The Bush Administration apart, what is the greatest threat to this country? China? Militant Islam? Or is it closer to home?

I was prompted to ask that question, yet again (I study this stuff) after reading a truly elegant essay by Michael Skube in today’s Washington Post – today being August 20 2006 and Mr. Skube being a lecturer at Elon University.

Titled: Writing Off Reading, here is an extract:

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The DaVinci Code" was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)

You may be surprised -- and dismayed -- by some of the words on my list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear to students who had graduated

from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.

"Satire," as in a literary form.

"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.

"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one of the country's better state universities wrote a paper in which she referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's novel."

The answer to the question “The Bush Administration apart, what is the greatest threat to this country? China? Militant Islam? Or is it closer to home?” would seem to be America’s truly awful educational system.

It isn’t just bad. It is now spiraling downwards as academic year after academic year of poorly educated Americans in turn infect the next generation with low and declining educational standards to the point where there is no understanding of what world class standards should be.

In fact our general level of education is now so low – compared to other developed nations and many other developing ones – that our collective ignorance is now metastising into a core weakness in our national immune system. It is becoming a threat to our standard of living, our prospects for the future and, without question, to our National Security.

Ironically, many Americans are aware that there are serious problems with the K-12 educational system but they rationalize this knowledge by convincing themselves that, at least, their children are going to a good local school and, anyway, American educational standards at college and university level are the best in the world.

Read Michael Stube’s essay and weep. The rot is just as deep in the Third Level sector.

It just costs more to acquire.