One reason the nation's businesses are failing is because the schools suck, and they suck because our standards of success equate to failure

While reading this SCROTUM TIGHTENING ARTICLE, Decline of America: Have We Given Away the Store?, they mention the following study PROPERLY from the NYT, damning it as demonstrative of failure.

The Department of Education recently released the results of its national geography survey of students in grades 4, 8 and 12.

The good news is that students did not do all that poorly: Fifty-six percent of high school seniors knew, for instance, that glaciation formed the Great Lakes. The bad news is that students have not shown much improvement from previous exams and that only about one in four fourth graders was able to identify all seven continents correctly.

Sorry to have be the one to tell you NYT, but if only half of high school students (I was taught this in 8th grade) have a clue how the Great Lakes came to be, the schools have failed.

They have failed not only because they cannot teach the facts, and insist they be comprehended or students REMAIN where they until until they are, they have failed because the CURRICULA (now handed down from DC, Dept of Eductaion and Dr. WILLIAM AYERS heavy involvement…yes that’s right..Ayers was elected Vice President for Curriculum Studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008), teachers and their training, have FAILED to make learning what is previously unknown a LOVE of their students.

They have FAILED to ignite intellectual curiosity except in self starters who would see something and find out all that needed to be found out on their own if schools were not even there.

The result, from the first article…

The free-market model of capitalism is dysfunctional, one hears. The markets are in for a prolonged period of frightening see-sawing. Nobody knows how to create jobs or induce corporations to invest in them. Deprivation and shrinkage are necessary preludes to future growth (on a smaller scale). For recent graduates, the only thing to do is “Go East, young man (or woman).” There is little left on the home front unless you like the spectacle of a gradual downward drift.

That line of thought certainly squares with the experience of a professor friend who teaches at a college in Connecticut and took some of his students to China this summer. Before departing for the Middle Kingdom, they visited the old Pratt & Whitney plant in East Hartford. Not so many years ago, the aircraft-engine maker employed 18,000 highly skilled engineers, technicians, and machinists. Now it employs almost none. In one far corner, past the rows of empty factory sheds, they found a small R&D shop with a few live bodies still at work. That was all.

When the group got to China, it went to the Pratt & Whitney plant in one of the industrial zones along China’s southeastern coast. There they found thousands of engineers, technicians, and machinists. China already owns 53 percent of the facility. The New Zealander running it figured Pratt & Whitney had 10 to 15 more years to profit from the place; after that, the plant and everything it made and earned would belong to the Chinese. If the Kiwi is right, another blue-chip American name (this one 86 years old) will be no more.

We have many problems here. We have a BIG HUGE FAT problem in the economy, which is to say, JOBS. I have postulated that only manufacturing can create the structure fast enough to impact us now. I have postulated that Free Trade as implemented has benefited only large multinationals and those who have impactful stakes in them and of course the workers in destitute nations, who replaced unionized american workers who lived a nice life. I have postulated that engineering and research will follow this along to where the wealth now is and that will be that.

I may be right or I may be wrong. But other critical thinkers on this, apparently will be absent in the numbers we need them because the schools (and NYT) think if half the kids know where the Great Lakes come from, we are doing fine.

Except, of course, if the policy makers think they came from the actions of some ‘Gabriel’ or run off from an ancient hurricane caused by neanderthal induced global warming, and these policy makers were passed along from grade to grade, and given govt guaranteed loans and scholarships to a college which had to accept them, to be taught that govt employment was the best way, and entered the long ladder to policy making by acting as they saw others act in the only job growth industry left.

Happy Labor Day.

WAKE UP AMERICA.

It is sickeningly CLEAR around us.

(Correction in caption.. that is the engine of the new F-35 fighter, not the 'J-35' engine..apologies)