The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

A long lament from Exercises in Unreality: The Decline in Teaching Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen. The charge is well known - universities have abandoned their dedication to the sharing and transmission of the knowledge and culture which have brought the world such widespread freedom and prosperity in favor of cognitively constipated ideologies with a track record of uniform failure.

Lots of good points but I don't incline towards lamentation. But this paragraph stood out.

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, “Your verb here does not agree with your subject.” That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for “formal” writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.