me out on the street without a job." Translation? The inmates are running the asylum.