[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The reason I believe the literacy level has dropped dramatically is my experience as an office temp for many years and seeing the bad grammar, misspelled words, limited vocabulary and lack of coherence in the thought processes of people my own age (54) and younger. The younger they get, the worse it seems to be. (Occaisionaly there are notable exceptions, but they are exceptions). At any rate, if you don't think there has been a decline in the literacy of Americans over the years, you can check the links below which report how low we are in the standings worldwide, and for a real shock, read some of the letters written on the Civil War battlefield by the "uneducated" blacksmiths, clerks, farmers, etc. who were wearing the blue and gray. They may only have had a rudimentary education (the 3 R's), but their prose is more coherent and literate than what I see and hear on the street these days.
Of course the letters you read are those which were written. Consider the many hundreds of thousands of soldiers who couldn't write and so therefore there are no extant Civil War letters from them. Until the percentage of extant Civil War correspondence and the number of correspondents is compared against the total fighting force, the mere existence of such letters proves nothing more than that there were some literate and eloquent people among the soldiers.
Think of how many other poorly written letters with bad grammar were probably burned to start the next morning's fire.
All this griping about drops in literacy rates and other aspects of civilized society is nothing new and one can go back to letters written by Aristotle which decry the very same "end of civilization as we know it" dumbing down of the younger generation and loss of politeness and respect for elders, etc.
But somehow we've managed to muddle through a few thousand years since those complaining letters, and I'm sure we'll muddle through a few thousand more, hydro-carbon-haze and melting ice-caps not withstanding.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
