Add to that the fact of multiplechoice examination papers which toady to our natural desire to avoid work. All the pupil need do is put an X in the appropriate square. He avoids all intellectual effort involved in marshalling his thoughts and expressing them coherently. When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean. We are in danger of falling into the terrible plight of having a high technology unsupported by people who can discuss it or operate it understandingly a sophisticated savagery.
Language goes deeper than technical literacy.
It is not only being able to read newspapers. It has to do with forming us as human beings, with the qualities of civilization. Without discipline, language declines flabby permissiveness, into formlessness and mindlessness. It deteriorates into what the late James Thurber called Our oral culture of pure babble. To be a good writer a person must spend much of his time at a table in the toilsome act of writing.