American high schools are peculiar in that the holder of a high school diploma could have gotten the equivalent of two years of college education - or at the other extreme have learned just enough to read his diploma by making out all the Roman characters with his lips. America is a land of opportunity: you get out what you put in. And if some put in garbage, they get ...

I believe the greatest source of our economic strength is our extensive education system, which gives everyone second and third chances and allows late bloomers to do their thing after driving their families crazy for years - My brother was one of those late bloomers and he did drive me nuts until he ended up at MIT and graduated from there with two graduate degrees, so excuse my rant.

However, with college tuition going up at twice the rate of inflation for the last 40 years, I don't know whether we can afford to maintain even the parts of our education system that are known to work. I suspect that places such as Singapore run a very good university system without driving the taxpayer into the ground, and we need to learn from them how they do it.



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