AI-Written Stereophile Articles

The decline in writing skills is a multi-decade phenomenon.  I was on the staff of an Army school in the 1980s; our students were mostly Army officers with advanced degrees from civilian colleges and universities.  I saw the same problem a few years later with slightly more senior Reserve Component officers, some of whom worked in institutions of higher learning. In both cases, some of them wrote superbly, but a good number had real problems in expressing ideas in a concise, direct, and meaningful manner.  I think the problem is that, to a troubling degree, our education system has shifted away from foundational skills that leave students less capable of clear expression, especially with the written word, and as these younger people enter the work force in increasing numbers, the problem will become even more evident.  Just my two-bits worth … inflation, you know!

I attended a University of California campus (UC Davis, formerly the University Farm) in the 1960s.  All incoming freshmen had to take a Subject A English exam; if you failed the exam, you had to take a 3-hour one-semester course in remedial English that earned zero graduation credits for an additional fee.  If I recall correctly, about 35% of the freshmen—the top 10% of California high school graduates—failed the exam.  Again, If I recall correctly, by the 1980s the failure rate was over 50%, and I read reports that they eventually dropped the requirement.  This would indicate a failure in our elementary and secondary education system, but serious problems exist in higher education, as well.  I have read in a reputable source that at one of the Ivy League Universities, you can earn a BA in History without taking any American History.  When I was a freshman, all students in the College of Letters and Sciences had to take History 17A&B, two semesters of American History.  My suspicion is that as colleges and universities have added a wide range of new and at times narrowly-defined degrees in functional fields, they have jettisoned many of the basics.  

Finally, after receiving my BA in History, I earned my MA in Political Science.  When I started those graduate courses, I was very concerned that I did not know all the Poli Sci jargon, but I quickly found out that the younger students did not know their history, one student at the school even insisting that the U.S. started the Korean War in 1950 by attacking North Korea, an absurd position even before we learned from Soviet archives that Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the go-ahead to attack the South.  One of my best professors taught a course on revolution and change in the 20th century, an excellent examination of the Bolshevik, Italian Fascist, and Nazi seizures of power; by the 1980s, however, he wrote me that the most of the students just wanted to know “how to make bombs.”
 

Ignorance, and mindless activism in many cases, is bliss … at least to some.