| Personally I would argue that the greatest way to a child a good education is to teach early, mainly get them into reading. But I think most parents feel they don't have the time to read to their kids and get them into reading. I don't think there should be any excuse for this, unless you really are doing three jobs a day to get a roof over your heads (though I don't think society should let a parent fall into such an awful situation). Oh, and for reasons I give later, make your kids over five watch the news, real news from a real source like the BBC or CNN too.
I also heard that the US education system starts at 6? I was in school at 3, and now you can get pre-nursery classes in the UK for 2.5 year olds.
I think it's also a fault of the US media, that they don't discuss the wider world enough, although there's not much you could do about this problem. In the UK broadsheets, about 1 third of the paper will cover none headlining international news, and it's not likely you'll find more than one page worth of gossiping shit. I could probably locate 95% of countries on a nameless map, and give the capitals of half of them, and I'm only 18. Most of this knowledge isn't from school but from watching and reading the news.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill |