by Robert Thistle

Created on: August 23, 2008

Calling illiteracy in high schools a plague is being polite. My present place of employment, a retail environment, hires numerous young people of whom a rather high percentage cannot make simple change calculations. Their vocabulary skills are limited to four letter words, most of which begin and end with the letter "F". They require constant assistance in writing simple notes to the boss requesting time off.

I know I just ended a sentence with a preposition, so sue me! Please understand there are also a good number who are very smart and very polite. Certainly they are making every attempt to improve their education and their possibilities of employment outside the store where they now work. Is not this due in part to the computer environment in which they dwell. It take very little intelligence to move a mouse and right or left click the mouse. I know, I play computer games.

The other part, and this comes from my sister who is a math teacher in a local high school, the kids do whatever they want. There is no discipline and you cannot fail the student. The trauma of failing would leave devastating emotional marks on their warped psyche. I failed grade 7 and other than joining my younger sister in grade seven the following year, my marks improved vastly. Rather than pulling off 50's and 60's, my marks moved up into the 90's. My sister was a serious student and made me study with her. A good lesson.

Our principal in high school was a former commandant in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He ran a strict school. There was something in our school that is not allowed anymore in schools. Discipline. Corporeal punishment. A few swats with a strap and you know they meant business. I was never physically injured nor do I suffer emotional setbacks as a result of the strap. As a result, you learned and studied well. Even if it was under duress. No one ever died from working or studying to hard.

Lastly students are not taught how to write. Both my children, now out of university, wrote numerous essays in high school, but never had any structural lessons in composition of the English language. If not for their parents who where taught these skills their marks would have been much lower. So, in the store wherein I work, I am always pleased, and tell the young people, when I see them reading a book. We as kids read voraciously. As parents, my wife and I read constantly to the kids. And when they started to learn to read, they practiced by reading to mom and dad. Simple skills. That need to be taught. We need to get back to the basics. Reading Writing Arithmetic (now mathematics)!

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