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Average college students cannot and will not read and write — 70 Comments

1. I have been teaching Latin at a public high school for the last 20 years; and taught younger kids (upper elementary-middle school) at a private Montessori school for 10 or so years before that.

   Unfortunately, parents have no idea, really, of how bad schooling has become, since phones / Common Core / covid / “woke” stuff. There is intense pressure to give everyone passing grades, and the “A’s” are wildly inflated (“grading for equity” pushes, from the admin.). Since districts are judged by graduation rates, there is intense pressure to push those rates up–at all costs. The easiest way, of course, is to cut corners and make things easier and simply teach less stuff, up to a lower standard.

   Parents should, if possible, keep an eye on what their children are learning, at least for subjects they feel competent about. Best of all would be to home-school them.
   If you have young children, I recommend _not_ giving them iPhones and unrestricted access to the internet; don’t risk it. Make sure they learn to do things with their hands and bodies. Have them study a musical instrument–it’s got a built-in way of showing the child that effort produces results. (Maybe sports works for that, too.)

   I’m happy to say that I’ve kept trying to teach my subject (Latin) the way it was taught to me: we use physical textbooks, write on paper–no computer stuff. The students have to memorize (all those endings; plus vocab. words), or they won’t be able to understand the texts they’re reading. This is ‘transmission of knowledge’ stuff; I’m not trying to create ‘change agents’ who think they know how to achieve ‘social justice.’ (My expertise is in Latin, so that’s what I’m trying to teach.)

   I’ve really hated all the fads that have come in, in recent years, in the ed biz: the idea that the kids of today need a radically new education system, for a variety of reasons. I actually think they’d do well to acquire the knowledge-based education that (for example) got men on the moon by the late 1960s. Find what you’re interested in; work hard at it; you’ll succeed. But ‘dumbing it down’ to the extent that everyone is already a winner ! , an expert ! , is a recipe for student boredom and apathy. I thought that philosophy prof, whose Substack essay is linked here, was exactly right; depressingly so.

2. I read the whole essay just an hour ago. It is very depressing but not at all surprising.

   In the early 2000s my daughter was a TA at a large midwestern university. Her job at the writing center was to help students learn to improve their essays. They expected her to re-write the materials for them and were not interested in learning how to do it themselves. (She refused to do their work for them, and was therefore not popular.)

   School systems and some whole state education systems are beginning to ban cell phones in class. That will help.

3. Based on my observations in everyday life we have run out of patience in everything, not just reading. Something is really wrong in what we have that passes for a culture.

4. Thank you Dept of Education!

5. My first free-lance job was editing professional papers, intended for journal publication. The papers from China were not too bad, but the papers purporting to be historical analyses 9moastly British and American) were beyond terrible. After some months PHD theses started showing up. OMG. The authors expected me to turn incompressible drivel into passable work. Everything in this essay and more was common.

6. One thing I’ve noticed, and wondered about, is my observation that many young or college age people today just cannot keep still.

   You’re standing in line, waiting for something, and a lot of people in the line are not just standing still but are swaying–side to side or back and forth–or, if they’re sitting, they’re jiggling their legs up and down.

   It seems to me that, if you can’t stay still in, say, a classroom, and pay close attention to a lecture, you’re not about to do a lot of learning.

   Is this swaying and jitteriness evidence of some sort of neurological/psychological problem?

7. Snow on Pine:

   I had tremendous difficulty staying still and listening to a lecture. And yet I had no trouble learning.

   I also wonder how many young people are on drugs these days.

8. I could barely sit still in class either. After I learned to read, I got by sitting in the back reading a book surreptitiously on my lap.

   I worked hard learning to read adult books. I was always trying to read a harder book. I think reading as a skill is underestimated.

   Back in the 60s/70s I felt supported by American culture to grow intellectually. Even in my hippie world there was respect for reading and learning.

   A few years ago I did the Slow Carb Diet for a year — protein, beans and vegs at every meal, no sweets or dairy — and I could finally sit still.

9. It was over a decade ago for me, but in all my classes I had college seniors who could not read their textbooks.

   There was this thing they would do where they would guess at what a word was, they would get the beginning right and sometimes the end but it would be the wrong word.

   My own college days, thirty years ago, there were plenty of students who didn’t work and didn’t pay attention and plenty times when I was one. The difference then was that those students were weeded out, and now they are pushed through and given degrees.

   You knew what to expect from the communications majors, for example. But now they are all like that regardless of major, and there are also so many bespoke majors, where students just draw a major around the set of classes they managed to pass, you really don’t know what to expect from anyone with a college degree.

10. The Memoirs of Jesse James

    I remember all those thousands of hours
    that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
    waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
        Waiting; for anything but school.
    My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
        for all the time they stole from me.

    –Richard Brautigan

11. I dont consider that particular selection of authors serious (ymmv) but if you dont train people to learn to read and think on an issue

    Did they chose trendy authors because they adopted a certain view of things

    Eg kingsolver colonialism and capitalism bad im using shorthand

12. Wow, this is depressing to learn. We need these young people to be able to carry our civilization on to a better future.

    That they can’t comprehend books and essays is startling. It’s so easy to look up words today. I used a thesaurus a lot even after I got out of school. Today, it only takes a second to look a word up.

    My years in school were not spent reading the great works. I avoided literature classes as much as possible. And, other than American History, I didn’t care much for what “old, dead men” had done. )-:

    I knew from 7th grade on that what I learned in school was needed to get me a decent job in later life. My goal was to be either a National Park Ranger or a geologist. I was interested in learning anything that could help in those areas. Anything else that I had to take in school was not of great interest. But I applied myself and managed to get good grades.

    My eventual job as a Navy pilot and then airline pilot required a lot of reading, memorizing, and understanding of weather, procedures, machinery, engines, etc. My schooling in geology helped me deal with those demands.

    Throughout my adult life reading has been one of my pleasures. But it has mostly been about the outdoors, adventures, mountain climbing, aviation, history of the American West, etc. “The Right Stuff” would be the only book I’ve read that would be known to many readers of popular literature.

    That said, I don’t have a cell phone and am not very computer savvy. And maybe those skills are more important to the students of the future. But surely, they need to be able to read and comprehend.

13. I graduated from college in the mid 1980s, just for some context.

    I took an undergrad class at a local college back in 2018. The college is a shmancy small college. The class was a small seminar class of about seven of us with a fantastic instructor. He had professional obligations that had him traveling but he set up remote classes for the days he was out of town. Students did have the option of logging online for those classes, but most of the classes were in person. I was the only student who did not miss a single class. I was also the only student who didn’t live on campus. There was one student I didn’t see after the first class until she showed up for the final! This was an upper level class that was not required so these students theoretically WANTED to be there.

    I saw a couple of them working on their final projects. They hadn’t a clue. It was like everything he said in class went in one ear and out the other.

    This was the instructor’s first and only year teaching there. (Actually, it was his first year teaching after working professionally for about fifteen years.) I gave him a wonderful review — this college was damned lucky to have him. He was a great teacher, incredibly knowledgeable about his field, with top notch professional connections. And he was EXCITED about teaching. I have no idea what sort of grades he gave the other students. If he gave them what they deserved, they probably panned him.

    I’m not sure why he left after one year. When he started, he was very excited about it. His wife’s family was from the area. Their kid was getting to an age where he wanted to stop traveling as much as he had been and be around more for the kid growing up. I’ve occasionally wondered why he left the position. (It took the college two years to fill the position with him, so I can’t imagine they canned him.)

14. My wife teaches math at university level. She’s about given up trying to teach “students” much of anything – none of the stories above are out of line and she has a few herself. Trouble is, by the time students get to university age, they’ve been ruined as “learners” – it’s too late for all but the most motivated, few and far between. This has been going on long enough that the adults now in charge were the same way (new teachers now were >born< in the 21st century) so that expectations as well as acceptability of performance from above have degraded.

    Looking back – a long time ago – maybe the performance started to degrade back when Sputnik scared the pants off govt and they got involved by forcing "New Math", long before DOEd.

    There's a difference just between myself and younger brothers – as an example, "yearbook" was an after-school club when I was there; it was a graded class for one of my younger-by-only-a-few years brothers, and by the time my youngest – seven years younger – was in high school, the schools were giving grades for such things as doing janitorial work at the school: "community service".

    Sigh …

15. I think the lower performance from 1970 – 2020 was driven by how much less selective colleges have become; we’ve had all that propaganda about How Everyone Must Go To College, and colleges need butts in seats to stay open.

    Nowadays students from middle-class families are underrepresented in colleges; it’s students from lower income families that are overrepresented.

    The decline in quality of K-12 education had not helped, certainly, but the push for ever-more butts in seats and to get some degree, any degree, is probably most of it.

    Since 2020 the system as it was has been thrown into shambles, and it’s not as though it was a well-oiled machine before that. My children are not yet old enough to need to know how to navigate it and I’m hoping it’s better by the time that they are.

16. JJ, Pensacola?
    I read a lot in JH and HS. My Parents got me the Landmark series of books. As a Senior in HS I read “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”.
    (I should have stuck to History in College, which I eventually did). I use to read a lot, bought loads of books, have a big bookcase. Several yrs ago, gave about half away. I read little today, other than blogs.
    I am a terrible speller. So bad that sometimes spellcheck can’t figure out what word I want.

17. Since the woke cultural Marxist left’s goal is the destruction of Western Judeo/Christian cultural values, it naturally follows that greatly degrading young westerner’s ability to even comprehend those values is an important tactic of the left. Results are a sure indication of motivations… for “by their fruits shall ye know them”.

18. I started teaching in 1978: post-high-school level, first full-time at a trade school, then at a community college as an adjunct, later at a four-year university and a college as an adjunct, and finally full-time at a community college. I retired a couple of years ago. At the trade school I taught both English and Psychology, but after that I was teaching English, mostly composition of course, the bread and butter of English departments.

    The quality of students’ work declined steadily over the forty-some years that I was teaching.

    There were always some good students, but the number of students with serious deficiencies in reading and writing increased over time.

    At the community college where I finished my career, we had some success by offering two levels of remedial English and reading, a strategy that resulted in better completion rates in the college-level English composition classes and in other classes as well. Unfortunately, around that time the theory appeared that students with poor reading and writing skills were having trouble graduating because the remedial classes were holding them up and taking valuable time, so the extra remedial classes were removed. After that, the rate of students completing the first college-level composition course dropped back to about 60%, where it had been before.

    In the community college setting, students who struggled the most usually disappeared from the class around the time that we were beginning work on the research paper, because they just didn’t have the skills to handle the assignment. When students just quit showing up, helping them to improve is obviously very difficult.

    Students who completed the course usually showed improvement in writing skills, but the students with the poorest skills often just disappeared.

    The college offered free tutoring, and I did quite a lot of it, too.

    Over the years I also did quite a bit of work with high schools who were offering our courses for credit. I would observe the classes and offer feedback on them. Let’s just say that the level of instruction at high schools varied tremendously.

    And one more thing: elementary schools often do a poor job of teaching students to read because of the ridiculous theories that dominated schools of education for the past forty years or so. “Look and guess” is not nearly as effective as phonics.

    I’m sorry about rambling on like this! We have generations of students who have not learned basic skills of reading and writing, and many factors have contributed to the problem.

19. When I took the Foreign Service Written Exam (FSWE) many years ago we were told that our subject matter was secondary to how well the essays were written. The State Dept needed its diplomats to be excellent writers, and it largely succeeded in this goal. But, that was a long time ago.

    About 20 years ago I had two 1st-tour officers in my office in a small, civil war-ravaged country. We wrote cables daily for DC’s insatiable appetite for information, and as the senior officer I had to clear all of their cables. I found their cables to be riddled with poor language and grammar, but worse, with important points left out of the cable entirely. I pointed this out and their response was, essentially, “we got the general point across.” I had to make them go back and flesh out the deeper details, because the “general point” wasn’t good enough. Were they just lazy or just poorly educated? I don’t know, but these two officers had advanced degrees, yet couldn’t write well. How did they ever pass the FSWE, at least the one I took?

    I saw this far too often in the years that followed among the younger officers. In general, they were/are poor writers. The older officers, though? The ones who had to prove their writing skills to enter the Foreign Service? As a group they wrote clear, concise, and often insightful work. Dry and often boring, to be sure, but that’s diplomatic writing in general. The difference was obvious and discernible.

20. That hasn’t been my experience at Columbia, where I am currently enrolled as a post-bacc. There is quite a lot of assigned reading or other homework (details dependent on the course), the material is challenging, and the students are knowledgeable and say intelligent things in class. Of course, Columbia is not a “regional public university.”

    That said, attendance is erratic–but so was mine when I was an undergraduate 45 years ago–and the grading seems pretty easy.

21. “JJ, Pensacola?”
    Yep, began prefight in May of 1955.
    Wings in July 1956. 16 years active duty and 8 years active reserve. Retired with 21 years’ service in November of 1976.

22. JFK vowed to put a man on the Moon before 1970 and succeeded. Perhaps Trump could set a similar goal, to restore our educational system to the quality level of 1970, or to achieve parity with China, Japan, or Korea? Maybe the still relatively young Mr. Musk could be given this project, after his Doge project is completed?

    At some point the Wokists and American globalist neofascists will need to be discredited and disempowered, to make America great again!
    …………………………………
    J. J. wrote “That said, I don’t have a cell phone and am not very computer savvy.” Well, you’re no slouch at blog commenting!
    And thank you and the other vets here for your service to our country!

23. The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry;
    The books we really want to read we are ashamed to buy;
    The books that people talk about we never can recall;
    And the books that people give us–oh, they’re the worst of all.
    –Carolyn Wells

    Titus reads neither prose nor rhyme;
    He writes himself, he has no time.

24. At least with regard to reading and understanding literature, English teachers and professors almost seem to go out of there way to make reading a horrible, draining experience. First because they want to read “serious” literature with “deep meaning.” Which usually translates to BORING to most students, indeed most people, myself included. Then they take that already boring tome and dissect it, often inserting hidden and symbolic meanings where the author hand no intent of there being any. I once read a blog post by a part time author who had a job grading the writing on the GRE or some other standardized test. At one point, one of her short stories was the text that was being used, and she looked at the meanings that the test writers were looking for in the answers and just went “WTF? I wrote this, and that’s not what I meant.” Or the classic bit in the Rodney Dangerfield movie “Back to School” where the extremely wealthy Dangerfield character hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper on Kurt Vonnegut, and gets a D.

    I would also venture a guess that the fact that the vast majority of English teachers are women influences the literature selection in the direction of works that women tend to enjoy more, to the detriment of male students. Boys like stories with heroes and adventure, not people talking about their feelings. I love reading, but I burned every one of the Bronte sisters books we were assigned as soon as we were done with them. They made me want to gouge my eyeballs out. But I would read through an entire Clancy novel in a weekend.

    And finally, on the subject of “serious” or “great” literature: Shakespeare didn’t set out to write classics of English lit. He was writing to put butts in the seats.

25. Music…
    It’s a huge reason why music instruction and proficiency, significantly Western music, is pushed so hard in China and several other East Asian countries (Japan, S. Korea…)

    Spengler had written about this extensively.

26. In Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Immortal Bard” a physics professor uses his time machine to pull Shakespeare out of the past and enrolls him in a college class on Shakespeare. No prize for guessing how it ends.

27. Several millennia ago I was in high school; I regarded most of it as “prison time” because of the mindless BS the institution was addicted to but math, physics and chemistry were different because I had a hobby which drove me to learn as much as I possibly could in those subjects, eventually leading to an advanced engineering degree; I was also blessed to be in the D.C. area because what I couldn’t find from the brain-dead industrial education complex was available at the Library of Congress 20+ miles away (the LOC reading room was open until 8:30PM on weekdays and 8:30AM – 4:30PM on Saturdays). All that stuff is now on the internet; oh, to have had that back in the 1960s.

    I’ll second the motion on phones. I carry two (legal reasons for the second one), but use both quite sparingly, primarily as actual “telephones,” and almost never out in public. I grew up with F2F and refuse to substitute electronics for it; we have replaced personal interaction, introspection and real-world experiences with artificially created digital interaction with synthetic strangers.

    I suspect “universal abdication of responsibility” is largely to blame for our current predicament; we have extended adolescence from the mid-teen years to the early 30s, put rounded corners and padded surfaces on everything in life to make it as convenient and congenial as possible, “work” is regarded as an inconvenience and must be “meaningful,” the individual’s personal psychological reward for achievement and success have been replaced by public Institutional and Societal Participation Trophies, the list goes on.

    We created this. Deliberately, with malice but not much forethought, we should not be surprised at the result.

28. we were allowed to smoke in class

    I got a key to the physics library. I would go in at night, sit down in a nice leather chair at a table, pull over the ash tray, and spend the night studying Quantum Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz. It is a fond memory and I got an A+ in that course.

    There was one professor (Nobelist) who didn’t allow smoking in his lectures. He pulled a couple of packs of Pall Malls out of his pocket, slammed them down on the lectern, and said “I can’t stand the temptation.” I sometimes wonder if we lost our edge when we gave up smoking 🙂

29. Allan Bloom with WFB (short video clip, 1:44): https://x.com/AllanBloomNotes/status/1906314665522594088

30. (Please forgive me for not having read everything above.)

    I read things like this, and I just scratch my head.

    I taught for about 10 years in an engineering department. The department, with input from the Visiting Committee (VC) of peer departments and leading employers and alumni, set five to ten Student Outcomes (SOs) — what student could expect to be able to do when they got their B.S. degrees. The faculty analyzed these SOs into the five to ten Knowledge, Abilities and Skills (KASs) items that the students needed to gain to achieve the SOs, and allocated the KASs to the required classes.

    The class syllabi stated the relevant SOs and their KASs to the students, and told them how they would be taught and evaluated. Teaching generally consisted of text, lecture, notes, homework and lab work, and the students chose the teaching mode they considered most efficacious. (About 20% attended my lectures regularly.) Evaluation generally consisted of exams, written reports and presentations.

    The curriculum and evaluations were reviewed yearly by the VC, and thoroughly audited every five or six years by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). While I was there, we passed the ABET audits, albeit with criticisms sometimes. The graduating students were evaluated yearly by industry and graduate schools, and our placement rate was generally over 90%.

    Many, many programs are similar and have comparable results. The curriculum and the ABET process well-known and widely available. It’s hard work, but it’s not genius, and it’s not magic.

    All my apostrophes are correct.

    Hilarius Bookbinder, you can kiss my country ass.

31. The Leftist attack and corruption extends, of course, to all sorts of institutions which transmit culture–librarians, and libraries, museums, statues, and public monuments among them.*

    Decades ago, a controversy arose about the Smithsonian’s exhibit about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which featured a large image of the bomber which dropped those bombs, the Enola Gay.

    What could possibly have been one of the major justifications for the U.S. dropping those bombs?

    Well, of note was the fact that nowhere among all of the commentary and images which made up the exhibit was it mentioned that, initiating all of these years of “unpleasantness,” was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

    *See https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/28/americas-librarians-became-militantly-political-and-now-they-suffer-the-consequences/

32. For comparison: the 1884 issues of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, written for a profession none of whose members would likely have gone to college and many/most have not even been high school graduates.

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73340.html

    How many of today’s college students would have been able to read and understand a typical issue of this magazine?

33. Perhaps this will help explain where much of modern American “education” has gone wrong–https://sourcetext.com/grammarian/

    The Underground Grammarian and Dr. Richard Mitchell’s (RIP) four books on the subject of education and thinking and more.

34. A lot of the blame has to be placed on the very popular and widely used subversive textbooks, curricula, and reading lists that Communist (he says with a small c), formerly of the “Weather Underground,” and supposed “educator” Bill Ayres created for use in education departments nation-wide.

35. A lot of great, relevant, personal information in neo’s posts and the comments.

    I think those of us educated in the U.S. who were born between about 1930 and 1970 (1965-is?) had an advantage of fear. Most of us were like tightrope walkers working without a net. We were not only expected to be adults and function as responsible adults at age 18, most of us lived in families that couldn’t economically do much for us other than feed, clothe and house us through that age. For a lot of that period there weren’t even robust social safety nets to help economically. If one’s family was unable to feed, clothe or house it was private charity, hopefully, to the rescue.

    None of us here likely fit ideally into the school system of that era, we all had our little quirks (fidgety, bored, not being challenged, being challenged too much…), but we had a somewhat foreboding and scary real world staring us in the face daily.

    Fear is a great motivator! And there were real societal expectations to be independent by age 18, if not sooner. Along with economic fear there was social fear and tremendous peer pressure. One of my mother’s mottos, spoken often, was, “If you’re still living here when you’re 18 you’re paying me rent.” God bless her for raising me in that environment!

36. Is it a coincidence ? the degradation of academic achievement of students seems to mirror the existence of the Federal Dept of Education.

    Also, what exactly are soon-to-be teachers being taught in degree granting , college level education programs?

    How many university “professors” of education have actually held an elementary or middle school or high school teaching position?

37. Cavendish mentioned High School as “prison time.” That’s not really hyperbolic. We probably all know how the American public school system was based on a Prussian model to produce soldiers and obedient citizens. And, one could argue, that’s what the U.S. needed from the ’30s – the ’60s.

    It’s a wide open world now. Professions that didn’t exist 10 years ago are booming and professions that were booming 10 years ago are dying. Does any College graduate assume he or she will work for the same company for a 30 year career? What are the odds any successful company in today’s economy will exist in 30 years? 15? If I had made a list of the top 25 companies my peers and I would have loved to land a job with when I got my Undergrad in ’85; at least 2/3 no longer exist and many in the remaining 1/3 are very different than they were then.

    And education has been ripped wide open. One of the Little Fireflies did a program where our school district allowed some kids to do their last 2 years of High School in the Junior College system. At 17 she got her High School diploma and an Associate’s degree and graduated College 2 years later. Such programs are more and more common. Kids are taking the GED halfway through High School and skipping the final year or two. Gap years are very common among the College bound. And the need for young men and women in the trades is intense!

    The U.S. of 2025 is not the U.S. of 1955. The 1955 education system was not ideal, but it worked for most of us. It no longer works for the majority of America’s youth. Just like we saw with the music industry and the print publishing industry (including newspapers) and radio; our educational system needs vast restructuring and many involved within the system are reluctant to be the agents of change.

    There are great efforts to create new systems; Mike Rowe’s Works Foundation, Dr. Jordan Peterson’s, “Peterson Academy,” the University of Austin, Peter Thiel’s scholarships to get bright teens to forego College…

    We live in an interesting time.

38. @Barry Meislin:
    Music…
    Yes, yes, yes! That’s what got me through of course, but the power of Western Music is under appreciated. Hidden in its inspired structure is logic and understanding, and built in intellectual and emotional reward.

39. The worst is yet to come. Robbie the humanoid Teslabot will wipeout the human workforce. I don’t need a self driving car. Robbie can drive any human car. I am building a new workshop. I am planning on doing the electrical work myself to save money. I would prefer that Robbie download rough-in wiring training over the air while I sleep because I hate doing that part.

40. A lot of interesting stories in the original post and the comments. Here’s mine.

    I graduated from college in the late ’70s. We had a required freshman course called “Principles of Writing”. There was a rule that if you accumulated x number (I forget the number) of any combination of grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes on written assignments during the semester, you’d fail and have to repeat the course. I don’t know whether this actually happened to anyone. In any case, the phenomenon described in this post simply did not exist at the time.

    I worked at various jobs over the next 20+ years then went you law school in the early 2000s. During orientation, we had to take a grammar/punctuation diagnostic test. What?? Most of my classmates had just graduated from college, so why did we have to do this?, I thought. Anyone who did poorly had to sit through a few lunchtime enrichment sessions. To my surprise, a lot of my classmates had to do this. I was astounded that this was happening at a graduate-level school.

    Not to brag, but I aced the silly test. Actually, I had one or two items marked wrong, but I emailed the professor in charge to tell him the test was wrong and I was right. He was miffed that a newbie dared challenge him but had to admit I was correct and the test was wrong as to those items.

    I can only imagine what the professors had to read through when grading essay questions on final exams.

41. An outside the box thought, for those who like to think exopolyhedronly.

    I heard a comedy bit from a talented comedian. He was lambasting people who insist, “the book was better than the movie.” “No,” he said, “movies are awesome and way better than books. They have moving pictures and audio.” He went on a funny tirade furthering his premise. I don’t recall if it was part of the bit, or not, but, theoretically, if Charles Dickens was alive in 1930 he would have been a screenwriter, rather than a magazine serial author.

    I love books and I almost always find the book better than the movie. On occasion I’ll appreciate both equally, but I don’t think I’ve ever found a film portrayal better than a book I’ve read. But I liked the comedian’s bit and I understand his logic. If Homer had access to Gutenberg’s press would he have told his stories orally? If Austen had access to Edison’s moving photo and audio equipment would she have written novels?

    While I agree with those who have sided with a “Great Books” education with minimal to no computer augmentation as being excellent; should we fault students in the modern world for preferring more immersive methods? Many men my age love computer games and spend a great deal of leisure playing them. I haven’t played a computer game since Space Invaders came out and I enjoy playing board games and cards. But I understand that computer games are amazing and have levels of interaction that my Monopoly board can never achieve.

    Imagine telling UCLA film students they can only use printed novels to tell their stories. Or expecting them to learn how to tell stories with moving pictures and audio solely be studying pre-20th century fiction. One could argue that the top 100 works of fiction all predate the year 1900, but that doesn’t mean film isn’t an amazing medium to tell stories. Can George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg write like Shakespeare or Wilde? No. But George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg can depict stories that inspire humans as well as Shakespeare and Wilde do.

    And, is it wrong to say it’s more fun watching “Back to the Future” than sitting alone and reading, “A Picture of Dorian Gray?” Jesus turned the Ten Commandments into parables so people would relate to them more and understand them. Should He be chastised for not sticking to static, voiceless stone tablets?

    Education is about connecting. As I wrote earlier, the method most of us had in the U.S. from around 1930 to 1970 was a decent fit for connecting with young people living in the U.S. at that time.

    How much of the lack of education of America’s young that we all lament is due to a lack of desiring education on their part; and how much is a rebuke of the reproach to the methods used to educate young Americans today?

    Did homo-sapiens devolve to be less curious in the past half century? From what I learned of Mendel and his pea pods in 7th grade science class, and experiments with fruit flies in High School AP Biology, evolution takes more than 2 generations to sweep through a species.

    Maybe it’s not so odd most young people don’t sit and read 500 page books about the New England whaling industry in the 1800s. I’ve never sat and listened to a blind monologist sing about the Trojan war for over 24 hours.

    Maybe it’s a, “how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris, France” sort-of thing. Very young children, even infants are exposed to very entertaining, immersive and interactive* forms of education. If some of us struggled to sit still in a desk for 8 hours and listen to lectures, imagine how much greater their struggle is.

    *Look at exhibits at Science Museums compared with what we had in our day!

42. well the story of the odyssey has endured for 3,000 years, Christopher Nolan will take a crack at it, the story of the Essex, was what inspired Melville to write Moby Dick, some 30 years later, in this era, In the Heart of the Sea, which became a film that inspired me to take a look at the book Moby Dick, which is really a compendium of everything Melville had learned about Whaling and 19th Century American Culture,

43. Rufus T. Firefly:

    But according to the article, teaching has already adjusted to current habits by not assigning books. So what you suggest should happen has already happened. And students can’t read or write or think, and have very little knowledge of history or government, or much of anything except pop culture.

    It’s important to know cultural history in order to value it. Reading and writing have not become useless skills, either. They are still very important.

44. Before anyone gets too enthusiastic about 19th century education, note that Civil War pension applications included alternate forms of signature attestation, one to be used if the applicant had signed his name, the other if he had made his mark. To be fair, I don’t think they still needed the latter form by the time of World War II.

45. neo,

    “… teaching has already adjusted to current habits by not assigning books.”

    I agree there have been a lot of adjustments, but I doubt most of them are the adjustments that are needed. I think we are in the early stages of an educational revolution. At least I hope we are. And I think books will be a part of that revolution.

    You may remember the controversy about Napster during the early stages of Internet audio. Those who spent energy fighting for or against Napster completely missed the change that was coming. Most music consumers consume music very differently than 20 years ago, and none of them use anything like Napster.

    And, there are still folks playing CDs and cassettes. And vinyl sales have grown in the past 5 years. It’s a niche, but some people prefer getting an album off a shelf, taking it out of its sleeve, putting it on a turntable and placing a needle on it without the option to instantly skip to another track on the album, or different album entirely. The changes are a myriad of great options and individuals can choose what works for them.

    About 30 million copies of the book, “Gone with the Wind” have been sold. Theater ticket sales are estimated at 200 million. Television, video and DVD viewings must be some multiple of that. Like albums and audio streaming; film didn’t stop book sales, and the film didn’t stop “Gone with the Wind” from being a great book, but more people prefer watching the film to reading the book.

    You’ve written that you find fast forwarding through podcasts and videos helpful sometimes. Some folks don’t. Some folks prefer reading text. We learn differently. I even prefer different methods for different subjects. And I’m not alone.

    What if, in grammar school, high school and college, you could choose your lecturers? Make the lecturer Richard Feynman or have Clarence Darrow teach you trial law? Or choose a book over a lecture? Or a film re-enactment of the subject? Or a podcast? Or an interactive workbook? What if you could study “King Lear” by inserting yourself in a recreation of the play in the role of Cordelia?

    We were restricted to books and lectures and a pace formatted for the average pace of a classroom full of students in our day and there have been a lot of complaints about that in this thread. You are extremely well learned and intelligent. How much more would you know if your time hadn’t been wasted in sub-optimal methods for your abilities? Maybe less, maybe more, but wouldn’t you have liked to have had a choice? Although you wouldn’t have perfected smoke rings. 😉

46. Used to be you could sit for the Bar exam or CPA exam and if you passed you were a Barrister or CPA. Now most (all?) states require a 4 year Undergrad AND a 3 year law degree to sit for the Bar. Most (all?) states require an Undergrad in Accounting AND a Masters to sit for the CPA. Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists? Most states now require a PhD before one can practice!

    ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

    I’ve hired a lot of computer programmers in my day. Always had to fight with HR on the job posting. HR always wanted to make a college degree mandatory. Why did I care if someone took Psych 101? I needed people who were talented programmers.

    I think this is where the revolution may occur. A lot of people get an Undergrad and matriculate through an accredited law school but don’t pass the Bar on their first try. Some never pass it. You can’t practice law in your state until you pass it. And we know there are still people, like Abraham Lincoln, who could do self-study and methods other than 7 years of formal education and sit for the exam and pass. In other words, they master the material. Yet they cannot practice law. Passing the Bar is the hurdle to get over, but you can’t approach the hurdle without 7 years of formal education, which doesn’t always get one over the hurdle, nor is it the only way to get over it.

    Why are we still restricted to such formulaic, staid, overly structured methods in so many areas of study?

47. Interesting. I went to Cornell as an undergraduate where all students must take at least one usually two Freshman Writing Seminar(s). About half are taught by professors and half by graduate students. Basically “we’re going to teach you how to write at the college level”. I was an excellent student with excellent grades but I did not know how to write well. It was the second Writing Seminar in which I earned a B+ (oh no the pain the shame) that taught me how to write properly.

    I stayed at Cornell for graduate school. One of my best experiences was when I finally taught a Writing Seminar. The training was excellent. Basically we took How to Teach a Writing Seminar followed by serving as a teaching assistant to a professor teaching a Writing Seminar to high school students in a special summer program.

    Learning how to teach writing made me a better writer. I had bright enthusiastic students about half of whom needed to learn how to write well. It was amazing to see how much bright enthusiatic first year Cornell students engaged in How Not to Write Well.

48. its the guild system that leads to swampy behavior as we’ve seen,

    Hillary eventually passed the bar, does that show she really understands the law,
    that isn’t at all clear

49. @yt81:Before anyone gets too enthusiastic about 19th century education,

    A lot changed from the beginning of the 19th century to the end, considering it took a hundred years. They had higher literacy rates in 1899 in Victorian England than today, it was about 98% for both men and women.

    Put a McGuffey Reader in front of a modern college student and see what happens. I have done this.

50. I was once a lawyer and, over time, passed Bar exams in three different states. I never failed one. Here’s a secret: if you can write well and think coherently about what you’re writing, you will pass the Bar. Legal knowledge is useful, of course, but not essential. What good lawyers need most is to be able to think clearly, and good writing requires clear thinking.

    (I do recognize that I’m writing about what’s now the long-distant past, and my experience may no longer accurately reflect the present.)

51. Rufus T Firefly,..”While I agree with those who have sided with a “Great Books” education with minimal to no computer augmentation as being excellent; should we fault students in the modern world for preferring more immersive methods?”

    The question of how changing communications technology affect the way people think and feel is a fascinating and important one. Some thoughts at my post Stories and Society

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70061.html

    which links an interesting new blog by Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black

52. @Rufus T. Firefly:What if, in grammar school, high school and college, you could choose your lecturers? Make the lecturer Richard Feynman or have Clarence Darrow teach you trial law? Or choose a book over a lecture? Or a film re-enactment of the subject? Or a podcast? Or an interactive workbook? What if you could study “King Lear” by inserting yourself in a recreation of the play in the role of Cordelia?

    People have been trying stuff like this for at least 50 years. (Incidentally, undergraduates complained they learned little from Feynman’s lectures; faculty and graduate students were most of the attendees.) And for things where you’re trying to learn a collection of facts, there might be some merit to it.

    But large amounts of what is taught is not collections of facts, but skills. Skills have to be learned through practice. You learn algebra by solving many algebra problems, you learn cabinetry by building things out of wood, you learn to drive or play basketball by practicing diligently under the eye of someone who knows how it is to be done. You get rusty when you fail to practice and have to practice more to recover. It takes dozens of hours for competence and hundreds of hours for mastery.

    Writing is one of these skills, and so is close reading. The students are not being required to put in the practice. They’ll cheerfully listen to the podcast or watch the video on how to design a bridge, take their degree, and then assume they know how to design bridges, and they don’t.

53. Incidentally I don’t know if anyone here has remarked on this, but there is a huge difference between “the front of the house” and “the back of the house” when it comes to college.

    Take, for example, generations of students who come up with the same lame excuses. Since they go through just the one time, they don’t realize they are traveling in a deep groove. I cringe at the things I thought, at the time, I was or should be getting away with, only to be on the other side of the desk and have a hundred people try it on me over ten years.

    Another example, at least when it came to math and physics, is that every non-major undergraduate thought they had the worst instructor ever. Now from “the back of the house”, I knew who the good ones and the bad ones actually were, but the non-major students could never tell. It was interesting to reflect later on my own undergraduate experience, and about half the math and physics instructors I had were actually pretty good.

54. You know what they say, “The real learning occurs AFTER you graduate.”

    Guess what?

    You can’t MAKE someone learn.
    You can INSPIRE someone to learn anything and everything. Figure it out. Use yourself as an example.

    Me?
    At age 70 I am still on a life long journey of always learning.

55. What if, in grammar school, high school and college, you could choose your lecturers? Make the lecturer Richard Feynman or have Clarence Darrow teach you trial law? Or choose a book over a lecture? Or a film re-enactment of the subject? Or a podcast? Or an interactive workbook? What if you could study “King Lear” by inserting yourself in a recreation of the play in the role of Cordelia?

    Rufus T. Firefly:

    You can find videos of the Feynman lectures at the Internet Archive plus a lovingly prepared text version:

    https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

    MIT has made a ton of their best lecturers and best lectures available free online with the real problem sets assigned to MIT students. I was riveted by Prof David Jerison for calculus, Prof Gilbert Strang for linear algebra, Profs Harold Abelson, Gerald Sussman and Patrick Winston for old-school artificial intelligence. (Winston says he spent at least ten hours to prepare a one-hour lecture the first time.)

    A great lecture is a joy to behold and one can even learn from it. All the lectures I heard at UNM were pretty much an unpleasant waste of time.

    However, a lecture is only a lecture. The lecture format is a compromise between the scarcity of professors/teachers plus physical plant with the abundance of students. Of course, you also have to do the work to truly learn the skill.

    Ideally the student would have a top-quality professor available 24/7. With AI we now have that and also most of Rufus’s laundry list if one asks AI for it.

    I always keep a ChatGPT window open when I’m learning French or almost anything else. It’s a new world.

    The student must still provide motivation, and those unmotivated may use it to cheat, but if someone wants to learn, AI is an astonishing resource which will, I believe, totally upend standard classroom education.

56. huxley,

    I agree, 100%. AI is/will be a boon for us autodidacts.

    Now we need to break the Universities’ hold on accreditation so autodidacts who demonstrate self acquired proficiency are allowed to apply for jobs.

57. Rufus:

    We also need to break the Universities hold on not admitting white/Asian/male autodidacts!
    _______________________________

    He was rejected by 14 colleges. Then Google hired him.

    A high school graduate with a stellar grade point average, near perfect test scores, and a tech startup he founded when he was a sophomore, was rejected by more than a dozen colleges, including state schools. Then he landed a job at Google.

    When Stanley Zhong, who graduated from Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, in 2023, was rejected by 14 of the 18 colleges and universities to which he applied, he and his advisers were dumbfounded.

    Zhong was a standout student: He had an unweighted 3.96 grade point average and scored 1590 on his SATs. He had also been a finalist in multiple global computer coding contests and founded a free electronic signature startup called RabbitSign.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stanley-zhong-google-software-engineer/
    _______________________________

    Now Zhong is suing for discrimination.

    Give ’em hell, Stanley!

58. @ Chases Eagles: I would prefer that Robbie download rough-in wiring training over the air while I sleep because I hate doing that part.
    Just set yourself the challenge on improving over the neatness of this layout:
    https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/multimedia-outlet-being-wired-gm180750367-24725614

59. @ RTF: “… where our school district allowed some kids to do their last 2 years of High School in the Junior College system.”
    I believe you also live in central FL, and my granddaughter is doing something similar. I have a minor concern of a younger girl being hit on by older boys, but she is having fun, is at least as smart as the boys, and her father is a capable watcher.

    And “The U.S. of 2025 is not the U.S. of 1955.” another one of those obvious statements that in fact deserves to be repeated occasionally to obtain the proper perspective and context on many things.

60. I personally am not pining for 1955, I’d settle for 1995 when you could reliably assume a college graduate understood how to add fractions and could read a sentence in an adult book.

61. Rufus T. Firefly:

    I think it’s important that people be assigned things they wouldn’t have chosen by themselves. It’s good practice in sometimes having to do things you don’t want to do – plus, I think it’s important for people to have a certain amount of shared cultural knowledge.

    As for listening to podcasts – I prefer reading to listening. But I listen when I’m double-tasking – for example, cooking or cleaning. You can’t really read while cooking or cleaning.

62. His experience is a strong indicator that those schools have policies in place to reject Oriental grinds. That he was rejected by one of the Cal State schools is an indicator that that policy over-rides just about everything else.
    ==
    State schools should have no admissions offices. The state system should have a central admissions office. The application consists of your identifying information, your board scores with supporting documentation, your achievement test scores with supporting documentation, your high school transcript and (if you’re seeking to transfer) your college transcript thus far. It also consists of a card with the state’s schools printed on it on which you rank-order your choices.
    ==
    The admissions office staff takes the board scores, the achievement test scores, the high school GPA, and the college GPA and plugs them into a vector equation which generates a composite score. All of the preference cards submitted are distributed to students’ first choices, then ranked according to composite score. Each school with have a matriculation target and a historical yield ratio (the latter recalculated each year). The admissions target is the matriculation target divided by the historical yield ratio. You run down the rank-ordered set for each school and you remark the composite score of the card in the rank-order which is in the terminal spot for the admissions target. The school with the highest composite score at the point in the rank-order where the admissions target is met can be identified. For this school, those admitted are those which made this cut. The cards for students not admitted are distributed to their 2d choice schools, The cards in each remaining piles are re-ranked according to composite scores with the new additions to the piles finding their place, and you repeat the process above, identifying those admitted to another school. IIRC, the average state system has about a dozen baccalaureate-granting institutions, so you have that many iterations of this procedure. That completed, each student receives a letter informing him of to which school he has been admitted.
    ==
    The student has a contingent claim on a tuition voucher and a room-and-board voucher issued by the state treasury. The student and his patrons have to pay a recipients’ fee to the state treasury to receive the vouchers. He can exercise his claim to just the tuition voucher or to both vouchers. On receiving the vouchers, he turns them over to the school. The school submits them to dedicated state funds financed by a special income tax and receives cash. The submission of the vouchers to the school clears the student’s obligation to the school for the semester. The student does face ancillary expenses (e.g. textbooks, parking stickers, &c), but the school is debarred by law from formally or constructively assessing any mandatory charges other than that for tuition and room-and-board. They are mandated to disclose students’ mean expenditure on these ancillary charges during the previous year.
    ==
    The recipient’s fee will vary from one student to another and it will be a function of (1) the redemption value of the voucher and (2) the number of state income tax returns his parents / guardians have filed during the course of his natural life on which he is listed as a dependent, and (3) the number of state income tax returns he has filed in the years since his 21st birth day on which he lists no dependents. The fee can be be financed out of family resources; scholarships granted by third parties; or loans issued at market rates by banks, credit unions, or finance companies. It can also be financed by the school itself, for which you have to apply.
    ==
    For that, the student submits a coincident application to the school’s financial aid office. The student’s rank-order among those admitted will be known to the office as it will be reported by the state admissions office. The student’s application will indicate the recipient’s fee due. The application to the financial aid office will include data on family income and assets and will include a request for various sorts of data (work history, extracurriculars, interests) useful in determining if the student qualifies for a scholarship under the terms stated by a donor or testator who has endowed one. It will also be useful in determining if the student is a candidate under current policies for a scholarship financed out of discretionary funds allocated in the budget for such purposes. The scholarship can be issued in one or another of two forms: a grant to defray the cost of the recipient’s fee and a living stipend.
    ==
    Posit a state of the world in which the recipient’s fee is part of the state’s general revenues and the schools never see any of it. The funds the schools receive from the state are (1) voucher redemptions discussed above, (2) the proceeds of occasional voter-approved bond issues to add capital (at each school) to a dedicated endowment whose income finances research grants to the school’s resident faculty, and (3) reimbursement for services rendered to clients who have elected to use services provided by the institution which are (for the client) financed by state issued vouchers or insurance plans. In regard to the last, an example would be services at a university medical center to a member of the general public who is enrolled in Medicaid. Posit also that the school receives nothing from the federal government but things like Medicare re-imbursements for services rendered. Nothing would prevent the school or of corporate bodies consisting of school employees from acting as state or federal contractors, but they’d have to submit sealed bids for them along side commercial companies seeking the business.
    ==
    In such a world, state schools will have donation and endowment income as well. Leaving aside the bond issues (initiative put on the ballot by petition campaigns and approved by voters), their fees from contracts awarded via competitive bidding, and the re-imbursements they receive when clients have selected them as a service provider, what they get from the state is voucher redemptions. Those redemptions are financed by a special income tax and the share of the state’s total personal income flow allocated to redeem those vouchers is known and fixed.
    ==
    As for private institutions, they should receive no public money at all unless they are a provider of services which are financed by Medicaid, Medicare, &c or have been awarded contracts via competitive bidding. They should be required by law to state their tuition and room-and-board charges up front, to have the same stated charges for every student they enroll, to assess no ancillary charges which are formally or constructively mandatory, to disclose mean annual expenditures per student on ancillary goods and services, and to disclose the mean discount the school extends each year on tuition and room-and-board charges as measured over the whole body of students and over the subset receiving discounts. Private schools should also be required to disclose stock and flow data on the demographic segments of their student body (in particular data on the median board scores and achievement test scores of important demographic segments).
    ==
    And if a school wants to admit a foreign national to study or hire a foreign national as visiting faculty, said subject (and any dependents he seeks to bring with him) must qualify for a temporary residency visa by passing language proficiency tests (among other things). For them to receive a temporary residency visa, the school would have to purchase one in a multiple price auction or they must purchase a bloc of time on a secondary market made up of time on primary-market visas left unused because the subject returned home before the time was consumed. The number of visas offered for auction each semester would be a function of the total temporary resident population in the U.S. and of the quantum of time in the secondary market exchange. Columbia wants to be an ‘international university’, they have to pay for the franchise.

63. I learn best when I’m engaged in a subject, but it’s mysterious how I become engaged. I believe most of us need an incentive to have mastered a subject in order to achieve something we are genuinely motivated to achieve, not just a passing mark. There was a wonderful story arc in “The Wire” about teaching burnout kids probability theory so they could make money in craps games on the street. By trial and error they quickly discovered that mastering the material was not the same as sleepwalking through it and getting an automatic pass: one led to winning and the other to losing. Winning was more fun and produced money to trade for stuff they wanted. Then their minds lit up.

    Sometimes we’re lucky enough that the topic itself is so exciting (or we are so wired as to find it exciting for no obvious reason) that our brains are fully in gear without an additional incentive. For me, some learning is such an intense pleasure that it’s a rush that competes successful with all other pleasures in life. What beats an author or lecturer who makes surprising sense about a fascinating new topic? I’m always trying to get people interested in reading Nick Lane’s popularized cell biology books: the man can really teach laymen. I have no earthly practical need to understand cell biology better, but it’s joy to see how something works and to understand how other people cleverly figured it out from obscure clues. It’s an explosive rush to see how things fit together, like receiving a vision.

    School only sporadically offered me any of this. The accelerated classes in my high school often did pretty well. Things got uniformly better in college, when I was surrounding by other students motivated to learn and thus enjoyed classes with appropriate subject matter and pacing. Even there, though, there were courses whose point could be difficult to grasp, not because the material itself was lacking, but because the presentation was opaque or perfunctory. Law school was very hit and miss.

    Somehow, happily, whether because my father took such an intense and natural joy in learning or because the thing is inborn, the experience of learning has mostly lit me on fire for my whole life. It’s joyful fun. Some teachers and schools helped with this while others hindered.

    To return to the question of what’s changed: An almost-30-year-old fellow of my acquaintance, the son of an old friend, is every bit as well-educated and capable of speaking and writing logically as anyone I know who was educated between 1920 and 1990. I suspect his secret is having been homeschooled, besides enjoying considerable genetic gifts and the example of intelligent family members who love learning.

64. Wendy,

    Thanks for the tip. I just ordered Nick Lane’s most popular book using neo’s Amazon link.

65. Emblematic of today’s educational standards–

    I make the mistake of asking for 2/3ds of a pound of ham at supermarket Deli counter.

    College age deli worker turns to her older coworker and asks, “how much is 2/3rds?

66. This shouldn’t surprise you because the IQ of students has been steadily declining. Evidence is data from the General Social Survey on mean IQ by decade among graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students. There has been a steady decline in IQ scores for each group over time. For example, high school graduates in the 1960s had an average IQ of 99.3 but this figure declined so by 2010 and onward, it was 93.5. A similar drop occurred among college graduates — from 113.3 in the 60s to 100.4 in the 2010’s. For those with graduate degrees, the fall was from 114.0 to 105.8.

67. Wendy K. Laubach:

    “It’s an explosive rush to see how things fit together, like receiving a vision.”

    After the pressure of the draft and Vietnam was gone, and after the sobering gauntlet of military service, I returned to college in the early 70s just for the fun of it. The post-graduate courses, all music or related, were only those that interested me like Form and Analysis, Composition, Music Theory, Organ, and Acoustics. Those 5 years of prior college were brought together. It was my own little “coda”.

    While I had read von Helmholtz “On The Sensations of Tone” previously, that masterwork of music theory and basis of acoustics was, as you say, like receiving a vision when taught as the center of Music Theory. What JS Bach and the other masters of Counterpoint had done instinctively, historically, now made perfect sense.

    Without government holding a gun to your head, learning can be such great fun.

68. I was thinking of this

    the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education

    On the face of it, it’s absurd because it’s talking about an intellectual education, not a vocational one. The average student no more deserves a shot at intellectual education than a shot at an athletic job. Only above-par people really have any business pursuing an athletic life or an intellectual life.

    Then it occurred to me that not that long ago, there may have been professional teams but people still often got together for amateur games on their own level. Nowadays, that’s much rarer. You get coach potatoes who are Monday-morning quarterbacks.

    These students are intellectual coach potatoes.

69. Mary Catelli:

    We are not worthy.

    Even so, it still takes all kinds.

70. @Ray:Evidence is data from the General Social Survey on mean IQ by decade among graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students. There has been a steady decline in IQ scores for each group over time.

    This is what I was talking about. It’s not that people are getting dumber. It’s that groups of people who didn’t use to graduate high school are now given high school diplomas, and groups of people who didn’t use to go to college are now pushed in and through and given degrees.

    There was a time when a high school diploma or a university degree implied some level of knowledge and competence, and this is no longer true.

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