Bad Books

As an experienced editor, I'm not at all surprised by what has happened in Mexico with thousands of grade-school textbooks full of errors, grammatical and otherwise. The decline in education standards all over the world has been going on for a long time, so generation after generation has gone on to graduate without proficiency in the basic subjects. People pay very little attention to grammar, regarding it as unimportant. This mindset is responsible for the sloppy way in which people talk and write. So, it's more than just carelessness by those who write and publish these books. It's ignorance.

And it's going to take a long time to really do something about it.

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