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Kids aren’t writing?

Now, for something lighter, we have a piece in today’s The Wall St. Journal (paid content - reg/$ reqd) today talks about parents fighting against some schools with tough pre-graduation requirements, chiefly around lengthy papers. The first case profiled is of a high school senior who was almost denied graduation because he didn’t complete an 8 page paper.

High-achieving students complain these projects eat up time that could be better spent applying to colleges. Many average seniors, bound straight for the workplace after graduation, can’t understand the need for such added rigor. Meanwhile, just the mention of a research paper can send out shock waves these days. Even three-page papers have become a rarity in English classes and 75% of all seniors say they get no writing assignments at all in history or social studies, according to a 2003 national commission on student writing.

I blush to admit the good student I was, but I probably had to do about 5 ten page papers by the end of high school. I marvel at how this could be true now - especially with how important writing is as a form of communication.

This quote especially sounded awful, for these are just the critical thinking skills that most kids aren’t going to get even in most colleges:

Because Cedarcrest students had little experience writing long, annotated papers that defended a point of view, failure on first drafts was common, even among honors students.

Now, if this really is true, this may be the solution to our blogging info overload. Or maybe they’ll find it’s worth the time and effort to try their hand blogging….

But it’s prob far more likely that they will become podcasters or videobloggers. :-)