Armed with an excuse to fail, they go through the rest of their lives expecting to be underachievers - and finding those expectations met. Institutional schools by design turn slow learners into failures. Institutional schools feed the formation of peer groups and peer pressure . At home, a child's best friends are his siblings and mom and dad. If you've read any of my soapbox articles or book reviews you know that I have strong feelings about the evolution of companies from organizations where the customer and the product come first to organizations where the bottom line comes first.
Schools are no exception.
While public education may have started with high goals and expectations, the dominant issues today center around job security and pay for teachers. Teachers are paid by seniority, not by performance. It's hard to fire a bad teacher, especially if he or she has been around a while. The National Education Association resists all efforts to require teachers to perform to a set of standards, preferring instead to rely on union muscle to assure teachers of jobs from year to year. This is not to say there are no good teachers.