My mother-in-law, Mary Jayne Shields, died in 2002 at the age of 91. In 1928, she earned a high-school diploma. She didn’t go to college, but instead got a job in an Ohio phone company that she held for about 10 years. She then married and took 10 years off from work, moving to Los Angeles and raising a couple of kids. When her oldest was 13 — old enough to baby-sit his little sister when he got home from school — she began a job as a clerk/typist in the Los Angeles County school system. By the time she retired, 20 years later, she had worked her way up to Assistant Registrar of L.A. City College.

My mother-in-law graduated from Glenville High School, a public school in Cleveland, at a time when only about a third of Americans her age finished high school. That’s about the same proportion of adult Americans today who hold a bachelor’s degree.

While she was alive, my mother-in-law corresponded regularly with my husband and me (she lived in San Diego, we lived in New York). She wrote in a smooth cursive script and composed letters with impeccable structure, composition, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Experts tell us that the bad writing of college students today comes from not enough reading and too many hours of TV and the Internet. But I keep thinking about how it came about that someone like Mary Jayne Shields, a woman who read books but was by no means a voracious reader, who came from an ordinary, lower middle-class family whose love for culture began and ended with movies, ended up such a fine writer.

Like thousands of others of her generation, my mother-in-law benefited from the great high-school movement that swept across the Midwest, beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1940s. These were decades when states like Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio built and supported public high schools as a matter of pride.

In Mary Jayne Shields’s day, most students learned some version of the Palmer method of penmanship. By the time they entered high school, students were expected to use a clear cursive writing in their expository essays — many of them done in class. Hours of high-school English classes were dedicated to diagramming sentences, mastering the difference between the nominative and objective cases, learning how to avoid dangling participial phrases, and memorizing lists of prepositions.

By the time my daughter entered kindergarten in 1988, there had been several revolutions in writing pedagogy that reached down to the youngest students. Handwriting had become irrelevant; cursive writing, in particular, had been put out to pasture. After all, it was the new new age of the computer keyboard — which replaced the electric typewriter’s keyboard, which had replaced the manual typewriter’s QWERTY. In kindergarten, my daughter and her friends learned what was called “inventive writing” — a nearly illegible, scrawled block print in which children used made-up spelling and ground-up grammar to “write books.” The idea was that if children were allowed to express their ideas without being shackled by the formalities of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, later on they’d end up more competent and “creative” writers than the Mary Jayne Shieldses of the world. When my daughter went to high school, like most of her friends, she composed all her essays on the computer. And her English classes touched only occasionally on the specifics of grammar.

I can’t help but wonder, as I watch colleagues pulling out their hair over the mucky writing of their college students, whether we didn’t lose something important when we abandoned the kind of education Mary Jayne Shields enjoyed. Even though she experienced an admittedly slower, duller, more metronomic approach to learning than many high-school students are subjected to now, that ancient pedagogy served her quite well. Perhaps it even explains why she could write beautifully, whereas so many of our college students can barely write at all.