Oprah Winfrey education: Everyone gets an “A”.

This is the standard teachers have tried to convince everyone else should be used on them. Fewer people are buying it than used to.

Labor Theory of Scholarship? Lovely.

One of my biggest problems with young people that I hire is their utter lack of ability to write clearly in complete sentences. Growing up texting has destroyed their ability to formulate the complex ideas and concepts of the business world.

The other big problem is to teach them to use the telephone when working with clients. They think a one line text or one sentence email to a client is a perfected adequate substitute for a thoughtful voice conversation.

Dammit, Wfjag, don't steal my idea! I'm going to go around as an "expert" to these universities and "consult" for them and charge them a handsome fee.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1998-08-24

Teachers and professors don't see it as their job to produce an educated and employable graduate. They don't see that they should be held responsible for the results of their efforts - preferring to blame any deficiencies in their results on the raw materials, the students.

The problem is that the "real world" will not judge people on effort, but on results. If you turn in a resume riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, you will not get the interview, no matter how much effort you put into landing it.

If you try to spell it "hampster," you will be called out by your boss, assuming your boss is not also illiterate.

No one out in the "real world" cares if you're nice to puppies or call your mother regularly. They care only about what you can do for them.

Excerpt:

Let's say that the person you love the most has just been shot. He or she is lying in the street, bleeding and screaming. A guy rushes up and says, "Step aside." He looks over your loved one's bullet wound and pulls out a pocket knife -- he's going to operate right there in the street.

You ask, "Are you a doctor?"

The guy says, "No."

You say, "But you know what you're doing, right? You're an old Army medic, or...."

At this point the guy becomes annoyed. He tells you that he is a nice guy, he is honest, he is always on time. He tells you that he is a great son to his mother and has a rich life full of fulfilling hobbies, and he boasts that he never uses foul language.

Confused, you say, "How does any of that f*****g matter when my [wife/husband/best friend/parent] is lying here bleeding! I need somebody who knows how to operate on bullet wounds! Can you do that or not?!?"

Now the man becomes agitated -- why are you being shallow and selfish? Do you not care about any of his other good qualities? Didn't you just hear him say that he always remembers his girlfriend's birthday? In light of all of the good things he does, does it really matter if he knows how to perform surgery?

In that panicked moment, you will take your bloody hands and shake him by the shoulders, screaming, "Yes, I'm saying that none of that other s**t matters, because in this specific situation, I just need somebody who can stop the bleeding, you crazy f*****g a*****e."

So here is my terrible truth about the adult world: You are in that very situation every single day. Only you are the confused guy with the pocket knife. All of society is the bleeding gunshot victim.

[Emphasis mine]

When someone needs specific expertise, effort does not matter, results do.

Universities exist not to turn out earnest strivers, but to turn out people with expertise, to turn out people who can write a clear sentence when a clear sentence is called for.

Shorter Conan: when buildings and bridges collapse no reason, this is why.

It isn't texting that caused that Joe. It is lazy teachers.

I'm a terrible speller. Autocorrect didn't cause that. Lazy teachers did and autocorrect has helped cover it up (and improved my spelling a bit). I was taught to spell words how they feel like they should be spelled. Which is bullshit. There is a standard spelling. You either did it right or you did it wrong. How you feel about it doesn't matter. That is why I empathize with hampster girl. A decade of English teachers taught her to do that. And as Conan points out my empathy is pretty worthless. As much as I sorrow for her I still would have fired her in the same situation. At the end of the day she wasn't getting the job done and wasn't willing to change to get the job done. So she goes away and someone else takes her place. What can you do for me still trumps feeling.

Cuckoo pants indeed. Meanwhile, American University also has a law school that's in the top 100. Success in the LSAT, and in the practice of law in general, requires the utmost attention to perfect writing and detail. No points awarded for effort. I guess American University has given up on preparing its minority students for admission to the professions?

This is AFU, but it's part of the general collapse, right?

What was I reading last week? Don't we all detest rhetorical questions? The point was made that there are so few positions in the economy for talented literature graduates that if you sincerely want to learn anyway, you'll probably find a fantastic young professor at your local CC. You be paying $200/credit hr, and he/she will be knocking down $49k/annum.

So maybe everything is as it should be. Talent is being correctly priced by its utility. People who want to higher talented writers will no longer to rely on mere sheepskin... But they probably never did, anyway.

Inoue taught American University's faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy.

And the problem with that is?

English is English and it has rules. Granted those rules are a hodgepodge of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and Norwegian, all squeezed into Latin structure.

Despite the rules, English is always evolving and is one of the most adaptable languages in the world. If we need a word or a phrase for something, we make one up. Spoken English is a gumbo of patois and accents. Written English not so much.

That its origins are from white European ancestors should not matter. If an African-based language is to be the primary language of the US, it will also have rules and these folks will break them and claim any insistence upon following the rules of the language is racist. They want their bad grammar excused.

Is insistence on proper Spanish also promoting "white language supremacy?" After all, it's based on a white European language. How about an insistence on proper Portuguese in Brazil or proper French in Haiti?

Joe, for what it's worth, here's what I wrote in Oct. 2007, elsewhere:

...what surprised me was the implication that public schools are far more to blame than the lemming-minded parents who don't see anything detrimental about letting kids have visual electronics in their bedrooms - or phones in the bedroom, for that matter. Not to mention those who allow their kids to let their brains rot every weekend and every summer...

...I keep hearing that employers are increasingly desperate for employees who are actually willing to deal with clients face-to-face or even on the phone, since so many young people are used to spending more virtual time with their friends than face-to-face time. Many CAN'T handle talking on the phone - especially not with strangers. Seems to me face-to-face time is something that needs practicing every day. Having a phone in the bedroom doesn't encourage that. At the least, kids could be told that if they want a cell phone or their own landline, THEY will have to pay every penny for that. It would stop a lot of money fights.

And, from you-know-who in 2010:

https://www.chieftain.com/b7c2c1ce-675a-5f1e-9a91-9ebbd18d4796.html

Most of it:

"...The evidence is mounting that for whatever reasons -- most likely having to do with brain development during said years -- smartphones are literally addictive to children and teenagers.

"Adults are able to keep their smartphones in their pockets unless some necessity arises. Human beings who are not yet adults seem unable, by and large, to do so. The exception to the child/teen whose attention is disproportionately captured by a smartphone's screen is rare.

" 'But John, that is how teenagers communicate with one another' is a common parental defense, to which I respond, 'Yes, and that is why their face-to-face communication skills are generally poor to awful.' Their eye contact is notoriously bad and when, in a face-to-face encounter, they begin feeling uncomfortable (which is often), what do they do? Right! They pull out their smartphone and begin looking at it while you are talking to them!

"I conclude that these devices interfere with the development of proper social skills. There is a reason why employers are increasingly identifying the social and conversational skills of job applicants as more important than college grades.

"I recently spent some time with two parents and their teenage child who had a habit of taking out his cellphone and looking at it while conversation was taking place. His parents told him to put the cellphone away at least five times in fifteen minutes. They were obviously exasperated. They are intelligent people but living proof that common sense and intelligence do not go hand-in-hand.

"On the positive side, I've recently spoken with a handful of parents who have taken their kids' smartphones away for good. They have all testified to the sort of reaction typical of withdrawal from an addiction: tantrums, rages, mood swings and near-manic obsession.

"It takes two weeks, at least, for the addiction to run its course, at which time, according to said parents, their children's moods greatly improve, they begin engaging in family conversation and family activities, they demonstrate renewed sensitivity to other people's feelings and they seem generally more relaxed. As yet, no parent has reported a downside.

"One teenage boy eventually thanked his parents, telling them he felt a whole lot better without a smartphone.

"Yes, a normal childhood is a wonderful thing. Every child's right, in fact.

"Where's your common sense these days?"

Business signs with errors are a constant butt of jokes on the internet. It does not help your business to hire people with no writing skills. A legal document with errors can actually ruin your client or mess up your court filing. English is the language that we use here and being unable to use this language makes you look dumb. The reason the push to call it racist is the bigotry of low expectations: that minorities (ie blacks) can't learn to write. That of course is false but is what leftists believe.

Another benefit of learning to write clearly is that it teaches you to think clearly.

Ah, more soft bigotry of low expectations.

The problem with employees interacting with clients isn't just a too-much-phone-use problem, it's also a too-much-phony-self-esteem problem. Too many kids raised to feel that any rejection tears them to pieces.

You can't do sales if you can't handle rejection; this inability is also a problem for customer service jobs. Ditto for any job that requires you to make internal proposals, which may or not be accepted.

This kind of thing is the reason it's time for all laws limiting (private) discrimination to go away. Because approximately all complaints of bias today are over issues like this, where the boss fires or disciplines an employee for good reasons and the employee just argues that it is "racism" not to automatically give him a pass. No, it's racism TO give you the pass.

What's really scary is how many companies accept employees sending functionally illiterate email messages to customers. Everybody's terrified to call their employees out on poor English because they might be called some sort of ____-ist based on the lousy writer's particular demographic, including age.

1) You may know Asao B. Inoue by his English name, Buy A. Consonant.
2) Forget SPEAKING clearly. Technical trades DEMAND accuracy. The difference between laboratory substances can and will kill you.
3) You should speak English clearly because the police, who carry guns and will USE THEM, will be telling you what to do in English.