"DSK" wrote in message
...
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


What's worse is that these people have the blessings of the commander in
chief, who has made it seem "elite" to be well versed in our native
language.