and then

Yes, it is completely wrong that our country is one of the most illiterate. It doesn't surprise me though. When I was in school (jr. high & high school, for instance), ALL of our teachers would take points off of ANY paper turned in if it contained spelling errors or gross grammatical errors. I work at a university police department and I see a great many of our students who seem to be incapable of writing a moderately correct sentence. We'll get hand-written statements from them that are just strings of words as there is no punctuation or use of capital letters. Why? I've actually talked about this to a lot of our students (who work for us) ... it seems that none of our schools actually teach spelling and grammar any longer. At least it appears that none of the teachers in this country will take off points for those errors - which leads to the students not caring whether they can spell correctly or not.

I'm no expert when it comes to writing, but most of the time I can at least make myself understood. When did we stop requiring our children to read and write correctly?