I had heard of this article a few months ago, but this was the first time I'd read it. Fascinating but also depressing. I was wondering what others thought of it? (follow the link from the article about McHale's new show).

I meet these sorts of people every day, mostly at work but also in social situations. The difference is that many of them have degrees, bachelors and associates... a few even masters degrees. A woman in my office has a degree (I assume associates) in medical record keeping and is in charge of thousands of engineering related files. She can barely compose a coherent sentence when emailing the entire company about new file room rules or to remind people that they must sign out materials. The great books and movies of the past century are not even a blip on her radar. 1984 is just a year, and Animal Farm is a nice title for Pixar's next movie.

If she was the only one I knew like this I wouldn't feel so hopeless but I regularly bump into a woman with a masters degree in Accounting who could not get through The Sisters of The Travelling Pants because it was at too advanced a reading level. And my favorite, a woman who has a creative writing degree from Carnegie Mellon University, who on seeing that Pride and Prejudice was playing stated that "she thinks that was based on a book". A masters degree from a top school should at least give someone enough education to not make statements such as this or at least require competence in basic reading skills. THis woman too could not finish a book, she spoke of reading (and it was the only book in her apartment) the Red Tent for over 2 years.

The sort of illiteracy described and ascribed to adult education and/or community college students shouldn't stop there. It should address those of us who have degrees from private and public institutions of higher learning. How can one graduate with bachelors and masters degrees and no know how to read? How can they have so little ability that writing emails is beyond their ability?

I am not a person of more than average intelligence, my grades were average and I have an average job. I have lived life thinking that most people are smarter than I am, but as I get older and see more of the world I think that perhaps I'm wrong. Was reading Anna Karenina at 14 and then at 30 a real accomplishment??? Is memorizing the Lady of Shalott something heroic? Enjoying the Worldly Philosphers and reading Marx, are those things I should put on resumes?

What is our future as a country and a democracy if we cannot raise our kids to be literate? What will happen when we are too ignorant to understand what is going on in politics or economics? Are our current issues with recession and home foreclosure the results of this ignorance? If people read novels would they have understood the fine print on their loan forms?

Excellent post!!! If it's any consolation, I never went to college but I read the classics and continually try to stretch my mind and learn, and at the very least know how to write a coherent email, LOL!

Sadly, I think the examples you mentioned of ineptitude and ignorance are becoming the rule, rather than the exception. If supposedly learned adults are so dreadfully unskilled and uneducated then I REALLY worry about the next generation(s) coming up. When do they have time to put two thoughts together, much less learn what's needed to function in society and the workplace? They're too busy texting, emailing, watching cartoons (and I'm talking about teens and young adults), tweeting, facebooking, etc. They have to be entertained and occupied every second of the day.

Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone even goes to college anymore or has the time to!

More and more colleges are offerring remedial courses in basic reading, wrting and math. The kind of stuff that incoming freshman should have learned before they even got into high school, let alone GRADUATED. I too worry about the future of the country.

We live in an enormously complex world. I work in accounting for small (less then 500 employees) manufacturing company. My job requires me to deal with vendors from eight different countries, customers in ten countries and four different currencies. Even the most basic jobs on the floor require knowledge of computers, advanced measurment techniques and other skills.

Many of the problems that we are dealing with as a society (education, environment, the economy, healthcare) are complex and demand at least a basic understanding of multiple fields. Just to keep up with the world demands the ability to learn and absorb new knowledge.

And yet it seems for the last 15-20 years we have been raising entire generations who can barely read. Who have no knowledge of history or literature. And worse, don't even seem to care. Who have no desire to learn anything else. Who think that all they need are 'street smarts' and their 'gut instincts'.

I am a professor. I see what the kids are capable of first hand. Our students are literate. They're not well-read, capable of critical thinking, or able to perform analysis. There is a difference.

I suggest you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death about how we are an incredibly informed society but we have very little knowledge about that information. This book was written in the 1980's and he is concered with television, but his arguments certainly hold up in the digital age. He argues that entertainment has become so ingrained in education that there isn't as much learning going on. I see this in the rush to incorporate every new trendy technology into the classroom. Sometimes an iPod is just an iPod and not a teaching tool.

Even when I taught community college the students could read and write. They hated it and as a result they were very poor at it and so they played that off as illiteracy to get out of doing it.

While I completely understand where you are coming from, I would like to point out that you really need to check your grammar and spelling before dithering on about other people's lack of knowledge or skill in the English department. I am working toward a Master degree and have rarely read any of these "classics." I know the books and can match them title to author, but have no need to read them just so I can say I have. Some classics were really the popular smut of their time. You disagree? Have someone with even a Bachelor degree in English take a closer gander at Bram Stoker's Dracula or even Richardson's Clarissa. I bet there will be few of them that would contest the point that they were merely popular fiction of the day and there were most likely better novels that were published that didn't last because of their lack of popularity. Sure, they are great entertainment that do address various issues of their time, but they are by no means books that should be the yard stick we measure other novels by. In this case, I would contest that in 200 years or so they will be using Harry Potter books in college class rooms and reading metaphors into his adventures. It isn't that society as a whole is completely "dumbing down," but that the tides of taste change- as do those of morality, ethics, and politics.

My high school had a vo-tech track and an academic track. (This was the earliest 1970's) We needed (and still do) machinists, secretaries, beauty operators (I love that one), electricians, auto mechanics and plumbers. Those in the vo-tech track were there by choice or because a counselor had recommended it. Those in the academic track might or might not get into college. (THis was before universal admissions became the norm)

I empathize with the author of "In the Basement..." and with his student charges. He's the institutional hammer and they're the square pegs pounded unnecessarily into round holes.

I was in Finland on May Day once and it is a day when people wear the hats of the schools from which they graduated. Why May Day is School Hat Day, I have no idea. But there it is.

Anyway, about half of the people were wearing hats from technical schools and half from universities. We have nothing like this here. We need technical schools at the secondary and post-secondary level, and those technical schools need to be legitimate forms of education, not independently-owned businesses that are nothing more than ripoffs of poor people and government school aid.

BTW, I have a master's degree and a post-master's university certification and I'm unemployed. I don't feel superior to anybody. If someone has a job, they're doing better than I am. Good for them.

It is not surprising that someone working toward a Master's Degree wouldn't have read the classics, but that is again another example of the dumbing down of our society, and of our inability to agree on a 'canon' of worthwhile texts that every educated person should read. Most people wouldn't consider Dracula or Clarissa to be "classics" in the sense of classic works, they are just popular old novels. It is certainly true that tastes change over time, and the value of certain works varies in accordance with the standards of the reviewers, but you can't take that to an extreme. To suggest that Harry Potter will ever be regarded as a classic (instead of an example of 20th/21st century pulp fiction) is ridiculous. Your attitude, frankly, reeks of the inability to discrminate which has done great damage to our society -- and which is documented with depressing precision in Professor X's article.

I think it is important to note that Professor X never claims that the people he teaches and stupid. He describes them as unprepared for college level work in his discipline, or more broadly uneducated. There may be some people incapable of learning, but the real villian here is a society that has a real lack of standards - a society that is unwilling to see anyone "fail." As Professor X writes, without failure, there can be no worthy accomplishment.

Finally, and this is a nitpick, you need to realize that a forum like the Fray is conversational -- a certain amount of spelling and grammatic errors is inevitable and expected, so calling someone on having an error (assuming they did, I didn't check) sort of misses the point of the forum.

Everyone in a society should have a basic level of shared education (reading, writing, analytical and math skills, knowledge of history and the classics, etc.). But what workers need is skills, not a classical education. Having decent reading, writing, and mathematic skills is a necessity though, and the debate, of course, is what standard should we set as a 'basic' skill. I've always admired the European model of trades, and believe that something similar should be adopted here -- but everyone going into a trade should have some level of academic competence, of course. The poisonous situation described by Professor X is a result of our having no standards except to require 'a college education' -- whatever that means.

"I am working toward a Master degree and have rarely read any of these 'classics.' I know the books and can match them title to author, but have no need to read them just so I can say I have." -minerva18279

A fallacious argument, and a perfect illustration of the problem itself...

Do not confuse the map with the territory. Merely knowing about a book is nothing compared to having read it. You seem to claim the former as a personal triumph, the latter as a waste of precious time.

If so, how sad. But it's YOUR loss.

Since you might also be able to name other artists and their key works, would you also argue that you have no need to see the Prado or the Louvre?

The point is NOT to simply be able to say you have read/seen/heard the classics in order to have something to name-drop at cocktail hour but, rather, to actually live your life with an understanding of the subtleties of the human condition that only an education in the humanities can provide.

This approach is what used to form the essence of a civilized life, and it is still arguably the essence of a truly democratic society: granting an ability to converse and interact with others in ways that transcend one's own temporal, geographic, and physical constraints. It's the basis of true tolerance and compassion, wherein lies the salvation of each of us.

So... where do we go from here?

And yet it seems for the last 15-20 years we have been raising entire generations who can barely read. Who have no knowledge of history or literature. And worse, don't even seem to care. Who have no desire to learn anything else. Who think that all they need are 'street smarts' and their 'gut instincts'.

That is no surprise, considering our country elected and re-elected George W. Bush.

And the prevelant religions of our country teach us that knowledge is foolishness.

Please, please, please let's not deteriorate this topic into a political/religious bash session!

She can barely compose a coherent sentence when emailing the entire company about new file room rules or to remind people that they must sign out materials- Callie1978

If a person is going to use the poor grammar or lack of ability to string five words together to form a sentence, they should be able to string their sentences together and spell correctly themselves. It does not matter whether it is in a forum, letter, essay, or text message. It is a classic case of "pot, meet kettle! I'm sure you will be fast friends." My point is merely that in that situation, he or she should have used extra care in forming their argument. Of course I do not think that people should have to use perfect spelling and grammar in every instance. As I am sure that your errors in your post were to highlight this point. That would be tedious. Which of course, the rest of the discussion is.

So here, I'll say it so you can feel better: You were right. Consider me properly cowed by your apparently higher intelligence and experience. I was tremendously wrong to ever suggest that Dracula and Clarissa could ever be in the same class as Frankenstein or Jane Eyre. I should really go back to where I got my undergraduate degree and demand to have my money returned to me. How could I have ever thought that I had a decent education from one of the top 20 colleges in the United States? They really should be in the bottom 20th for the Liberal Arts because they have the nerve to use supposed non-classical literature in their classrooms. They should have known to use the opinion of nameless people online over other, more literary opinion when they conducted their search in course material to use for their classes. To think that because I rarely read classic works of literature, versus reading them every second like you apparently do, I am so completely uneducated and a shining example of how correct you are. Did you also read the criticisms of those classical works? Can you explain those great themes of the human condition to me that perhaps I missed in my occasional reading? What would your definition of "rare" be? I am usually in the process of reading 3-4 books at a time right now since I am pursuing my non-worthwhile Master degree. So, if I read 1:12 is what various Literature authorities would consider to be a classic (not what you think, because obviously, you are not an authority), would that be comparable to your frequent reading? Consider it more than done.

Do you recognize sarcasm when you read it? Ignore it, and I am sure your day will be peachy. And if you don't ignore it, perhaps you should also consider some classics that teach us that even the most "uncivilized" person can understand abstract concepts of human perception, thought, and emotions. Without any humanities education what-so-ever.

My brother is an English literature professor at a very "prestigious" university. I'll never forget going to dinner with some of his colleagues and overhearing one ask another if she had read a certain book. Her response was (dead straight face), "Read it? I've never even taught it." This may be totally irrelevant to the topic at hand, but I though it was funny.

have a real talent for missing the point.

Also, a suggestion: if you are going to "mockingly" brag about your lack of erudition while at the same time belittling others, try not to credentialize yourself by noting that you graduated from one of the "top 20 colleges in the United States". A lot of us graduated from "top 20 colleges" and we probably learned enough critical thinking there to understand that if one has to resort to university creditials as a pathetic attempt at defense, we have already lost the argument.

In any case, given the state of many of our best univerisities, especially in the liberal arts departments, I am not at all surprised.