I recommend a piece by Dorothy Sayers called "The Lost Tools of Learning"
available at http://capo.org/kmsc/lsttools.html.
Here is an excerpt:
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the
proportion of literacy throughout western Europe is higher than it has ever
been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of
advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and
unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press
and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over
a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product
of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at
disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?
Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably
responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the
average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the
arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the
extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at
committee-meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of
acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that
most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you
ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?
Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and
noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how
often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply
that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which
he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the
amount of slipshod syntax going about? And if so, are you troubled because
it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?
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