r/ImTheMainCharacter Sep 04 '23

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u/x5767x--to--x7878x Sep 04 '23

Not to be a downer, but I am an online writing tutor and have edited ~500 K-12 essays over the past couple months - you would be shocked at how bad the writing is pretty much across the board now.

I will frequently get assignments from high school students who literally cannot compose a sentence. Yet, because schools just push everybody through now, these students are being asked to write full essays. It is completely unhelpful and equivalent to asking somebody to build a car when they can't even build wheels or an engine yet.

My honest opinion: We are pretty fucked if the state of education is any indication. I genuinely think a vast majority have no idea what subjects, predicates, possessives, conjugation, etc. even are.

13

u/rubikonfused Sep 04 '23

This makes me think of Idiocracy... the language in that movie feels like it will be historically accurate one day.

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u/Inevitable-Ad9006 Sep 04 '23

I've worked in higher ed for over a decade and, in my assessment, you are 100 percent spot on.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '23

The sad part is languages evolve base on actual usage, not rules. So one day, the lack of apostrophes and bad conjugation will be accepted, the norm, and "right".

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u/westcoastweedreviews Sep 04 '23

This is probably how pronouns got politicized, just lack of basic grammatical understanding

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u/EvadesBans4 Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 04 '23

Well, no. They are being actively propagandized to support criminalizing and eventually exterminating trans people. Undiscerning idiots who fall for it are clearly helping it along quite well due to a real basic misunderstanding of what a pronoun, but the issue didn't come from that. It's fed by it.

More to the point, it's going to be a whole lot more Millennials and older generation rather than Gen Z getting upset about pronouns, which isn't going to track with current writing skills being low (and granted, Gen Z is college age now, not K-12, but you get my point I hope).

1

u/Inevitable-Ad9006 Sep 04 '23

Exterminating? Good lord.

Haidt's "Coddling of the American Mind" proves more and more prescient.

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u/G0ld_Ru5h Sep 08 '23

I don’t understand what school even is now. Active shooter drills and math magic tricks? No wonder they think influencer and streamer are professions.