Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.

Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills. - CNN.com
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From the article -
"That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map."

That doesn't do a great deal of good if they haven't a clue if they have enough gas to get there.

If you have children, and don't like this news, do something about it. Don't depend on a school district to educate your children if you won't do your share at home. Teachers today already spend too much time with discipline problems and filling out paperwork, so doen't add to their burden with another program designed to help. They don't help. If your child enters kindergarten or first grade lacking the very basics, who is at fault? It really does start that early. Children whose parents didn't start their education at home, before kindergarten started, will spend the first two years trying to catch up with the children whose parents did take that time. Guess what? In almost every case, they never catch up. That means that in every class they are in, the teacher must spend time catching that child up to where he/she should be. Guess who suffers from that loss of time? The children whose parents started them off right. This goes on year after year,grade after grade, and in the end, we all suffer. We all get kids graduating from high school who can't understand the issues at election time. We get children who graduate from college who can do moderately challenging tasks such as identifying a location on a map. Whose fault is that? Who started them down that road?