Reply #233: No, what is wrong is...

[LeahMira]

Yes, I have no doubt that you, "give a rat's fat ass about whether or not disagree with most of the American public." And that, in a nutshell, is much of what is wrong with education.

... that for some reason the American public got into its collective head that there is something wrong with public education. If the public schools rarely or never turned out students who go on to achieve, either in college or in work, then they might have a point. The fact is that 67% of high school graduates go to college, at least for some time. Granted, the unemployment rate is a problem now, but it's certainly below 10% which means that 90%+ of the people are working. The rest can't find jobs, but if the jobs existed they would fill them.

What happened is that some religious folks decided they didn't like public schools teaching their children about evolution or they didn't like their children learning to respect those who are in some way different from themselves. Those folks chose to talk down the schools and disrespect the teachers... in front of their children as well as in the public realm. Pretty soon, a lot of people started blaming the schools, with their alleged "frills," for their own children's shortcomings, and the children began to blame the teachers because their parents had so little respect for teachers.

There's a right wing movement that wants nothing more than to destroy public schools in an effort to dummy down the population to its own dummy level. The religious want to limit what their children learn, especially insofar as what the children learn makes them able to challenge some of their parents' beliefs. Then, there are corporations who would like nothing better than a large group of uncritical, obedient individuals in the workforce... people who just can't quite grasp why they are getting poorer and poorer while a few others seem to be getting richer and richer.

Americans are blaming the wrong culprits and just because a majority of them are making that mistake doesn't make them right.