Books are inexpensive and enormously variant, auditory and audiovisual educational methods abound, from auditory tapes to television documentaries, and telephones, inexpensive letter - carrying, and the Internet put almost every American at easy reach of a friend or expert in a field. Despite this new availability of information, ignorance is increasing in the United States and test scores are plummeting. Despite the fact that compulsory education is three times as expensive as it was thirty years ago, even adjusted for inflation, the United States consistently achieves dismal results from its school system. Despite the enormous wealth that exists in this country, pedagogy is at a new low in this nation's history. Teachers' salaries are rising, and there are thousands of devoted teachers, but the proceeds are less each year.
Scientists have to be imported.
To suggest even greater expenditure on schools. Compulsory education is based on fallacies and hollow slogans. People are forced to slog through twelve years of school at a pace aimed at the average, even though even average students are capable of much more, as we can see by the success of other countries and this counry's past. Most people below the schools' standards are relegated to special categories, classes, and schools, designated as inferior and consigned to spend the rest of their lives marked as inferior to most. Most people above the schools' standards, in addition to having some of their earliest years, some of the most fertile for learning, wasted, begin to believe that learning is boring and arduous.