You didn’t ask me, but as I’m the one who raised the issue:
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I don’t see anything of Rilch’s posts as supporting social promotion;
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I think it’s an awful idea. What you end up with is students who haven’t learned much of anything and are often convinced (sometimes this is more based in reality than at other times) that they’re just stupid. I had one student in her late 40s or perhaps mid 50s - I never asked - who had basically been told by members of her high school administration (this was back a few decades ago) that she was wasting her time in school and should basically just drop out and seek menial labor work. Some judge of talent he was; I ended up teaching her more in a few months than she learned in several years of high school (I use that term in the sense that she was physically in the building at the time).
But there isn’t necessarily any connection between social promotion and not being able to properly differentiate between it’s and its. It’s more a matter of not having those differences drilled early-on, and there are a lot of people, even here, who routinely make such errors. It’s just so often a waste of a post (not to mention the fact that it often isn’t appreciated by the original poster or passers-by) to say something like “You shouldn’t have used a comma there” or “than, not then” or remark on any number of other not-uncommon errors. What happens is that uncorrected mistakes then tend to build in their promulgator the idea that the particular mistake is in fact a perfectly legitimate way to write.
(Ain’t no capital letters in my screen name, either. 's no big thing, though.)
