Will Fitzhugh, founder of the Concord Review, discusses the distressing failure to teach kids how to write here..

It bothers me a great deal when I hear spokesmen for the higher education establishment yammering on about how it’s so vital to the nation that we get more and more kids into college so they can learn all the “higher order thinking skills” that they (and we) need to compete in the world economy. Malarkey. Great numbers of kids enter and graduate from college without even learning how to compose a decent paragraph, much less acquire “higher order thinking skills.” I’m a skeptic about the supposed need for colleges to upgrade the quality of American workers — most of what people need to know they learn on the job, not in classrooms — but even if there were such a need, most schools are too preoccupied with keeping the students happy to bother with any serious intellectual augmentation.