Welcome to my first post.
I hope we'll talk about many subjects here. Please send this on to people you know who love to discuss the issues of the day. Any day. History is as interesting to me as the present is.
There will be times when my weird sense of humor will show itself. I forgive you if you think I as funny as a flatulent uncle at a formal wedding. But it happens. Humor is how to deflect hard feelings, and how to help people learn. If you read my bio, you will see that I have a desire to learn as well as to spout off about my own views. I'm fairly open-minded, but I want supporting evidence before I accept anything as fact.
To the topic at hand: Education.

I have 2 kids who went to the public schools. I am always more amazed at what they don't learn than what they do learn. THe teachers who are supposed to be teaching seem to be clueless themselves. Here's a great example:
Some years ago my husband and I took the kids to Florida for a family vacation. It wasn't summer, Spring Break, or Christmas break. It was just a week of off-season enjoyment for the 4 of us. The kids would miss 4 days of school. So the rule was that the kids had to plot the route to our destination, find 3 interesting but historical or scientific side trips to do on the way, figure out how many miles we would drive, figure out how much gas we would use according to the mileage our car was getting and how much we would spend overall for the fuel. They would also have to keep a log of the trip for the purpose of writing an essay about what they had learned.
OK, let's review: Geography, history, science, math, time management, sequencing, reading, writing, spelling and fun.
Wow! Sounds like a pretty heavy curriculum to me!
I was told in no uncertain terms that the children were being deprived of a great education by not sleeping, um, er, sitting in a classroom listening to the teacher talk to the lowest common denominator of kids and wondering what they had done to deserve this living hell.
We went anyway.
Thank goodness my daughter is off to college (and she swears she won't come home a socialist), my son is in the Vocational program in his senior year learning to become a machinist and metal fabricator ( he's an intellectually brilliant kid, but it's obvious people like Jesse James of Monster Garage make the big bucks).

Public education has become the last bastion of those who want to brag about their college educations but don't exactly achieve anything after moving their  tassles to the left. Zero tolerance, filling in test bubbles, and making sure everyone is included even to the detriment of the quicker kids has made our schools factories for the mediocre.