Hi all - well, it occurs to me, that "we", the US, are in real trouble.

Why?

"We're raising a generation of morons"!

Yep, the kiddies are in trouble. "Our" kiddies, are in trouble.

Let me tell you why I say that, and then, solicit your thoughts and input.

Umm... I travel a lot, both in the US and overseas, and I get to talk to a lot of people "on the ground". So, you know, here in LA, it ranges from Beverly Hills, where all the kids go to the local private Harvard/Westlake schools which cost almost as much per year as an Ivy League university, and only a few miles away is South Central, which has, you know, "secure" high schools that are practically totally locked-down during school hours so nothing bad can get in and nothing good can get out..... and then, you know, I get on the ground in Tokyo, and Mumbai, and Zurich, and places like that, and I talk to the local college students, that kind of thing -

So ah - everyone knows about the US test scores, right? And what a miserable failure "No Child Left Behind" has been, right?

But it seems to me, there's something a little more dangerous going on - and Imean, this oughta make sense to both conservatives and liberals - remember that during WW2, it was really "technology" that won the day, yes? i mean, long before the Brits actually "engineered" the thing, there were some geniuses at MIT (like Norbert Wiener) who dreamed up the "theoretical" piece of the radar technology (the "synthetic apperture" and all that) - and I mean, technology like that helped defeat the Luftwaffe and so on -

So what I'm suggesting, is, that the smarts of our kiddies (and thefefore our adults as well), is kind of a "national treasure" - it's like a "national resource" that we not only want to maintain a good supply of, but also not piss away without good reason, yes?

So like, this is rapidly becoming my number one domestic issue, for this upcoming campaign. 'Cause I mean - healthcare, people can work for that, but the kiddies, they're kinda helpless on their own, they need US to look out for 'em, and make sure they grow up with a decent amount of smarts and "capability". 'Cause I mean, when we're all old and gray, they're the ones who are gonna have their finger on the nuclear trigger, right?

And I mean, I'm really gettin' kinda scared, when I look around the world, and compare what I'm seein' overseas, with what I'm seein' here - I go to the streets of Mumbai (Bombay, India), and I mean, that's kind of a well-known story over there, right? Everyone knows what it's like, more or less, right? There's quite a bit of poverty and stuff - but I mean, Joe Average college kid over there, knows all about things like fractal and non-Eucliadn geometries, non-linear dynamics, the ethics of moral relativism, the political thinking of HL Mancken - right? And I mean, you know, most of our college graduates don't know about ANY of that stuff, at least they couldn't talk about it off the top of their heads without doing research "up front"....

So, I mean, this is what I see - and it's kinda starting to concern me, "more than a little". We have two kids now, our oldest boy is almost two and our daughter is four months, so we're kinda startin' to try to figure out how to raise 'em so they get to be robust independent thinkers, and I mean, it's not easy - it appears to be considerably more difficult than when "I" was a child and my parents had to go through this exercise.

So - hmmm.... thoughts? comments? I'm kinda interested in how people view this thing "in context", like relative to other issues that are floatin' around in the campaign airwaves these days. This one, I think resonates with me "a lot". What's your view?