I blame the schools myself - I understand that teachers now (in the English state system anyway) are prohibited from correcting grammatical or spelling errors as it's an "infringement of individual expression"!
In the course of the Celtic project, I have ploughed through several hundred CVs personally - a very large proportion of which contained serious spelling and grammatical errors - curiously mainly from native English (well, I'm including - perhaps ill-advisedly - Americans in this category). Do I junk them because someone unable to write decent English is likely to render him/herself open to misinterpretation when it's most important? - or do I overlook that as an 'individualism' (although in some cases they are more like Spoonerisms
)?
Finally, these poor educational standards make it hard for me to find a decent secretary/PA as well. The last one I had - despite having attended Cheltenham Ladies College - couldn't tell an apostrophe from a semicolon; and in any event sprinled punctuation around on an apparently random basis. And she had 'A' level English!
Finally, I'd like to make the point that people for whom English is a second (or third, or fourth) language usually manage to express themselves perfectly clearly - even with spelling and grammatical errors. It's the 'native' English speakers that should know better!
------------------
Happiness is a warm L1011