Illiteracy After Four Years

I encountered a student several years ago who had a B average, listened in class, and actually seemed as though he wanted to learn. When he graduated, I was there to see him get his diploma. He applied to a college, was accepted, and now attends it. He has just started his second year.

From time to time he has called me and wanted to talk -- perhaps as much because he comes from a one-parent family that consists of himself, his mother and several sisters and wants some time with an older father figure as to enjoy a cup of coffee. We jokingly call the coffee house "the office."

In the course of perhaps a dozen meetings with him that last for perhaps two hours each, I have discovered a great deal about the education he received at high school. He knows who Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are and has read some of their work. But in a recent conversation he did not recognize the names of Socrates, Sophocles, Homer, Oedipus, or many others whom we would consider to be essential to the knowledge of any educated man.

The immediate reason for the meeting was that at college he had taken a course with about 200 other students, but was called aside by the professor at the end of the course and told that the professor would have failed him, but passed him only because he liked the student. The reason was that the young man's writing was just slightly above the level of that of an illiterate.

How can a young man graduate from high school with a B average and still not know how to write. Obviously, nobody at the school took the time to read and correct his writing -- or perhaps because students were not assigned enough writing to do. Since writing is a way of examining and clarifying one's thoughts, what can the quality of this young man's thinking be ?

When I look at the level of political discourse these days (I am writing this on the 16th of January, 2012), it seems to me that one reason candidates can believe some of the things they believe is simply that in the course of their education they never taught critical thinking. Isn't teaching one of the main functions of education ?

This can only be accomplished when the student-teacher ratio is much smaller than it presently is in most public high schools. What is required is minute attention to the grammar and logic in a student's writing, the correction of these errors, and the assignment of enough writing to enable the student to learn from mistakes. When a teacher has 30 or more students in a class and five or more classes a day, how can he or she find enough time to even devote to reading, much lass correcting an appreciable amount of each and every student's work ?