Degreed But Uneducated

This piece at UnHerd by William Deresiewicz pushes a lot of the right buttons:

Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a couple genuinely brilliant. All, needless to say, were expensively educated and impressively credentialed. I assumed that they’d arrive with a fairly good idea of how to make an argument with an academic context and that I would be teaching them how to apply those skills to a very different set of rhetorical occasions.

What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analysing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

and his experience is not unique:

These problems weren’t confined to Claremont. Later that same year, in a piece about the differences between the way his students read Shakespeare and the way that students used to, Stephen Greenblatt wrote this:

“Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility… In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.”

Here’s a pretty disheartening statistic:

The whole creaking machine is lubricated by the magic grease of grade inflation. As of the early Sixties, 15% of grades at American colleges and universities fell within the A range. By 2013, the proportion had reached 45%. To paraphrase the joke from the old Soviet Union, students pretend to work, and professors pretend to grade them.

I think he’s wrong in attributing the problem to “wokeism”—I think it goes back farther than that and is more pervasive. Basically, I blame the change on a loss of true literacy in favor of visualcy. Reading and understanding long form written tracts is becoming increasingly rare. Nowadays in order to communicate and foster comprehension you’ve got to have pictures, graphics, charts, and, preferably, videos. So what? (I hear somebody ask.)

The reason it’s important is that reading lengthy texts develops different cognitive skills than short passages, tweets, slogans, memes, etc. Those skills include longer attention spans and abstract reasoning. The present method of communication also cultivates increasingly agonistic expression. I’ve explored this in some detail—you can find my previous posts on this subject under “Visualcy”.

My point here is that everything he’s attributing to “wokeism” can be even more credibly attributed to the decline of true literacy in favor of visualcy and that process has been going on for nearly 60 years, long before many people in the U. S. had even heard of post-modernism. “Wokeism” is at most a contributing factor.