Jackie, I think there are a lot of different disabilities with which a person can be afflicted. I've long maintained that among the worst is having idiots for parents. I think there are some really crappy teachers out there. But I don't think they're the worst problem - namely because I don't think there are that many who are utterly incompetent. In most cases, I think it's the kids themselves and their parents who share the bulk of the responsibility for academic failure. This is justified (by some) by saying that they're not entertained enough or they're lacking in self-esteem.

Zed, reference the disjunction between the connotation of the names vs. the abilities required to play those games, I agree with your comments, though I hadn't thought about it before.

I heard of a book a while back (the title eludes me for the moment) that purported that school systems were actually doing very well and that complaints against "the school system" were calculated and very politically motivated lies from conservatives. There may be something to this as our school systems are handling more people and many more people are college bound. OTOH, look at most colleges and a huge proportion of their beginning courses are actually remedial. LOTS of people are learning in college what they ought to have learned in high school. This is particularly true of community colleges (at least the ones with which I'm familiar), but in that case it's PARTIALLY mitigated (IMO) if a higher percentage of the students are older students returning after a long absence.

On the flip side, it's possible to survive by being more stupid. One doesn't need to be educated to get a job and make babies. It may not be a great job, but it'll get you by. One may not be able to prepare those babies to be learners, but that doesn't make one a bad parent. Look at "technical skills." People are learning a lot of those these days, but the vast majority of technical skill (or what falls under that umbrage) is very trivial. You need to know very little about theory to fix a computer these days. In some cases, it's an impediment. You don't need to know a lot about networks to be a network engineer. Of course, this doesn't mean that all people who fix computers or build and maintain networks are stupid. It means that one can find a job in those fields without having an immense amount of understanding of the subject. In this case, people can learn specific roles, but they don't have to understand the larger landscape. Parochialism makes for an easy life in many cases. If the world were a static place, this might even be sufficient. The problem comes that economies change, populations migrate, jobs move, skills required to function change.

k