Learning to write

From today's NY Times:

Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.

And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.

Those are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, an 18-member panel of educators organized by the College Board. . .

In two decades of education reform, the teaching of reading and arithmetic has come under intense scrutiny, with increased state regulation and a host of new assessment tests. But until recently the teaching of writing has been largely overlooked. That seems to be changing now. With everyone from employers to college professors expressing alarm about the dismal writing skills of most American students, there is a new urgency, and new energy, to upgrade the teaching of writing.

And it is no false alarm -- ask anyone who teaches at the university level. One telling indicator from my own experience has been how often foreign students' papers prove to be much better structured than those of the American students, even if the English is shaky. This is not a matter of students not being able to write stylishly: this is a matter of functional expression, where even intelligent students cannot make themselves understood, let alone construct a convincing logical argument.

Posted by David on April 26, 2003 11:45 AM