Clams to be interested in "solving" the educational crisis are mostly being fostered by those who want to replace a generally successful public education system with one which preaches their pet ideologies.

Sorry, but that's just not the case.

From my comment of a few days ago:

From Truthdig, Chris Hedges:

     We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

    There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

A full one third of Americans who graduate from college will never read another book.

My friend, who was once the chief of IBM's personnel division, told me -twenty years ago- that the fastest growing new job description in the company was one in which the worker would just help applicants fill out the job application, because the applicant's literacy skills were inadequate to that task.

Presidential debates illustrate the changes well:
Using a well respected analytical test, the Global Language monitor tracks a clear trend of deterioration from the current presidential debate levels of 6th-7th grade levels, back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, where the candidates at least spoke on about a high school graduate level.

Yes, their Biden-Palin results seem weird. In general, a well-respected outfit.

The facts above are well known among educational researchers. They are, in fact, not a bug, but a feature, in the world of supercapitalist plunder.

In fact, it is the literate, questioning, iconoclastic worker who is grit in the bearings of a consumer society.

Viewed in this light, the current "educational" system is a great success.

But--at what?
Creating consumers. And dumbing down the "masses" so they will believe that--it's a life. The only life.

My son's experience with the system--and ours-- is here:
Enterprise Village==or, the future of American democracy.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.