I once had to deal with someone working in the test prep industry that had two ivy league degrees and couldn't get the population of the US within 200 million.

I once had to deal with someone working in the test prep industry that had two ivy league degrees and couldn't get the population of the US within 200 million. It was striking that this was someone who represented the pinnacle of our education system, training the next generation to get into the elite. E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy