Johnny Still Can't Read

In keeping with my 2006 resolution to stay as far away from the Iraq War as possible, I’m going to try to focus on other things as long as I can - maybe a week.

College graduates can’t read. Whew, who’d ‘a thunk it?

Our economy demands more and more skilled people and we’re turning out a greater number and higher percentage of college graduates than any generation preceding this one. Meanwhile, our newly discovered high power competitors, China and India, are cranking out high quality engineers, scientists, and English majors by the carload, what’s happening?

I surely don’t know, but one politically incorrect notion keeps creeping into my Busch addled brain; maybe the people we’re attempting to push through the higher education system aren’t up to it. We’re extruding a higher percentage of our kids through high school and on to the next level at an ever higher level. Hey, when the gene pool isn’t improving and the labor market calls for an ever increasing numbers of educated – or at least trained – entrants – or at least time servers - what happens? Could it be that the input quality goes down so far they can’t be trained to do those jobs?

With three or four times our population each, China and India have more – many more - smart people – in gross numbers - than we do. If they educate only those folks on the second, third, or even greater standard deviation above the norm in intelligence, they’re still educating a whole heck of a lot more folks than we are when we start dropping down to the first standard deviation below the bell. Look at it this way, when they educate twenty or thirty million of their best and brightest each year and we keep up in sheer numbers, we just can’t keep up when it comes to the overall quality of the output.

Remember when Johnny couldn’t read? Well we got the kinks out of that problem and most of those capable of reading could. Now Johnny’s grown kids can’t hack it. Give them a break, they used to get jobs down at the local plant; now they’re in the front office and they can’t read.

I don’t know the answer, but it’s not just pumping more money into the system or even injecting accountability into our schools. Maybe we’re getting down to the bottom of the barrel. Maybe we’ll just have to educate the educable and deal with the results. Kurt Vonnegut novels toyed with these problems half a century ago. The answers then weren’t very pretty either.

Wow, I’ll be getting a lot of email on this one. “Stick to Iraq, you don’t anything about that either but at least you’re only insulting George Bush.”

Blog on!

Wild Bill