Friday, April 22, 2011

Why Johnny Can't Write or Think

We know it so well that we believe that we are beyond being shocked. We know that political correctness has infected American universities to the point of turning education into ideological indoctrination. And we ought to know that this  process has dumbed down the experience to a point where it amounts to professional malpractice.

However well we know this, nothing really prepares us for for Mary Grabar’s account of a convention of university writing teachers. Link here.

Grabar explains: “After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested  in teaching students to write and communicate clearly.  The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against ‘marginalized‘ groups and restrict self-expression.”

This band of imbeciles has gone completely over to the dark side. They do not even pretend to be teaching writing; they could care less about whether or not their students can formulate a clear sentence that expresses a concept.

They want to use their professional expertise to indoctrinate their students into their ideology. They are almost surely grading their students based on their adherence to politically correct thought.

The examples are so egregious and so mindless that I could not have made them up if I had really tried. Grabar is especially taken by the trio of native American drummers whose “music” is supposed to be akin to expository prose. Naturally, that part of the program is capped off by a plea for everyone to learn to speak Cherokee.

It would take a very talented group of joke writers to invent that kinds of discussion topics that absorbed the interest of these English instructors.

Even then, if you are an outsider to the field, you would not laugh because you would never believe that any college instructor could be that stupid.

Surely, this malfeasance rises to the level of malpractice. It is grossly unethical for people who are being paid to teach English composition to refuse to teach English composition.

When you are hired to do one thing but do another, you are severely lacking in integrity. You are exploiting and abusing your professorial privilege.

These teachers are so thoroughly arrogant about abusing the system, and so thoroughly unaware of how unethical they are, that they do not even try to hide it.

Why should anyone care? Don‘t these academics have a right to their kumbaya moments? Doesn’t everyone?

Unfortunately for all of us, the people who are the core editors and writers in the mainstream media have probably had their skills honed in English composition classes where good prose style was ignored in favor of rants against white privilege.

If you wonder why so many journalists do not bother to offer an objective view of the facts, but are hell bent in forcing us to think the way they want us to think, the reason might be that they received indoctrination in place of education, that they were rewarded for political correct opinions and not prose style, and that they were taught by teachers who were  unethical and unprofessional.

They must have learned it somewhere.

3 comments:

  1. This band of imbeciles has gone completely over to the dark side. They do not even pretend to be teaching writing; they could care less about whether or not their students can formulate a clear sentence that expresses a concept.


    Judging from the context, I think you meant to say that "they could not care less...".

    Sorry, just one of my pet peeves. Especially funny in context, though.

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  2. Thanks, Jordan. I had thought that in the vernacular "could care less" was equivalent to "could not care less."

    I'm likely wrong, especially since I'm taking an educated guess while it sounds as though you have looked into the question.

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  3. Stuart,

    I think you are right, actually, that they are interchangeable now. I think this is through misuse and it bothers me.

    "could care less" is not logical for how it's most commonly used.

    The fact that the word specious will soon mean "obviously and clearly wrongheaded" bothers me more.

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