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Luckily, the world has been going to hell for a long time.
One thing that doesn't seem to change much as the world goes to hell is the way English is taught in the schools. One of my daughters recently graduated from high school. Her English class featured a two-month session on The Scarlet Letter. Great book if you're a college-level English major. Tough going if you're only moderately interested in reading in the first place. If you intended to design a strategy for failure, I suppose it's a reasonable choice.
Why is it taught at this level? My guess is that it's taught because it was taught. The teacher had to read it as a junior, and her teacher had to read it as a junior, and his teacher… As if not much else had been written in the past 160 years.
I agree that there are a million things wrong with parenting, income distribution, the prevalence of electronic gadgetry and so forth. But I would add to the list the apparent inability of schools to make reading seem engaging and relevant to students who are actually living in the year 2011, and not 1935.
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