We have to be the change we seek. We cannot simply wait for help that may never arrive. We are the help.
Innovate... Challenge the system, the status quo. Recall that Langley bore the full blessing and imprimatur of the establishment yet it was a couple of status-quo challengers, Orville and Wilbur Wright who made human flight happen. They had no free rides, no college education, no wind at their backs. They just did it.
True, it's tougher to be a Wright brother or a Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or even Steve Jobs than in their day owing to increasing dependency (which in turn can be traced to the overall intellectual malaise that is the fallout of the very technology that intellectual genius developed). But we must be that inspiration.
Don't put hopes in "education", either - at least as traditionally understood. A college education today, esp. in this age of ridiculouly widespread dissemination of information, fails the ROI test. Nope, we need real learning, real innovation, and real can do'edness. With respect to that establishment, we need to be the woman in that 1984 Apple Super Bowl ad, today more than ever.
You've made some great points. I've just started teaching after working in business and raising my own family. I teach high school science, and most of my students are average youngsters taking their core biology course. It has been an eye-opening and somewhat discouraging experience. The curriculum standards of our (parochial) district are generally ambitious but not unreasonable. Unfortunately, a large percentage of my students are unprepared to learn at that level. They are coming in with such poor basic literacy, numeracy, and study skills that I have high failure rates on tests unless I dumb them down or grade on a curve. I spent part of the year in the inner city, and part of it in the suburbs and saw the same problem in both locations. It's far worse in the city, as you might imagine.
There are certainly students who can handle the grade-level material, and some who excel at honors levels. Unfortunately, many of what we would consider average kids are only passing because they get points for doing worksheets and because they do small-group projects in which they collaborate. As a teacher it is very frustrating. Our administration discourages us from giving failing grades, and by high school, it is nearly pointless to give them anyway. These students have been socially promoted for so many years that their academic deficits are very deep.
From what I can see, many of these average youngsters are failing to build a strong foundation for learning during their pre-school or early elementary years. I suspect that what we are seeing is the impact on average kids of single-parent families, parents with too little time for their children, and 'feel-good' no-failure policies in elementary schools. It's not good, and not something that's easily fixed once broken.
I recently spoke with the author of our science text and asked him about this issue. He said that he's seeing the same problem broadly, and advised that high school science teachers 'just hang in there' as it won't get better for some years. His hope is that with stronger standards (i.e. Common Core) we will raise the academic achievement level and have stronger students coming into the secondary schools. Until then, we don't have a way to address it. I don't share his optimism that Common Core is the answer, but agree that it's difficult to fix these problems in high school. And yes, most of these kids are college bound . . .