Tracking the decline …

… Why I Quit Teaching. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words.  I could not help thinking of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, in which the children of the planet are all translated into some otherworldly dimension.  I titled one of my books about our educational debacle The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods, based on an initially mysterious phrase in a student's essay by which, as I discovered after long consultation, he meant to say "the total epidemic of psychopaths."  (This is a true story.)