This 'ere is likely to be a long post, so if you've better things to do, I suggest that now would be a good time.
I employ staff for various kinds of work for my firm. Not all of them are IT geeks, but most of them are. With very few exceptions they can't write for nuts. One or two are functionally illiterate. One of the employment tests we use is known as the VIT - a Verbal Integration Test. It doesn't ask you to write anything, it asks you to respond to simple questions. On average the applicants' scores fall within about the fortieth percentile which, effectively, means that they understand little of what they read.
We employ them anyway, unless the other criteria are not met. Why? Because if we didn't, we wouldn't have any new staff at all.
I spend a good deal of my time rewriting business cases, terms of reference, reports, even letters. Out of perhaps 200 people at the premises I work at, I would say only 50 people have medium to good skills in written English.
This is, to my way of thinking, a shocking state of affairs. Here we are, entering or in the twenty-first century (depending on the way you count years) and more and more of New Zealand's youth are leaving school with no ability to hold up their end of a written communication. I don't know whether this is the case internationally or not.
The silly thing is that for years New Zealand was held up as a shining example of a literacy education system. Yet, between my leaving primary (elementary) school and my sister, who is eleven years younger than me, reaching it, something happened which has resulted in the situation today. My sister is bright as a button (she's just completing a PhD), yet my mother and I spent hours and hours teaching her to read the old-fashioned way - using word lists, spelling words out, learning word order, writing repetitively and all the other "obsolete" approaches to teaching reading and writing. She's only just forgiven me, some thirty years on. And she wasn't alone. A friend of mine who is a high school history teacher told me ten years ago that she and her colleagues actually have to teach kids to read before they can teach their subject sensibly.
For several years I was involved in the local adult literacy programme, teaching adults who had slipped through the educational cracks to read and write. Most of them were ashamed of their lack of literacy and some went to extraordinary lengths to disguise why they were visiting me or why I was visiting them. One woman used to hint to her neighbours that we were having an affair! And most of them picked it up pretty quickly, again using the old-fashioned methods, the "cat sat on the mat" approach rather than "it's okay if you spell it 'kyt', dear, because everyone will know what you mean."
The active members of this list (with the notable exception of Jazz) appear to be mainly "older" people, and I gather that most, if not all, have tertiary qualifications. No insults intended, but most of us also seem to be of "mature" years. There are about 1740 members on the list worldwide. It's not hard to find. Given that there are supposed to be over 70 million people with access to the Internet, 1740 seems a paltry number.
What do others think about this - the whys and wherefores?
And what does everyone think we can do about it?
OP
