Asia colored today.  The instructions had her color the squares blue, the triangles red, and the rectangles green.  Easy.  Any three year old can do that.  But...

At Benito Juarez High School, I gave my class an assignment:  Explain, in English, the difference between a rectangle and a square.  They excelled at one thing: copying.  Each kid submitted the identical mangled sentence:  A square has four sides, yet a rectangle has but three.  Lordy.

Either:  1) I was the shittiest student teacher ever.  OR 2) Those were the dumbest kids on the planet. 

I mentored four student teachers in my career.  Their performance ranged from average to very shitty.  My student teaching was no worse than theirs.  Scratch #1.

#2?  No way.  Dumb?  A little, but mostly they were naive.  The American education system works fine - if a kid buys into it.  The Juarez kids weren't buying.  Hell, they were too damn poor to be allowed in the store.  The system works like this:  In high school you learn useless shit like Geometry.  It's training ground for your mind to wrestle with both profound and abstract thoughts.  Then comes college - Four more years of mind altering shit.  And in the end...the system produces workers who have some ability to think. 

I taught five years at a top college prep school.  Guess what?  Half of those kids weren't sold on the system either.  What they were sold on was not getting their ass kicked by their parents.

It might be time for an overhaul.