How about writing instruction before the university?

Rose brings up some interesting points in his article, "The Language of Exclusion." What caught my attention wasn't some philosophical idea, it was a fact about education in America. Certain "skills should be mastered before one enters college and takes on higher-order endeavors. And the place for such instruction-before or after entering college-is the English class. Yes, the skill can be refined, but its fundamental development is over, completed via a series of elementary and secondary school courses and perhaps one or two college courses..." (347). I don't have any figures on student performance from in the public school systems, but I can't resist to place some of the blame on teachers. Now I don't mean to insult my classmates who teach. You guys are great students and I'm sure you take your jobs seriously. I'm talking about the teachers that pass students along without having instilled a greater awareness of literacy. What a "remedial class" is can be ambiguous, at Rose notes that different universities have their own criteria. But if students have to take a class at the university level on fundamental aspects of writing that just have to be learned, I think that's unfair to students who are ready to take classes for their major, and to the professors who spent the better part of their twenties in school working on a doctorate. I think teaching literacy to generations of students is a collective effort, not the sole responsibility of one particular segment of the educational system. For that matter, parents and need to take more responsibility over their child's/children's literacy. Not all parents are capable of assisting their kids in school subjects, but the least they can do is make sure they spend time doing homework.

Having said all this, I don't think all forms of literacy can be taught in middle school or high school, as a certain level of cognition has to be reached before students broach particular concepts imperative to intellectual growth. I do, to some degree, understand the need for "remedial classes" at universities, as writing is "central to the shaping and directing of certain modes of cognition, is integrally involved in learning, is a means of defining the self and defining reality, is a means of representing and contextualizing information" (348). I could only imagine how many people in America would be impeded from going to college because of a perceived lack of literacy.