Waiting for Somebody

On Gail Collins on Waiting for Superman:

I was a teacher for thirty years, the first three in E.Lansing High School, the rest in colleges and universities. I left a tenured full professorship when my mother died, and I was thus free to roam the world as a freelance critic for a Philadelphia alternative weekly.

The sad fact is that we have "outsourced" K-12 education to playpen media. Until we retrieve this gross "trahison des clercs" we will send half-educated consumers to college to learn how to make compliant consumers of their peers and those, unluckiest of all, underclass dropouts, not only from failing schools, but into unfulfilled lives.

America is fast becoming a class society committed to making millionaires and minions for the Millies. We will continue to thrash around with childish Tea Parties until we realize how dishonest we've been about our nonexistent Exceptionalism.