Once again I’ll say, I’m perfectly fine with the death of the essay as viable school homework.

In my experience, teachers graded only on grammar and formatting. Teaching - and more to the point, grading - effective writing skills is harder than nitpicking punctuation, spelling and font choices, so guess what happens more often?

You want school to mean anything, you’re going to have to switch to verbal or demonstrable skills instead of paperwork. Which society probably needs to do anyway.