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.
That is a sad commentary on what has become of the educational system. BTW, cows and bulls ARE the same species. They are female and male representatives and their ability to mate and produce viable, fertile offspring is a hallmark of the very definition of the word species. A horse and a donkey are different species. They mate and produce a viable, infertile offspring called a mule.
I was able to name all the bones, internal organs and muscle groups in a human in 3rd grade. It helped that my parents purchased a set of World Book encyclopedia when I was 4 years old. At that same point in my life, I was able to read and understand electronic schematics. The school library shelves were full of books on electroncs and I read every one I could find starting in 2nd grade.
I commend you for your efforts to lead the clueless to new fountains of learning. Many people really want to learn and have been stifled by the poor education system. I realized just how little I really knew on graduation day at UCSD. What I really learned was how to learn about anything that caught my interest. The college education provided a great foundation in science, mathemetics, literature, history, foreign language and even martial arts. Still, that is just a microcosm of the things that are available to learn.
I taught school in the evenings from 1980 to 1983. The class was co-sponsored by the Regional Occupational Program and Southwestern College. Students working on an AS in Electronics took the class as Electronics 51. ROP students took it as Electronics 91. Over that 3 1/2 year period, the ROP office reports 91% of my students were hired by DEC or IBM. In May 1983 I accepted a new position inside PacBell that required 7x24 coverage of the data center at Trade Street in San Diego. Those obligations made it impossible to continue teaching school in the evening. It was fun while it lasted.