What is the purpose of public education? Is it only to employ teachers? If I was were an English teacher with hopes to achieve certain goals with my class, I would scrap those goals if my kids couldn’t write. See another sad example: failure to communicate. The writer observes, “Many of the students whose work I correct are smart, motivated, and quick to incorporate suggestions. But they have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place.”