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Originally Posted by MorganGrayson
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They lowered the standards and kept lowering them in public education. I remember my mother looking at me and saying "What do you mean, you've never read Moby Dick?!?!?!?" (She was a graduate of Cathedral High School in Springfield, MA, which means her high school education was most likely the equivalent of a Master's Degree today.) By the time my children were in high school, I was reduced to "what do you mean they never taught you to diagram a sentence?!?!?!?!?" To this day, my youngest says "oh, I got a great education...but I got it at home."
I've tried reading Moby Dick, for my mother's sake. I can't get past page 119, no matter how hard I try. Seven pages explaining why the damned whale was frightening because it was white. I counted. Seven damned pages explaining why white was frightening. Oh, for heaven's sake....
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Our parents read. Our grandparents read. That was their primary way to absorb information about that which they may not have been able to experience. Times have changed. We have many, many more ways of absorbing info, from documentaries, radio, television, and getting on a plane and experiencing that which they could only read about. Now along comes the internet and whatdayaknow? Kids have to read again, but much more succinctly. They can answer any question you like in under five minutes with a high speed terminal. You don't need to "know" as much, you just have to know where to find it. That leads to another problem. Spelling. If you can't spell it, you can't find it (well, certainly not as quickly). It is an evolutionary process. Our penmanship sucks, but we type 130 wpm, so who needs a pen.
We have email, so long letters have become less necessary. We can squirt off a couple of paragraphs three or four times a day. It is a different style of intercourse, but it certainly is effective and useful
What we have lost is elegance, and I see no hope of regaining that in the future. It is lost to the common man.