My latest class, for those not so informed, (which is a lot of people, really,) is one called "Critical Issues in Education," of which, of course, there are seen to be many. True enough. But I don't see a great number of the problems springing necessarily from education itself, or the way it occurs; the problem, and this is just me talkin', is one of mind-set. The "de-mechanization," and passing of the industrial age, has left great numbers of people in the dust, simply because they cannot compete. They don't have the education, because they have never seen the need for it; the assumption was always there that a good-paying job in a factory somewhere or other, would meet a person's needs. Who needs education when you're pretty much going to be treated like a rat in a cage anyway? So we developed a society where people spent eight, or twelve hours a day, putting one part on top of another; the mind-numbing single-mindedness of what was, dare I say it, Henry Ford's brainstorm. (We won't even get into the whole idea of him being an anti-Semite, or any of the other million things he was.) This, backed by the swaddling, cultured complacency of unions like the UAW, eventually priced the American worker right out of a job. China is huge right now for manufacturing, because America can't be; relatively unskilled American workers are seen to cost too much. For those who haven't gotten the message, the manufacturing jobs that have gone to other parts of the world are not coming back; ever. Still, service and other industries bemoan not being able to find qualified candidates to fill positions that require a modern set of skills. So there probably are issues in education, some of them even critical. But the biggest issue remains the way some people think. You wanna see a real, dramatic change in education? Get up offa that thing, and don't depend on something that no longer exists. Poverty isn't the problem, inadequate amounts of self-motivation is the bigger issue.