Kids who write

Ask a college English teacher and she’ll tell you: Today’s kids don’t read and they can’t write. They may be whizzes with their smartphones, but they can’t string two sentences together.

Well, that may be the case for many of them, but—as our College Essay Contest reminds us every year at this time—some kids write brilliantly. That’s certainly true of our contest winners, whose powerful and touching personal essays in this issue offer revealing insights into the often difficult and challenging lives of 10 young people who are about to begin college.

As someone who is new to Sacramento, I was struck by the remarkable diversity of the essayists. They seem to come from around the globe, practice all religions, belong to all races—and yet are united in their identity as Americans. If anyone gives the lie to the anti-immigrant crowd, these beautiful young people do.

But I also couldn’t help noticing that nine of the top 10 winners, as selected in a blind judging, were girls. It’s understood that girls do better in the literary arts, and in high school generally, than boys do. That’s part of the reason why they outnumber men in college; in the 2009-10 academic year, women earned 57.4 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.

Recent studies report that the “reading gap” between boys and girls is narrowing, which is good. Just as educators are working on getting girls interested in STEM classes, they should be putting extra energy into getting boys hooked on reading and writing. As every teacher knows, there is no more valuable skill—smartphones be damned—than being able to write well.