DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At an average university, the average student is ‘functionally illiterate.’

The average college student is “functionally illiterate,” writes “Hilarius Bookbinder,” who teaches philosophy at a public university that attracts students with mid-range academic records.

Most students “could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” nor do they have “the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read and most certainly not the attention span to finish,” writes Bookbinder. They don’t read textbooks or primary texts, “even in upper-divisions courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest.”

Students write at the eighth-grade level, he writes. They submit the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

The alternative is a coherent answer written by a bot.

Combine lack of knowledge with safetyism (and institutional antisemitism), and you’ve produced Ben Rhodes’ next batch of journalists who “literally know nothing.”