Kelly in Kansas

Mental multivitamin: "Ayup. In fits and starts, we have eliminated ability tracking from our schools; no more canaries, orioles, and blue jays in our classrooms; we are all birds, capable of fantastic eagle-like flight, although in this brave new classroom, no one dares to fly too high, too fast, or too soon. These days, teachers are not encouraged or trained to nurture the potential best (Best? Why, there is no best!) but rather to cater to the at-risk, to teach to the middle, and, as a result, to give everyone a just-so education. We parents, teachers, students celebrate and reward the 'above average' in Lake Woebegone; in other words, the mediocre. And nowhere is this more depressingly apparent than in our system of higher education, where, at some point in the last six decades, we came to embrace the notion that anyone who wants it should have access to a college education, which has (pardon the pun) by degrees, reduced the value of the college diploma to a mass transit pass, duly punched as one hops along the map of his life: preschool, elementary school, high school, college, job, retirement, death (with an ample bit of taxes tossed in for good measure).

Doubt me? Name twelve parents who number themselves among our nation’s middle class (I know, I know — who doesn’t?) who don’t expect their children to go to college after high school. It would be easier to find fifty, nay, one hundred who will be humiliated if their little Brandon or Dylan or Taylor doesn’t get into if not a good school at least a decent school. And they’re willing to pay; in fact, via college funds and other savings plans, they have been paying for just this moment in their little darlin’s life since, oh, before they were born. "