I'm going to take a contrarian view. I think that American public schools are decent. Many are quite good. Only a few are excellent, but that's true of private

I'm going to take a contrarian view. I think that American public schools are decent. Many are quite good. Only a few are excellent, but that's true of private schools as well. I don't think that it's our schools that are to blame for American ignorance. (And no, putting more money into them probably won't solve the problem.) It's economic inequality (underprivileged kids don't fuck off because they're stupid, but because they know that even if they work their asses off, the deck is still stacked against them) and a culture of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that pervades all social classes, top to bottom. People value ambition but not insight in this country, and deep knowledge makes you a fool who didn't have "the guts" to charge into the working world, beat someone up, and take a place. For the world that should exist, where humans of average social connectedness and social class are equipped to solve the problems bearing down on us as a species, American students are undertrained. If the shit really hits the fan on energy, ecological concerns, or social unrest... we're all out of our depth. It's not just the schools, with their supposedly "outdated" emphasis on timeliness and conformity. The first 10 years in the corporate world, except for the upper-class kids who get a rope-bridge over the shit pit, kills any creativity that people might have had. The corporate world is much more destructive to creativity and, in the long run, intelligence, than the schools are. (It's also why intelligence tends to decline, in the U.S., after 22. That's not normal, and in other societies, people peak much later.) This society produces one thing: private sector politicians. For the jobs that most of them will actually get, American students are overtrained. You don't need a college education to be some shitty private sector subordinate, nor an understanding of CS to do business-driven engineering in some VibratorFactoryVisitor-laden Java Shop. Knowing that stuff will just make you angry and make it harder to do your damn job, stay employed, and feed your family. The claim that American schools are training kids for a 20th-century world that requires conformity is missing the point. The 21st-century world requires just as much conformity from individuals in the short term. Those lessons about not talking back to authority are just as important today. The hard challenges that humanity will face will take more, and our generation may be underprepared to take them on when they arrive, but we won't get a verdict on that one until we're tested.