I recently found myself marking University papers from a business writing course at Concordia University and am now slightly worried. My mother’s friend being the professor of the course needed help marking the assignments and while I don’t know too much about business, I do know a little bit about writing, unlike a lot of the students I marked.
“Many of them just don’t know how to relate to the written word anymore,” said the professor. A multi-talented and extremely intelligent woman, this was only one of her disturbing opinions on how our increasingly image-based culture is hurting the abilities of students when it comes to the basic skill of writing.
Many of the students in her class were international students and writing in their second language. But it wasn’t always the writing that was bad, it was the inability to follow simple instructions and guidelines on how to format, for example, a business report or inter-office memo!
The written word itself and our relationship with it is evolving and there is no use in trying to stop this change but I think we might be losing something important in the process. I grew up on tangible, turn-the-actual-page books and bedtime reading as well as studied English literature, so I guess I’m a little old fashioned, but I’m still a part of the generation that has transitioned into the world of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter, but only to a point!
After coming across this article called The Shadow Scholar about a guy who is hired by students to write their papers, I am now even more concerned about our future leaders in, apparently, any and all fields. This “Ed Dante” has written on every subject under the sun and all the way to the doctorate level. Now the words of Sir Ken Robinson on how, in short, university degrees are a dime a dozen rings even more true. If students are cheating their way through university and getting a nice degree that says they have all these wonderful skills when they probably don’t, where is the value in the whole process?
“I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created,” wrote “Ed Dante” in the article. What a telling statement, along with this one:
Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven’t mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences.
More people really need to start reading Ken Robinson and his ideas about how the education system is crushing creativity and really needs a good overhaul to suit the present age. The shadow scholar’s road to where he is today seems like the perfect example of what Robinson has been trying to bring to light when it comes to the experience of education students have today.
“Ed Dante” writes that “the story of how I got into this job may be instructive. It is mostly about the tremendous disappointment that awaited me in college.” What he met in university was that grades and competition were still number one and “the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.” At least he managed to escape the crushing effect of the current system and didn’t lose his creative drive that is slowly ground out of most students at a very early age according to Robinson. The only problem is that his creativeness capitalizes on the failure of education:
Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.
You know what’s never happened? I’ve never had a client complain that he’d been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.
That’s a bit scary, no? Just take a look at some of the emails the shadow scholar had to decipher, there are some classics. But my favourite line is from the shadow scholar himself: “I’m planning to retire. I’m tired of helping you make your students look competent.”
any ideas on how to make the whole storify appear here?
