American Schooling System, Is it effective? Options

[ersatz]

in dumbing us down: the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling, john taylor gatto presents the seven-lesson system that american public schools teach children: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and that one cannot hide. our school system enters children into a system that breeds fear of curiosity, short attention spans, fear of authority, and drowns out any individuality and eagerness for learning that we innately have and would have if we were put to our own resources.

what is the american school system attempting to achieve with the compulsory schooling & curriculum that we currently have? does it work? is this truly education? what can we do to fix it?

our country had higher rates of literacy before compulsory schooling was in place. people learned to read and write and count, on their own terms, when they needed to, for their own reasons. individuals had intellectual curiosity and if they didn't necessarily, they learned a trade and were happy that way without being discouraged and graded on their merits in subjects that didn't apply to them. people learned to do things for themselves; the thinkers were the thinkers and the doers were the doers. the american school system does not breed great thinkers; we are one of the most intellectually devoid countries in the world while at the same time claiming to be the most prosperous. does that strike anyone as odd?

[Infravermelho]

I always wanted to know how does that kind of thing works on United States and i think that so far there is no Michael Moore documentary about that.
Well, Brazilian education sucks worst. I wish college here was like in USA, here we have to do an exam to pass to the college, my teacher said that over there you just get recommended or something like. The problem is the Racial Quota. They give black people, indians, people with disability and people who went to public schools almost a free pass to get into the best colleges. So people who worked hard for that can't get in, there aren't enough places. The worst part is that most of these people give up in the first week, they just don't have the education required for the course, they weren't properly tested.