At 08:57 AM 7/30/96 -0700, David Kline wrote:

A question though: What about the 3 million hard-working, reading, middle-class folks who have been downsized into oblivion the last three years alone? What about the tens of millions of readers who had the skills needed for the industrial age, but not for the information age?

I mean actual ability to read and write *meaningfully*. Not the official "literacy" handed out in thousands of local institutions designed to produce mental retardation in this country. It is a skill almost are capable of (most had it in 1856 -- we know this because we can read the Lincoln-Douglas debates), but monopoly government institutions can no more make genuine literacy than they can make decent steel.

Well, change means pain, and we'll get to the millennium one way or another. But we can do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way means severe social dislocation, possibly even threats to democracy. The easy way seems the smarter approach -- no serious effort at reforming education and at skills retraining has ever been undertaken, and it seems a better use of our tax dollars than most of the crap it's spent on now.

H.L. Mencken (always an optimist) said that a significant improvement in the quality of American education could only be achieved if you dynamited all the schools and shot all the teachers. Whether that is true or not. The governments have had the minds of our children since 1870 or so. If they haven't done a better job than this perhaps it is time to retire them. DCF