Composition__A Lost Art?

Had an eye-opening talk with a buyer who is a professor at COS, a Ph.D. in fact. He has been here since '01 and got a rude awakening about educational standards when he started. He had a standard 15 question exam with ten of the fifteen questions being of the essay or critical thinking type.

"We don't do that here" he reports being told. "You have to do multiple choice or true false questions." "Why?" he asks. "Because we are open enrollment and since we can't reject applicants and since they can't write a complete sentence, we must adapt to current conditons."

Well, when I went to school composition was important. Being able to express yourself in writing sort of equalled whether or not you could think clearly. I attended the University of California in Santa Barbara and Berkeley, and so did Sally. In fact I followed her there. But I digress.

All the classes were huge; 2 or 3 hundred of us listened (and took copious notes) to famous people like Edward Teller (H bomb) and Eugene Burdick who wrote (The Ugly American). And then we took 3 or 4 hour long passing exams which were COMPLETELY essay form in the famous Blue Books.

These were 32 page lined composition booklets that you had to buy and bring to the tests to write your answers in and give to the professor. They were what, maybe a nickel? But the pressure ! You felt like you had to fill the darned thing up to pass.

So you wrote and you wrote and hoped it made sense enough to earn a B or better. The point isn't that it was in penmanship, a word not often used now, but that we were educated to express ourselves in writing. Not on the phone. Not in email. Not texting, but in words. Complete, full words which we had to check in the dictionary if we wanted high marks.

So to close the circle, we apparently are now accepting students who not only cannot do that but are not required to. My client-friend blamed the public schools for this but I wonder if it is more accurate to look right in our own homes and blame ourselves. How much reading and writing do we ourselves do? Do we value and urge those skills in our children?

An even larger question, and more bothersome is whether our society values these skills. How can we prosper and be a world power if our major vein of communicating is texting "R U OK?"?