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My girlfriend lives in a ghetto part of South Texas. I was helping her with her Stats homework the other night, and as I was explaining, she said she didn't understand fractions, and not complex fractions, but the reduction of 2/8 to 1/4. This is something I learned in the 5th grade.

The Valentine's thing just today, she asked me what an adjective was. I learned that in 2nd grade if not earlier.

What is wrong with our education system that we can't even teach simple Math and English? Instead of health care, we need to focus more on education. If we had more trained doctors, maybe health care would be less expensive. If we had more trained lawyers, insurance might be easier to come by. Our country needs to get it's priorities straight, many other countries have far surpassed us in education. There are pre-teens out there who seriously write essays in text talk. The foreign students do better in English than our domestic students.

Discuss the failure of a school system we have here.

The Canadian system has some issues as well - I am still amazed that some people were able to fail the literacy test in grade 10... =/

The word you're looking for is "its," rather than "it's," and your entire sentence is a comma splice.

I'd say you illustrated your point quite well =P

@ Pirate Captain: Or you'll become a politician, or you'll move to California, where you'll be paid to perfect your art of doing nothing.

I don't think it's just the schools. I think America is much too rewarding of lack of effort in general. Country needs fixing.

My English teacher got on to me recently about it. I never really learned a lot about commas and stuff so when I write longer sentences I just put commas by every conjunction and hope it's right xD

Well you can't expect a 7 year old to sit down and instantly take out a notebook and jot down pages of notes. At that age they don't know what good their education will get them until it's too late.

The American education system can work, but unfortunately it doesn't work in some of the poorer or corrupt parts of the country. It needs work no argument there, but it can work. I even possess a plan to do it, as part of my debate work.

Also the statistic that other nations have higher literacy and math rates is off because the average of America is knocked down a peg or two because of the areas that don't get a proper education. I wouldn't be surprised at all if our best students are better than those in other countries. But the fact that the average is down so much speaks of itself on the fact that our educational system needs work.

I remember that thing.. our class was the first year of grade 10 students at my high school to take that test, we all passed. Every class after us? Failed miserably.

It's frightening to think that these people are destined to take control of the world someday.