losses

it's like... kids ain't thinkin'... n' stuff... ya know? ;)

Loss of... the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders...

What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more...

Students have constantly been told that there is no essence and meaning to things, and that they are only what they want themselves to be. They have been fed a heavy diet of relativism and indoctrination in one of the changing variants of collectivism -- feminism, socialism, and nationalism being only the most prominent among them. They are taught what to "make" of themselves, how to "construct" an identity in a category that is politically desirable, but not to discover what -- or rather who -- they are and for which purpose they are in the world.

via nicole via dustbury