Jinn

There was an interesting Straight Dope today that addressed the myth that US Education (and particularly vocabulary) was on a steady decline, like claimed above:

"A speaker at a recent school board meeting claimed the vocabulary of the average American grade school student was 25,000 words in 1945 and about 10,000 today. This is pretty disturbing if true. What do you think?"

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070907.html

As usual, it's misconstrued statistics that lead to the perception of a drastic decrease, rather than reality.

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