OPINION:
About 15 years ago I was sitting next to a priest at a wedding. He turned out to be the dean of students at my alma mater. I inquired whether he thought the “dumbing down” of our education system had forced the university to lower its standards. He said, ’Are you kidding? When did you enroll?’ I told him 1963. He said, ’If our standards now were the same as they had been in 1963, 95 percent of our current students would not have been admitted.’”
I have long said that for about two generations now, a majority of our students have not been taught how to think. We found it kind of funny when, in the first generation, a teenager had trouble making change. Now some of those same kids are in positions of authority. And we wonder why, when we have a question or a problem, it takes forever to get an answer.
I graduated from a small Catholic high school in 1963. English was by far my worst subject. In my first year in college I was required to take two semesters of English and I barely passed. Now I regularly find myself noting and correcting the common grammatical errors of others. The basic lessons I learned way back then make me feel like a PhD compared to students today. Sadly, this illustrates how far we’ve come in the denigration of our education system.
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HARVEY BOWER
Pittsburgh, Pa.
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