What People Want from Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere

orionblastar

Yes, we should study countries like Finland that have a success of sorts.

LorenPechtel

To a large degree I agree with him. He gets one radically wrong, though--unions. He's attributing to unions the post-war boom that was actually due to the US having the only industrialized economy that had not been smashed by the war. Effectively a monopoly--of course we did good. But the unions take credit for it. And it's the very problem he's talking about that has caused the "decline" of the American worker--it's no longer a group selected from those in the best position, now it's a group of all. Unfortunately, he's right about our economy lacking enough jobs for those without sufficient academic prowess, even though he's wrong about what became of those jobs. (Reality: I've seen it--over 20+ years I watched my former employer increase productivity per labor hour about 5x. We were growing, this didn't cause any layoffs. It was the machinery that mattered--jobs were moving from doing a somewhat skilled operation by hand to feeding a machine that could do better on standardized stuff. The skilled operations were mostly for customers that wanted oddball stuff, plus some of us whose job was making the hardware and software.)