This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: What to do about unskilled college students http://bit.ly/6btQxr Full http://bit.ly/4AOPNQ...

The moment you allow students to use calculators for basic mathematics, you give them permission to not memorize facts. Something or somebody else has to take the responsibility for being the collective memory.

In a nutshell, if you can’t teach a student how to read, write or cipher to at least the 8th grade level, using only a dirt floor and a sharpened stick, then you’re not a teacher…you’re a babysitter collecting a salary under false pretenses.

It’s the public’s desire, the creed that says credentials are more important than achievement, that sets the stage for lowered standards. It’s the educational institution’s fault for trying to accommodate mediocrity. Education is a business to some, but to all, it must set minimum acceptable standards, and enforce them, to establish credibility. My argument is not how high or low the standard should be set…only that it be established and supported.

The problem is that not everyone should go to college, obviously.

So I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that my current college students are nowhere near as skilled as I was when I was in 11th grade. I rather expect most of them, now in college, to have learned far less than I did at that point in my life.

No, the sad fact is that my current students — students who are at what is ostensibly one of the top large universities in the United States — are by and large nowhere near as skilled as most of my friends were in 11th grade, either. And I don’t mean just the three or four top students in my class… I mean a wide range of honors students at a rather mediocre high school. I could go probably fifteen or sixteen people deep in the (approx. 32 student) population of my 11th grade honors English class who could (at that age) utterly wipe the academic floor with over 95% of my current college-level students. That’s not to say that my high school peers were smarter, just that they knew more then than my students do now, and were years ahead in their ability to read and write than my students are now.

Of my students, I would say that the number who are minimally prepared for college-level work in terms of their reading and writing ability is somewhere around 15%, with perhaps 5% who are really top flight students. That’s fifteen percent who have the practiced skill necessary to read the amounts of text needed, to process its meaning, and to turn that meaning into something readable, perhaps while injecting something original into the mix.

Have skill standards changed that much in just twenty years? It makes me feel like a grouchy old man. But I know what I’m seeing.

Too late. That process started back in the 80s (maybe before that). As a Prof of 30 years, I started noticing the difference in 1985. It has only worsened since that time. With the colleges’ hunger for and addiction to money, it will only worsen over time.

You then have a power hungry, inexperienced former teacher who insists everyone call him or her “Doctor”. The degree gives a presumption of knowledge that then gets rebutted anytime they speak on an issue.

I worry that the solid experienced teachers will leave rather than have such a boss.