What is Wrong With Education?

Well, if the previous post wasn't long enough, here is another one. I guess I should write about the state of the kids coming out of high school in this nation...well, mostly NM, but also everywhere else in this fair nation of ours.

I took Freshman English last semester, and while I didn't think that it would be hard, I was surprised at how easy it was. I was the only Eng major in my class, the rest being...get this...primary education majors, with a few nursing and psych majors. Now, I know that teaching is an important vocation, and that teachers are very important to society as a whole, and that we should respect them for what they do, but give me a break, a lot of them that I see coming through the colleges are useless wastes of flesh!!!

In said english class, most of the people were young, 18-ish, with a few older folks in it, me being in the middle (not in my 50's, but not a baby barely able to vote and unable to drink). A vast majority of the people could not read. No, they were not illiterate, but they were pretty damn close...they could read, but didn't have much of a vocab, and comprehension was a joke...and these people want to teach my kids (if/when I have some) to read!!! I don't understand.

Well, actually, I do. Say what you will about President Bush and no child left behind (written by Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass), but this problem did not start after Jan, 2001. It started many many years ago, when these kids were in elementry/middle school, sometime in the '90's (not blaming Clinton either). But, knowing what I know from the Nuke power pipeline, and what passes for knowledge in some of these college courses, it is evident that the school system is failing, and passing the buck on to higher education, like my wonderful University, as well as the Navy Nuclear Pipeline, or to the workforce. What will this do to production in the future (I have allready seen it in the Navy, with some people coming in, expecting the division to hand them everything on a silver platter like they got in power school, high school, and from mommy and daddy), what will this do to our job force when these people are handling money at banks (and can't do math), when they are writing tech manuals (when they can't form a coherient sentence), when they are putting together a multi-billion dollar submarine (when they can't read the documents)?

I don't want to toot my own horn, but I am smarter than the average bear, and I know that I will be well employed in the future, especially with this dumbing down of so many people coming out of the education system, but a small handfull of people can't do everything. That is why I loved training on the boat, I wouldn't do everything anymore (to those of you from M-div on San Fran, you know who I am talking about during the 2002/2003 timeframe, especially during the dark summer of 2003 before it started getting better (hemp-nuts, dorksen, donut, and lets be honest, all of those random DINQ coners that couldn't handle it BEFORE we ran into a damn mountian)). Sometimes, I think that I am going in the wrong direction, getting an Aerospace Eng degree, I should go into education...but my calling is Engineering, and one man can't fix the system (despite what all of those skimmer fags that went to prototype while I was a SPU there, trying to "fix the system" allthough they didn't know shit from shinola on a submarine prototype, and finally learned it just in time to go back to the "Big E"). I will get my degree, despite how easy it really is, and how dumbed down too many of the classes are, go to a (hopefully) private Aerospace firm and change the world for better (see Moon Midgets).