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...The next time we hear a talker attacking a doer, we just might ask: What have you done to further human progress?....

Sounds good Mr. Williams, try living by it.

I hear you all the time bad mouthing American education. Now granted, you may be just referring to your own personal experience where you or the institution that employs you fails in its mission. So speak for yourself because the study you sited had pages --a whole section on advances in US in education.

Williams is spot on when he sticks to what he understands, like economics, technology, and production.

When it comes to one of Americas most valuable contributions to human civilization, Williams appears to collapse into a mindless bigotry against his own kind-- but it's probably not what it appears. Rather than self loathing, IMO he's just piling on with pundits from the left and the right.

The right hates education because so much of it is run by the government so they blame educators for the sins of bureaucrats. The left bad mouths education so they can raise our taxes to buy more. On this point they agree --and they're both wrong.

THE RIGHT HATES EDUCATION????
Think about that for a while! The people who home school their children are the biggest self-loathers....NOT!

Sounds good Mr. Williams, try living by it.

I hear you all the time bad mouthing American education. Now granted, you may be just referring to your own personal experience where you or the institution that employs you fails in its mission. So speak for yourself because the study you sited had pages --a whole section on advances in US in education.

Thanks for posting the link to the pdf file containing the Stephen Moore piece Williams cited. It was an interesting read.
As to the graph you posted from there, the one thing it shows for sure is that America's high schools and colleges are awarding more diplomas and degrees than they used to. As to whether that is due to anything more than grade inflation - and it may well be, considering that you gotta answer more questions on the SAT than your grandfather would have had to to get the same SAT "score" - that is not an issue on which that graph sheds any light.
And as to the "pages --a whole section on advances in US in education" which you allude to, I'm afraid that my own education isn't good enough to have enabled me to find anything else in the entire pdf file which does shed any light on that issue. Other than the fact that women are getting more degrees of all sorts than they used to, I didn't spot anything else on education at all. Certainly nothing that indicates that people now graduating from high school even know who George Washington was . . .

The right hates education because so much of it is run by the government so they blame educators for the sins of bureaucrats. The left bad mouths education so they can raise our taxes to buy more. On this point they agree --and they're both wrong.

You may be confusing education with schooling. They are not the same.

My grandfather's formal schooling ended in the eight grade. Yet in those eight years he acquired a better education than the average university graduate does today. He could quote Shakespeare; he knew poetry; he could read and write and compute.

Today, I teach at the university, where we provide the best remedial education money can buy. When students enter my freshman course after twelve years of public schooling, I cannot assume that they know anything about anything. Grammar, spelling, punctuation? Those things are largely unknown. History? Anything that happened before they were born is a mystery. Mathematics? Take away their sophisticated graphing calculators, and most are lost.

...the study you sited had pages --a whole section on advances in US in education...

The graph you cited demonstrates nothing more than ever increased profligacy in the granting of high school diplomas and college degrees. In fact, the page you got the graph from stated "The quantity (though perhaps not the quality) of schooling received by Americans has risen in almost every decade of this century."

There is no doubt of the decline of the quality of education in America. For one example of what a high school diploma used to mean, consider John Henry "Doc" Holliday. Holliday, more famous for his gambling and gunfighting ability, as a child studied Greek, Latin, and French. As an adult, he remained fluent in Latin. Where did this refined and erudite fellow obtain his education. In Civil War-ravaged, ignorant, and backwoods Valdosta, Georgia.

The right hates education because so much of it is run by the government so they blame educators for the sins of bureaucrats.

In a government-run system, the educators ARE bureaucrats. If educators want to free themselves of bureaucracy, the only alternative is to free themselves of government.

Williams appears to collapse into a mindless bigotry against his own kind-

He's only confronting reality wrt the state of the education of blacks. He's trying to reach people, maybe by reverse psychology.