I think it's a break down on everyone's part. People pointing fingers at the parents. Parents pointing fingers at the system. The system saying, "We don't have the money for education but we do have the money to bring Capitalism to the Middle East!" Sorry, I have to point the finger at the media too.
We all allow ourselves to do cut rate work. Look at how we all have started to reduce words even in our comments here. We start sentences with lower case letters. We excuse letters missing in words. We use alpha and numeric in words and in sentences. We aren't talking about an administration; we are talking about butchering the entire english language.
The sad thing is; we have all learned to adapt to this new system of garbage talk and type. We have actually allowed ourselves to become lesser than instead of setting the bar higher.
We ALL expect our children to do better than we did. We put a lot of pressure on them to do better and get frustrated when they get over loaded and just give up.
I have a teen age son. He is in Pre Advanced Placement classes. This to those of you who don't know, is doing college level work in high school. I had no problem with him when he was making straight "A"s and was on the distinguished honor roll but, in order for him to do that, he couldn't really "hang out" with his friends.
Now, he's popular, on the football team and has a girlfriend. His grades are just passing and he started being around kids who use drugs because they accept all kinds and smoking pot with them. He says it relaxes him. (eyeroll)
During football season, he goes to school at 6:30am gets an hour or two before football practice and then comes home about 6:30pm. On game nights during the week, he is not home until about 10:30pm. When football season is over with, he works and gets home around 10:30pm. I don't even want to get into the hours put into homework.
We all know that if you want to live above the poverty line in the United States, you have to have a degree. Sometimes, you may get lucky and not need one but, all in all that is the bottom line. Everyone else is struggling to get by.
How do we change this?
