Yet another waste of ratepayers money on why Johnny cannot learn

A panel of the learned carried out a study on why young Americans know little or nothing about history or literature. A lot of taxpayer monies have gone down the drain to fund a blue ribbon panel to state the obvious. Yes, brothers and sisters the word has come down from on high about the sorry state of education in an America which proclaims to the world that there won't be one child left behind. And yes, survey after survey, dollars misspent, draw the same conclusions. In fact some say, cirricula favour more time for reading and for mathematics, and yet on the whole in math Americans fare worse than Asians and Europeans. As for reading, don't get 18Brumaire started. Newspapers, the boob tube aka the television...the media in general dumb down. Reading books is not a top priority if we judge by the stinginess of the public purse for libraries. Publishers looking for unrealistic returns on a us$ spent shot for a profit margin of say 30 per cent when 3 per cent would make an old fashioned bookseller's day. Of course Americans do read, but read what is the question which is not truly answered. Casting an eye on a broad range of vision reveals an historical short term memory for history...it's unimportant...and as such, misreading or ignorance of Clio's art sinks the US into foreign wars without issue. Look at Herr Bush's lying war in Iraq. And speaking of Herr Bush, he may be a closet reader, but he puts on an image that brains and thinking are of a single thread. He projects a 'What me worry' persona, so why should anyone give a tinker's damn when the country's powerful show a disdain for learning and reading but for children's books...remember Bush reading about a goat to a kindergarten class whilst the World Trade Centre towers were collapsing. And he a proud Eli who got into Yale on the shirt tails of the Bushes who went before him to that Ivy League school, and which gives preferential treatment to the offsprings of alumni. As for literature post modernism partly shares the blame for dampening the art of reading; pomo showed a disdain for the classics by labelling them the works of dead white European males, and by definition worthy of our disgust and our willful righteousness by casting them on the dung heap. So education is cheapend...but there's more which has to do with the change in capitalist economics which hold a dictatorial grip on streaming education. Gone is vocational training; gone is serious learning period. The market rules all save when a national disaster or shame happens. Remember Sputnik! Then the US forced march the training of engineers, scientists, Russian language and area studies...and so the old music keeps playing on, and the country may be turning out 'smart' businessmen and women but on a more general level, the patch of ignorant cabbages extend to the horizon and is symptomatic of the decline of America's leading role in world affairs.