Bear with me if I jump around. I have just read the entire thread in one go and a few comments come to mind.
1)Japanese children are still being pushed to learn things The Japanese system may have gone too far in the direction of rote learning of facts. Yes the three R's are important but learning how to learn, learning to use what you know creatively is also important. Like most things it has to be in balance.
2)Too often teachers are expected not to teach children but to raise them. A grade one teacher I know recieved a complaint from a parent that in 6 months her son had not been taught to "do as he was told" and still talked back to his mother. Small wonder that it is difficult to find time to teach.
3)Don't you have to come up before you can come down? I hadn't thought of it before but is our language declining or decreasing or mearly changing from the literary to the technical?
and finally 4)Scrabble/literati I can't help thinking that Scrabble is a much better name than Literati. The latter implies educated in the older sense of the word, well- read, well-spoken and knowledgable. Merely learning lists of correctly arranged groups of letters is like the rote learning of any other list of facts. A feat of memory but with a very limited usefulness without the ability to understand and use them creatively.