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Fred's a very insightful bloke - which is a significant part of the reason he moved from the increasingly-bureaucratised Unitd Police States of America... to Mexico.
Down With Schools has a resonance for anybody who has ever taught in a publicly-funded University (as I have - even the self-selected Econometrics Honours students that I taught were not immune).
And anybody who's ever tried to teach in an urban State High School is either an idealist or a person whose degree results were so bad as to force them into teaching as an alternative to starvation...
That's why it's not all the kids' fault. The other (supply) side of the public education problem is at least as bad - low teacher standards due to the teaching bureaucracy being the last refuge of the underperforming tertiary student. It's the one place where an additional year's study takes the Pass graduate from the unemployment scrapheap to employability at something approaching Average Weekly Earnings.
I am old enough to remember when people who genuinely wanted to be teachers went to Teachers' College (just as people who genuinely wanted to marry doctors went to Nursing School)... now both of them pretend to require a degree.
It goes to show - form a powerful bureaucracy, and its bureaucrats soon get the idea that their constituency ought to be taken more seriously (Health and Education are two of the largest bureaucracies, along with Welfare and Defence).
