Eventually someone who can’t read or add simple numbers just can’t succeed at a professional level. Schools can claim whatever they want, water down grades, eliminate standardized tests. Eventually reality hits. Once you send an email and it’s grammatically moronic and full of typos, the jig is up.
I'd like to think so, but I'm getting the sense that maybe not. I've been observing businesses having to be incredibly tolerant of the poor performance of new hires, I guess because they can't find better. In academia, it's been getting harder for decades to hold to past standards.
I don’t think we’re necessarily contradicting the parents post though. You need some people with some amount of competence to get work done. If it’s more valuable for individuals to play political games instead of delivering value, and the people who deliver value are ostracized, the team, or organization will fail.
If the organization is one of those too big to fail companies, of which our country has many, the buck will stop at our nation being over taken.
I don't think anyone ever noticed.
That the school does not care about education.
After all, if I find a misspelling on a headline on one of my web pages, I fix it. Wouldn't you?
Spelling is different from other domains of education like mathematics, however: an explanation of "correct spelling" is not to be found in natural law, but rather in a Katamari ball of historical contingencies of chance, intervention, and everything in between. (Why'd we keep the _-ough_ in words like _through_? What if the Simplified Spelling Board had succeeded in its aims and totally reformed English spellings? What if Scots, not the English, had had linguistic dominion over the United States? Etc.) Moreover, in large part because "correct spelling" is derived from one very peculiar and privileged variety of English that not everyone speaks, your ease of access to correct spelling is going to be facilitated or hindered by facts about your SES, race, and ethnicity.
This is why I don't really care when I see a spelling error anywhere, unless genuine confusion results, or stakes are high enough that adherence to a rigid standard must be maintained. In many ways, nothing is gained from imparting it to a small child compared to something like basic arithmetic. And moreover, in some contexts I think it's not unfair to call an evaluative insistence on standardized spelling a vehicle for linguistic and therefore ethnic chauvinism.
I understand your original reaction--having proper spelling is a display of fitness to teach, in the same way that, say, having won some Kaggle tournaments is a display of fitness to do data science. But spelling is a rather peculiar thing to insist on, and I'd have been much more interested if the teachers had been writing out multiplication tables on sandwich boards. Spelling is sociologically thorny, and there are bigger fish to fry.
It's not a sign in front of a coffee shop. It's a sign in front of a school that's supposed to care about teaching the kids.
I want to think that but I'm old enough to observe that often it doesn't. If someone has connections or some other unfair advantage, they can go through life succeeding higher and higher without any competence.
And that is assuming there even if a buck. Plenty of people are entirely happy to destroy their kids future as long as they can pretend they didn't know (or that it hasn't actually happened). That's true for education. LA parents are happy with low test scores as long as they can get low taxes and high grades to point at if anyone starts asking questions. The same is true nation wide and internationally in the anglo-sphere west at least. If one citizen cannot read or add up, that is a problem for them. If no one can, that's a problem for society/government/employers etc.
Healthcare is very heavily interfered with by the government. Public education is totally the government. Isn't it amusing that those are the poster examples for "failure" of the free market?
Let's take the software industry. It is nearly completely unregulated. It's been a resounding success.
We tried private healthcare, it failed and the government had to step in. The same for education. The idea of using the free market for education is already defunct because education isn't software development. It's much harder to measure success or failure.
It didn't fail. Healthcare was cheap, plentiful, and advanced until the government stepped in.
> The same for education
How/when did it fail?
No? That's what QuillBot is for, and QuillBot, like, exists. It's already the world we live in. Anyone for whom English is a foreign language, anyone with sense anyway, already is using QuillBot before sending an email.
And even a grammatically correct email might be confusing, etc.
What I am saying is that it is demonstrably the case, that writing with stupid grammar and spelling mistakes is not a problem for working professionally. Tools exist that can fix it adequately, and people actually use them.