http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150663,00.html


Interesting article, thanks for the link... definitely gets
the point across about the health issues... but was this
covered on their TV news? Or does this further prove my
point that the best info is to be had by *reading*?


"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote
Funny you should mention this Doug. The other day, I was commenting on
an image on a photography group I have frequented for a long time and
used some imagery from mythology, in particular Campbell's "Thousand
Faces" to make my point. Nobody knew the reference or ever understood
it for that matter.

I have noticed more and more that the broad based reading you would
think "artists" would be doing isn't being done and that if you make a
literary reference, it's usually met with stone silence - unless the
reader is around my age (60 +/-).


Very few people read nonfiction for pleasure, and the
fiction audience gets smaller & smaller every year in this
country.

I am shocked at the number of people I meet in the
university environment who read as little as possible, and
that only within a very narrow range of interest (within
their field of course). I met a far higher percentage of
avid readers in the military.

I have often thought that one reason that we have the political
problems we have is that not enough people are well read enough or
spend their time reading that which is understandable to them, rather
than stretching their imaginations and intellects to at least try and
attain another level of enlightenment.


Sure. And IMHO the internet makes it worse... this newsgroup
is an example... instead of sampling a wide range of
material and digging further for interesting details, people
tend to form little clusters of self-reinforcing interest
groups.

Doug Kanter wrote:
I wonder if what you're talking about has been caused, in part, by the
internet, and the ease of plagiarising such things as written material for
college assignments.

Two years ago, a friend of mine taught a college course in research methods
at SUNY Binghamton. The school apparently has a system in place for spotting
plagiarized writing by the students, who must submit their work as computer
documents. My friend found that 5 out of 20 of the seniors in the course had
swiped some or all of their writing off the web. And, their bibliographies
listed books which did not exist in the school's library. Sort of
interesting, considering it was a course in research methods.

To make matters worse, a few of the students' work was unintelligible - the
kids could not write to save their lives. How they got past 15-20 professors
in years 1 through 3 was a complete mystery.

Anyway, some of these people never cracked a book.



Partly because I was an older student (returning vet) and
partly because I pushed pretty hard, in college I spent a
lot of time in grad courses & hanging out with grad
students. For a couple semesters I found myself as an aide
and responsible for helping to grade undergrad papers... at
least half of those "essay questions" were answered with
incomplete sentences, gobbledygook sprinkled with keywords
plucked from the textbook. It was appalling and I was told
many times to not grade so harshly! After a while, I felt
that the guys who wrote long-winded evasive paragraphs about
very very little were at least deserving a C for being able
to write coherently.

When I say that the average reading level in the US is at
the 5th grade, I'm including college... unfortunately.

Regards
Doug King