Our TV is anti-intellectual, anti-learning, anti-questioning, quick and easy, entertaining with tiny drops of information, some of it downright wrong.
Our news programs are about opinion, not information. Our media sells misinformation and absurd fairy tales even to adults.
The schools are tuned to the lowest common denominator in terms of challenge.
Whenever possible, we need to reward good students by putting them in classes with other good students in which the standard of achievement is high. Every child needs a challenge. Return to the subjects to be mastered the areas of art and music and hire teachers trained in those fields to teach them. Same for science and math. Bring special teachers into the classrooms to travel and teach those subjects. Reading should be taught by the main classroom teacher who should coordinate reading with music, art, math, science, etc.
The intelligence and creativity of the child begins when the child is just hours old. We are learning from the moment of birth.
The foundation for later learning is established before a child is three years old. Count with babies. Talk a lot to babies. Read lots of books to babies. That's how you get a good student at high school graduation.
That's why the children of upper middle class, educated parents tend to do better on the average than children from homes in which there is a constant struggle, maybe alcoholism, unemployment, parents who are depressed and needing help themselves. Biology can in some cases play a role too. We don't have adequate information about that.
And then there is the community. Kids need to have positive learning experiences outside of school. Sports are fun. But when the biggest heroes on the high school campus are the football team players and being nerdy, studious or downright intellectual is ridiculed, kids are not going to study very hard. Beginning at about age 12, acceptance and respect from people in your age group, your peers with regard to age, are important. Parents don't help when they make a huge fuss over those admittedly fun things like proms and hairdos and belonging to the football team.
But the thing that we can really work on is improving our media and the quality, complexity and intellectual challenge that we get from the information that our TV, radio and the internet.
Our media is designed to get the most ads in within the shortest time. That means that we get very little in-depth reporting and very few really intelligent, informative shows about complex issues.
Our media is next to worthless. And our children watch it, listen to it and learn very little from it. Rush Limbaugh??? Fox News??? If that is what America's adults are listening to and watching, that's what America's children are listening to and watching. So we get what we pay for. Thanks advertisers.
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Thank you... 
said differently, our schools are doing just fine - it is the home that is driving the problems).""
