Gregory Kane looks at college students who don't write decent English. I have seen all the errors he cites from a school newspaper as his evidence. Sigh.

But when students don't know the difference between affects and effects and use the plural form of nouns where the possessive form should be (courts and groups instead of court's and group's), you have to wonder what's going on in high school English classes.

These errors were from a student newspaper at a good college. We can assume the school has good students. This isn't the nitwit brigade making these mistakes.

Public school teachers -- and some who have quit to teach in private schools -- have said the folks running things have ordered them not to teach basics. Thus we have boo-boos like the ones above, and we have students graduating high school without the slightest notion of how to multiply 8 by 9.

Add to this state of affairs the "reformers" who rail against "rote memorization," and you can imagine why we're in this mess. But we baby boomers know that rote memorization led to our knowledge of basic arithmetic facts, as well as passages of William Shakespeare and other classic literary works that remain with us.