The answer is simple, in the past academics were educated by those that had life experience in their chosen fields. Now the academics are people who have only ever been to school, so they have no understanding of reality. This can be seen in the collapse of literacy within the education system, go into a shop and ask the young well educated sale person to calculate a price for your items without using either a calculator or cash register. 99% can't do it and when they write, their writing is virtually unreadable. The problem with our education system is that it is operated by those who have only ever been to school so their knowledge is based purely on illusion. It is the same with people they call specialists, or leaders in their field. They learn more and more about less and less until tney know a lot about nothing and that can be seen by the collapse of every institution, government enterprise and business that is controlled by academics, (read beaurucrats). These people live in a fantasy world of semantic garbage as can be seen by how they write, they write a lot but say nothing, except convuluted sematic stupidity. Just like their masters, the politicians who are totally incompetent. Until we can actualyy change the education system so that it puts out people with substance, then we will continue to go down the drain.
The alchemist

Alchemist, please spare us! There isn't time enough to read uninformed wild assertions. If you must write, please give us some evidence-based thought, or, failing that, a reasoned argument.

Thank you frankgol, you prove my point. As to my comments being wild and uniformed, I accept the reality of the world not the fantasty illusion that you probably represent. To use one or two expensive and unrealistic methods of energy production that hail from the past is irresponsibly stupid. Firstly, small scale solar, wind, wave and tide energy utilised in many locations and controlled by local communities would go a long way to solving the problems. If we put solar and wind systems on every house in rural australia along with tide generators for those in coastal areas, we would cut out power failure and be able to export power to the cities. Of course in some instances you would need grid or high energy generators, but by the people providing the power freely, would drive down the cost to industry and commerce, increasing profits, good economics I would say. It is just a matter of slowly spreading this throughout the country. Sorry, you don't want answers, like to keep your head in the ground and bum stuck firmly in the past. Nuclear power is yesterdays technology, as is coal and gas generation, even large scale hydro is old hat and very inefficient when you look at the long term effects it has on the environment and water supplies, a quickly disappearing commodity. You are right, we don't have time for uninformed or wild assertions. Have I missed something, don't wild and uniformed assertions relate to using technologies that have been proven to be uneconomic, polluting and evironmentally unsound. I would believe that those who advocate the use of these forms of technologies are actuallty the unimformed amongst us. Look at the national grid, a debacle of huge proportions, higher charges, more blackcouts collapsing infrastructure. That is informed reality, yours is sematic whaffle. McConvill is right that intelectualism is on the decline and mediocrity is the norm in universities. When you have those that have only ever really been to school, teaching others about life and the sciences, you are bound to get less that mediocrity.
The alchemist

As a university graduate and past examiner of medical students, I have observed a gradual decline in standards and a loss of intellectual rigour in our society. As it showed on the 4 Corners program last night, students are passed when they fail because of political, economic and legal restraints on examiners and I have seen this with medical students. This is corruption at its worst.We are going down the intellectual drain and our international reputation too. The "hard" subjects are dummed down. In Classics subjects such as Ancient Greek, Latin (of which I did both) are now reduced to reading the Classics in English and doing a bit of Ancient History. Our PhD's have become a joke (I have one from the Uni of Melbourne in Medicine). I know one man who did it in long division. Medicine has also been dummed down and clinical (bedside) teaching in decline.
A CEO of a large US company said to me that the most effective employees including CEO's were those who had excelled in the liberal Arts and not specialised too early eg in IT or business. Uninversities are in name only. Most are TAFE's. These people could adapt to work place changes even in the middle age and did not become redundant. They were literate, capable of critical thought and creative. Many university students are not even literate in English to a unversity standard unlike our European counterparts who are multi-lingual. This leads to a limited paradigm of life. I frequently observed medical students who could not write a report without numerous spelling and grammatical errors.
I observe an appalling conservatism,the death of intellectual tradition in medicine and a slavish conformity which is quite disturbing and a dirth of negative research studies. We risk going to sleep intellectually as a people.
May I recommend Steve Fuller's The Intellectual. The postive power of negative thinking. Icon Books, 2005.($24.95)(184 pages).
The Liberal Arts, the Classics, philosophy etc are the intellectual repositories of civilisation. Intellectual rigor is rigorous. There is no royal road to learning.

If you are going to bemoan the "numerous spelling and grammatical errors" of university graduates, Odysseus, you might be more convincing if your own spelling and grammar were stronger.

You give us 'rigour' in your second line but 'rigor' in your second last line. You give us 'dirth' when you should have given us 'dearth'. And for someone who claims a PhD from Melbourne University, you surprise us with 'uninversities'. You give us no fewer than three inappropriate apostrophes (PhD's, CEO's and TAFE's). Your sentence structure is wobbly at times too.

Perhaps I missed your ironical intent: you were deliberately writing badly to demonstrate your very point about how widespread illiteracy has become.

Two write, Fwankgo. Phanks a lot. You spotted my guile.

My dog who (she thinks she is human and hence the "who") is an Italian greyhound and who barks in Italian, sits on my lap and now does the typing but can't use spell check yet. I apologise on her behalf...woof,woof.

I, Odysseus, still hab twuble with the language of the Anglosaxons as I speak in Homeric Greek and still prefer wine-dark seas, grey-eyed goddesses and I dwink out of a gold goblet.

I like repartee about content not trivia.

No spell check was used here....una grande woofa...woofa...!!

Ciaou,

Pawprint signature...or is it pore??print...off to the Thesaurus.