The solution is simple and Queensland teachers are working at it now.

Pay teachers more. Pay a hell of a lot more.

Every time a beat-up happens, every time the brainless media spouts yet another 'aint it awful' story the response is 'we'll put THAT in the curriculum'. With overcrowded curriculum and overseen by political realities where everyone's an expert because they went to school, the teaching profession is the punching bag for every wannabee perfectionist.

Give it up, boys and girls. If you want to belt teachers have a shot at parents first. The raw material is seriously less than perfect. The little darlings are desperately rarely pocket Einsteins. Maligning teachers only serves to underscore your simplistic notion that parents have nothing to do with their children's learning.

If teaching was as easy as pedantic grammar and precise English, everyone would be doing it.

Whilst I can see that non school issues may affect literacy the same cannot conceivably be said in respect of Mathematics. The brute fact is that, as Masters has stated, Mathematically our students have regressed by about 2 years learning in the last decade or so. That is exactly what I see every day whilst tutoring - i.e. I have to use old Year 8 and 9 books whilst I am tutoring Year 11/12 students. Every adjectival day it happens. It will happen in an hour or so when my first student turns up.

Re literacy, I have a very smart grandson in Year 10. He has an excellent general knowledge and reads voluminously. However he cannot do 'joined up' writing at all and even his printed letters are hard/impossible to read. Speling iz perthetic. He is, in that sense, functionally illiterate.
Last week, in a letter to our local rag here I referred to the abysmal condition of our childrens education, called it 'State sponsored child abuse' and pleaded, yet again, for Parliament to launch a full blown Inquiry into school education.

I’m sorry Baxter Sin, but I cannot see how paying teachers more will improve the quality of their teaching. The only thing it may do is attract a few more qualified practitioners.
I agree that many parents are shirking their responsibilities and expecting teachers to do far more than teach. Likewise, the Education departments are overloading the curriculum with more and more PC rubbish.
Though, when members of the teaching profession come up with the examples noted by Tim they deserve a touch up.
Over all, I don’t believe the issue is about maligning teachers, but rather the education(lack of)system that has evolved over the last 30 odd years.

I think this article largely recapitulates the basic theme of "Death Sentence", written by Don Watson. A central theme is the transfer of intrinsically unwieldy and irreparable management jargon to mainstream misuse.

Perhaps these errant teachers of english could be issued with a copy of Strunk's classic.

(I too would benefit)

Rustopher.

Many of the irritating errors in English grammar and spelling creep in slowly, like DNA mutating.
For example, Clownfish's:
"Ultimately, frustrated with asking for rewrites, the curriculum manager and myself have simply taken it upon ourselves to rewrite these activities ourselves."

The use of the personal pronoun "myself" as the Subject (or nominative as it used to be called) in this sentence is incorrect. Take out the shared Subject "the curriculum manager and" in that sentence and the remaining Subject should stand. It does not, as we would never say "myself has simply taken it..etc".

It should read "...the curriculum manager and I have simply...".

This mistake is now quite common and will become "common usage". Call it evolution, but it stems from an incomplete understanding of English sentence structure.

Hooray for the rexationarys of the world - I know when things are wrong but my grammar is so rusty I can't explain why - so I'm probably part of the creeping problem too! Just last week the PM was wittering on about 'myself' and Malcolm Fraser used to do it to, so its been going on far too long.

I think we need to have a new word: aliteracy. People who know they can't grasp the written language are illiterate, but those who pretend they do, like the English teacher's in the article, are aliterate. The neither know nor care. Like people who are amoral.

There is no point berating parents for not doing their part. Some don't care, some don't have the ability. It is these parents who make it so important that teachers do know their stuff and are able to provide an excellent example to children who have none at home.