Even More Detached From Reality Than We Thought

After our last post, this appeared in the UK's Daily Mail:

Bosses say graduates can't cope with office life:

Third of companies are concerned about young people's attitude to work

For the full measure of this concern, though, consider the following:

There are also worries about the literacy and numeracy skills of young employees, with firms admitting they have had to run classes for recruits.

So that there's no mistaking what's being said here: these people lack writing and math skills. As a result, here's what some companies are doing:

Faced with a skills shortage, two in five businesses (41 per cent) have been forced to do remedial training for school or college leavers.

Companies are now teaching their employees to write and do simple math - even to read! What were these people doing in school all those years?

A survey of companies concludes the following:

‘Personal attitudes, aptitude, readiness to learn, effective communication skills and a sufficient capacity to cope with numerical data are the key enablers. It is critically important that all young people are helped to develop as fully as possible in these areas.’

Let's be clear about this. What's apparently happened is that the these people haven't learned the three basic skills that we universally taught, once upon a time: Reading, Riting', and 'Rithmatic - or "The Three Rs" as we used to say. In addition note the phrase "reading to learn": These people have not been taught how to study and learn.

While the article refers to the UK, I've been exposed to this right here in the good old U.S.A. I was asked to supervise a recent hire who arrived with a decent resume and solid work experience. She bore herself well, and her verbal presentation skills were effective. But she couldn't write a lick. When asked to present an idea in a simple email, she was completely incoherent. She literally couldn't string sentences together to complete a thought. Her punctuation was a disaster. She mixed up periods and commas. (And I'm not sure that, if asked, she would have known what a "semi-colon" looked like, never mind how to use it.) The idea of a "paragraph" expressing a single thought was completely foreign to her. And so I had to do one-on- one "remedial training" (although I didn't think of it as such at the time) in order to prevent her from embarrassing herself or our team.

I found this shocking when it first occurred. Subsequently, I discovered it wasn't all that uncommon. For example, apparently, it's normal procedure to offer remedial writing instruction to students who, after being accepted into a college or university, can't write down their thoughts coherently - something any grammar school child could do when I attended school.

Of course, anyone who's had children in public (and many, if not most, private) schools shouldn't be surprised at any of this. Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on education (public and private), our children graduate without anything that would have passed for an "education" in the past. That's concerning enough.

Even more concerning, though is the fact that people "can't cope with office life." And this "can't cope" syndrome extends beyond office life. We now run across young people - and not so young people - who basically can't cop with life - period. That is, unless you consider "living" spending hours on Facebook, walking about staring at and texting on their phones.

And you wonder (if you did) at the recent response to Donald Trump's election? Maybe that could serve as a "wake up" call. If it doesn't maybe you can ask yourself: Can a society survive, never mind thrive when it's children grow up basically uneducated, lacking practical skills along with the ability (or desire) to put in a full day's work?

Add this to our last post about young people being detached from reality, and you may find an answer. If you think this interpretation of the facts is mistaken or exaggerating the problem, I'm all ears.