Me too.
But a couple things. I'm not after a hierarchy but allowing for a multiplicity. Joanna's insurance agents: Probably there's one someplace who reads Virgil in the original for light entertainment. It's a varied world. But there are also undoubtedly thousands of them who write e-mails but for whom "English" classes in high school were a torment -- and who just might even be better writers if they had never had it forced on them. We just don't know -- and yet, not knowing, we spontaneously equate ability to write with 'intelligence' (which doesn't exist) and not being able to write with lack of 'intelligence.' A very low 'level' of literacy is sufficient for e-mails and business memos.
A few years ago at a class reunion I sat at a table with a woman I had not known in high school and discovered that she had been close friend of a Florence, a girl who had been one of the 'brighter' students in the rural elementary school I attended. She had her year book with her, and in it Florence had written something to the effect that she couldn't make sense of English classes as her friend could. Now "English" classes must be pretty fucking horrible for some to make them the subject of a scribble in a friend's yearbook. For four years it would seem, five days a week, this young lady had been forced to confront the fact that she was not as bright as many were. (About 6 years after graduation she was killed in an auto accident while pregnant with her second child.) I don't think 'highly literate' people realize what can be the pain of being judged by others on the basis of 'illiterate' writing. And it seems also that 'the literate' cannot (however hard they try) help but see lack of literacy as lack of 'intelligence.' I think if you search the archives you would find some posts from someone saying (in effect) leftists ought to read Westbrook Pegler to see how to write; at least in the early history of this least there was a steady drumbeat of whines that leftists wrote badly. All those posts are pretty fucking offensive in their implication that if someone wrote badly it was because he or she was just too lazy to learn better. The stultifying arrogance of the 'literate' knows no limits.
(Incidentally, in these posts I have continually to resist the temptation of offering 'solutions' -- and I believe that so far no one has committed the stupidity of asking me what 'we' should do about it. I will flame the first person to do so.)
For over a century learning to write well (not just to write business memos or fill out a form) has been a central 'aim' of American 'education,' and now working people are going to be fired if some tests don't show that their students indeed have learned to "write well." But I know no one who wrote badly before taking a (compulsory) English Class and wrote well afterwards. Attempts to teach writing have been a total failure for over a century. At the University of Illinois back in the ''50s and '60s Freshman Comp was almost officially made the flunk-out course: its teachers were supposed to help correct bad judgment on the part of Admissions. Writing was merely a thread students were supposed to balance on. If they fell off, too bad. (Has someone read Book I of Gulliver recently enough so they can describe that section?)
Do you want democracy? Then you had better start working on including people who write badly. Perhaps in some ideal future state everyone will write wonderful essays on the Paradiso & Clarissa. Not now. Are we going to include them in our democratic debates or exile them to the sidelines?
Carrol