Time to Punt

One of America’s dirty little secrets, which soon threatens to become public knowledge and public shame, is how the colleges are passing along huge numbers of poorly-prepared students to the workforce, just as the high schools passed them along to the colleges.

People whose job it is to hire and train the young as they enter the job market have become increasingly appalled, and challenged by, the descending levels of aptitude -- the results of a failed educational system. In fairness though, only a portion of the blame should be on the educators as this is a systemic cultural crisis, with causal factors ranging from entertainment overload to empty diets to the breakdown of family discipline.

It’s gotten so bad that Toyota recently announced that it was placing its new auto plant in Canada, instead of in one of the several U.S. locales which were hungrily vying for it. They were clear about their reason for turning down the lavish American incentives: The workforce in this country has great difficulty with written instructions, and combined with their very low memory retention, this leads to overly long training periods followed by many workplace errors.



In their dark-seated hearts, the ultra-conservatives want it back to 1905 — women and blacks in their God-ordained positions of servitude, the robber barons and their installed political cronies calling the shots on Wall Street, Main Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, nobody in the press doubting America’s "big stick" foreign policy, and a clear understanding of the class structure in this country.

Short and Sour
In June, CNN, FOX News, and the three major network news outfits ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the ongoing genocide in Darfur.