While darn few of us will ever have an important need to arrive at the square root of the area contained within a fraction of a circle, the primary reason for studying math doesn't have a lot to do with getting the "right" answer. There's an incredible mental discipline required to process algebraic and geometric equations, and long after the right answer is forgotten the benefits of a systematic, organized approach to problem solving are retained.

Kids aren't successfully educated when they can regurgitate facts upon demand. They are successfully educated when they learn how to process information, think creatively as well as pragmatically, and realize that the known facts are often most useful as a basis for further exploration. Well educated kids will connect the dots between the facts to detect significance, relevance, and meaning.

Real talk, I have a college kid and a kid on his way to high school and it is reciculous the way they teach you to add and subtract, I learned quicker using my fingers and what's the use if you can't give a customer correct change for a $20 bill or read basic instructions on how to put a model airplane together?,lol.

I am just saying

What is your point?

If you think that kids of different ethnic backgrounds shouldn't be in class together, there's a reason people consider you a "racist".

Education won't turn a grazing animal into a hunter. Nevertheless, we owe every kid an opportunity to discover and develop whatever potential they have. While the education system may have "failed" the kids who can't find Alabama on a map, the reasons for that failure extend well beyond the classroom walls.

I would think that people who believe it's the natural province of capital to exploit labor would be just delighted at the number of folks coming out of high school with no recourse except to work very hard for dirt wages.

My business career has really all been private sector. I typically made my daily bread through sales and marketing. Starting off in life with *zero*, I have twice owned or held a partnership in my own business, and sustained payrolls as high as thirty people in for-profit, private enterprises. I helped train a lot of people to become individually successful in business. You could hardly find somebody who more successfully fit the private capitalist mold. I could be a poster boy for Fox Business News.

I'm 60 now, and sort of easing into retirement. I'll be living off savings as well as rents and royalties (earned, but passive income), not a government pension, union pension (like a retired pilot we both know), or slopping at "the trough".