1) and 4) seem to be the most important to me (not only reading specifically, but spending time in general). #4 is simply not possible in a lot of American hou

1) and 4) seem to be the most important to me (not only reading specifically, but spending time in general). #4 is simply not possible in a lot of American households where school's primary function is daycare. I certainly learned a lot about physics and algebra in high school, but I learned how to learn from my parents and my family. I grew up in NYC going to public schools with a parent and a few relatives working as public teachers, so I'm pretty intimately familiar with the struggle of fixing public education on limited budget. Most of them generally share the opinion that schools can only do so much. They are absolutely necessary, and should continue getting better, but someone who is offered every resource in the world and doesn't have a home life that can support it will throw those resources away 99% of the time (from my experience that number is actually roughly accurate). So I would look at education as something that can and should be improved, but it's also really important to look at education as the symptom of bigger cultural issues. Americans tend to be pretty anti-intellectual and reject unfamiliar ideas. You can't really change that with education (alone), because people will always reject what school teaches them if their family doesn't support it, and in many cases the citizens will never vote in the budgets anyway. Main point: our mediocre education system is the symptom, find the cause.