Sunday, June 27, 2021

Woolly-headed illiterates

After attending school in America she returned to Britain to discover she had been ill-prepared to write well. In The Telegraph today:
.... Students today can no longer take for granted the apparent luxury of being evaluated harshly and fairly, and with it, the potential for learning, improvement and excellence. This is because, with its genius for turning good things bad and true things false, woke ideology has decided that even basic standards of coherence and accuracy themselves are evidence of a white, male Euro-centric (and therefore bad) worldview. At a number of universities in Britain, good spelling, proper grammar and robust essay structure – not to mention concepts like facts, truth and argument – all now fall under suspicion. Continuing on in thrall to these devious non-ideas now risks turning us into a nation of woolly-headed illiterates. ....

We must make sure these ideas never gain the same supremacy in Britain [as in America]. For by rejecting standards and objective criticism, their proponents want the politics of identity to triumph over the challenge of learning. But in rejecting the whole concept of merit as still more evidence of racism, they seem to want to put as high a barrier as possible in the way of minorities and those from less privileged backgrounds. We must ensure that, unlike America, we don’t fall into a morass of intellectual dishonesty where woke nonsense, rather than actual quality and potential, is king.
Zoe Strimpel, "Why we must all resist the woke war on written English," The Telegraph, 27 June, 2021.

1 comment:

  1. Found among the Tolkien Papers at Marquette University - a page from an exam graded by C.S. Lewis with a one word comment. "Drivel" Ouch!

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