You get out of it what you put into it. If you ended up illiterate, blame the person in the mirror tomorrow morning. My 22 year old had crappy teachers, so he took the bull by the horns and conducted review sessions for his fellow students so they could score well on the AP exams. If you just let life happen to you, you will be a miserable failure. My formal education is in molecular biology and pathogenic microbiology. I make my living as a computer scientist and electrical engineer. The skills that pay the bills were acquired by purchasing books and studying ravenously. That beats pushing a broom at Walmart and crabbing about insufficient opportunities in the field of genetics engineering.
You can lay the blame for crappy schools on the leftists who dumbed down the schools to make the underachieving minorities "feel good". The schools teach leftist claptrap today and expect little or no level of academic achievement. It wasn't boomers who set those policies in motion. It was the "greatest generation" who were the politicians and the teachers and administrators at the schools attended by the boomers. Gen X is getting the second wave of the dumbed down process.
You can lay the blame for crappy schools on the leftists who dumbed down the schools to make the underachieving minorities "feel good". The schools teach leftist claptrap today and expect little or no level of academic achievement. It wasn't boomers who set those policies in motion. It was the "greatest generation" who were the politicians and the teachers and administrators at the schools attended by the boomers. Gen X is getting the second wave of the dumbed down process.
I agree with *everything* you said. Personally I've chosen a similar path of self-education and I've lead dozens of my peers to the same trough. But I am dealing with, on a daily basis, young women who honestly don't even have a clue where to begin. They don't even know that they don't know. They have no mentors to fall back on or to give them direction. I've met women with COLLEGE DEGREES who don't know where an egg comes from or that cows and bulls aren't separate species. A woman with a BA told me that diabetes happens when a person's "liver drys up".
See, the stories I'm telling on this thread aren't aberrations. This is the norm. I bow my head to you for doing the right things and raising your children well, but you cannot continue to bury your head in the sand and pretend that there is not a serious problem. None of these folks ever made a choice to be ignorant. And when I hand them a book, they greedily eat it, demand more, and furiously ask why nobody has ever told them this before.