a cheery recent graduate offered to cook my daughter and I a meal

An English professor wrote this? That's sad.

I don't think the core of her advice is necessarily bad--knowing how to cook can save a recent college grad a small fortune--but if students at a "top-notch liberal-arts college" need to spend between $300 and $1,000 per credit hour to close the skill gap with their peers who already know how to boil pasta and take out the trash, then God help them.

At the same time, her suggestion that English profs should find ways to work home-ec lessons into students' assignments is one of the funniest examples of academic mission creep to come along in a while.

Well, copy editing ain't what it used to be, so maybe the error isn't the writer's. Harping on the occasional mistake strikes me as peevish (and often an exercise in overgeneralization). What's striking is not that an English prof should make an occasional mistake as that so many people should make such a big deal out of it. Such "peevology," as they call it over at Language Log, deserves further study.

As for Werner's essay itself, a really ruthless editor might have pared it down to this:

"Kids nowadays."

Yeah, it's a little funny to be complaining about the inadquacies of the help using improper English, especially when one is an English professor, but I think her message is about something more important than the need to improve cooking skills...I read her as saying that many students have failed to develop the levels of planning and practical thinking that one would expect of, say, an Army corporal, a skilled worker in a factory, a traditional housewife, or a small farmer.

Agreed about the necessity of life skills--from being able to plan, to read a map, to problem solve, to cook. I learned to cook in college, by the way, as I did not have the money to eat out or buy prepared foods. Necessity is the mother of invention--and was the means of my learning to make everything from chicken stew to homemade bread. Cooking became--and remains--one of the great pleasures of my life.

Still, I think the essay gets at its insights in such a convoluted, loaded, and problematic way that its value is not what it could be.

Let's see, she's a prof at a "top notch liberal arts college" full of students from the sort of families that, as she does, employ domestic help for such daily, trivial tasks as, oh, I don't know, cooking dinner, and is surprised they don't know how to cook? How about her kids, raised with domestic help, do they cook?

I was raised as the oldest of six children, in a 1,200 square foot house, by an Irish mother that banned all of us from the kitchen when cooking was happening. Yet I am now a 50-ish, accomplished cook that learned through the sort of experience, aided by a passion for good food, of which Erin speaks.

Am I allowed to be irritated by this latest issue of my-generation-is-better-than-yours?

I see two problems: unwillingness to take risks, and failure to take responsibility. These both may be related to immaturity.

You can't cook, sew, or do much of anything else of a physical nature if you can't handle something not turning out right. I remember when my kid was growing up, she'd have some craft project she'd come up with to work on, and my husband would want to help her with it. I used to tell him to leave her alone unless she asked for help - to do whatever it was with perfect technique was much less important than for her to go through the process of figuring it out, make her own mistakes, and either fix them or start over. Not reading a map - that could also be a function of not wanting to take risks. I get lost from time to time, even though I've been in my current spot for two years, because I try to find new ways of getting where I'm going. I'll get there eventually, and see some interesting stuff I hadn't thought of. My husband gets all uptight if he doesn't know EXACTLY where he is at all times.

Not taking out the recycle, not noticing the cat abscess - that's immaturity right there.

I don't know how to fix these things. I do think it's unattractive to complain in a published article, as the writer has done, and "offered to cook my daughter and I a meal" is inexplicable unless a copy editor "fixed" the grammar.

Isn't the truly weird issue at hand here the fact that so many students rely on domestic labor money from their professors? And that professors think it's all right to have students in their homes cooking, cleaning, etc.?

Laura..Tom Wolfe noted that a high proportion of the engineers who made America's space program possible were originally farm boys, and suggested that the farm-life experience develops practical creativity. I suspect that here are many transferable skills and meta-skills that are developed in doing work that has a physical component, or at least rovides some kind of inherent feedback.

Joanne Jacobs recently had an item from a teacher whose students refuse to admit that there could be anything more than "opinion" involved in their use of words (one insisted that "churlish" was valid as a term of praise)...I suspect that people who have had to fix tractors, or even write computer programs, would be less inclined to take this attitude.

LB...there may be more than one "truly weird issue" involved here. I don't think there is anything wrong with professors hiring students, so long as they don't use their position power to hire them at below-market rates.

"Isn't the truly weird issue at hand here the fact that so many students rely on domestic labor money from their professors? And that professors think it's all right to have students in their homes cooking, cleaning, etc.?"

YES. I would not hire a student for something like that. It would feel too much like a 'conflict of interest' - what if they are in your class, receive a poor grade, and claim it is because they didn't wash your car just the way you wanted it done?

Though I do agree, being risk-averse may be a factor in not knowing how to cook, needing super-explicit instructions to be able to do anything, etc. Though I think also lack of cultural transmission is a factor: kids who spend the afternoons at soccer practice while mom or dad is home cooking dinner (or, more likely, ordering take-out) are not likely to be as inclined to learn to cook later in life.

Besides - If I'm called upon to teach my college students "life lessons" like how to change a catbox or balance a checkbook, when am I going to fit in the stuff I'm actually being paid to teach them? Do we need some kind of other post-secondary education in "how to be hygienic and not poison yourself?" I hope not.