General Discussion

When I was coming up in the late 90s, most of the regular classes were simple information retention and regurgitation. Learn it long enough to pass the test, forget it, brush up on it before the final, then forget it again forever after. The current regime of standardized testing really doesn't help with this phenomenon, either.

When I went through high school it was the accelerated and AP classes that really pushed us to think, to interpret, to draw inferences and form opinions. Memorizing the facts was secondary to understanding how and why they mattered. In a regular history course a student might be asked when the Battle of Gettysburg took place. In an accelerated or AP history course we were asked to explain what led to the battle, why it was significant, and how its outcome affected the remainder of the Civil War.

You're right that other industrialized nations are going to leave us in the dust. I saw that during my childhood in Mississippi. Many of my classmates were the children of Vietnamese immigrants fresh off the boat, as it were, the first members of their families to be born in America. Their parents were relentlessly focused on their kids' education, pushing them to excel. The rest of our peers... not so much.

Valuing education is a culture and a mindset, whether you value it for its own sake or for the doors it can open in your life. It seems, given the virulent strain of anti-intellectualism that's alive and well in modern America, that our culture has collectively decided education is less important than figuring out how to get more online clout.