Briefly: Colleges being forced to teach high school grads how to read

Here’s more evidence that the modern U.S. school system is badly broken. It was once a reasonable assumption that a high school graduate who was accepted to a major college could read and write competently. For years, colleges have known their incoming freshmen’s writing was mostly dreadful, so they’ve been forced to teach students to write. (They’ve done it very poorly.) Now it has become obvious that basic reading skills among freshmen are so terrible that some colleges must now teach kids how to read. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, all incoming freshmen will now take a mandatory three-course sequence which will teach them how to read and understand what they’re reading, in addition to trying to teach them how to write. If a student has made it this far in life without learning how to read and write, this probably won’t work, but the system will eventually be dumbed down to ignore the failure. Parents who trust the modern school system to educate their children are gambling with their kids’ lives. The system is broken.