Good points all.
Our affluence has allowed our society to draw out adolescence from 13 all the way to 26, and beyond.
Public lower education today has been watered down to near irrelevance. We've converted it into little more than state-mandated day care in order to keep unruly children off the streets. In order to keep the miscreants in class, they aren't expelled for being disruptive to the kids who actually are interested in learning. As a result, few do.
So instead, the kids who are actually interested in learning now have to wait until college, which (for the most part) filters out the disruptive class of occupant (can't bring myself to call them "students" since they weren't there to study) that had no interest in education and was only there because the law or their parents said they had to be.
So now colleges have the burden of having to bring kids up to speed on what they should have learned in lower, middle & high schools. The result is that academically, a bachelor's degree means about the same as a high school degree of 40+ years ago.
But I will dispute money as being responsible. Remember, education is primarily funded by head count. The public school establishment is not paid by results, but by how many kids are in attendance on a daily basis. So they are incentivized towards keeping the disruptive kids in class at the expense of resources devoted to those who wish to learn. There's no way they're gonna keep the most kids possible interested in staying with Shakespeare, so instead they teach with 50-Cent. It's all about the lowest common denominator. The price we pay for "no child left behind" is that they're all left behind.
My solution? Eliminate the Soviet-style public system where public students are told where they must go and there is no competition. Make schools compete for students. Let failing schools fail like a business would if it was not delivering.
Yes, the educational establishment cries bloody murder at this notion. But they've been murdering our kids minds for generations.
