init4fun

Perhaps at first glance , you can see the blame here as being a chain of "who done wrong" , the parents , the department of education , societal erosion , etc .

BUT !

At the end of the day , once the child has grown , doesn't the ultimate responsibility lie with the person who allows his or her self to remain uneducated ? As in , what about taking personal responsibility for correcting areas in one's life that are lacking ?

Yes of course young children need to be properly educated , that much is obvious . But by the time they are teenagers/young adults , by the time they are 18 and we're putting guns in their hands and sending them into combat with our military , they should have already developed the presence of mind to realize that knowledge IS power , and that in order to become powerful the quest for knowledge has to be nothing less than a personally driven lifelong commitment . Making excuses for people's unwillingness to actively help educate themselves leads to all kinds of mollycoddling of people who otherwise should be taking the personal responsibility of taking care of themselves .

The government can't mandate or otherwise force someone to WANT be educated anymore than the government could force someone to want to make other healthy life/lifestyle choices , "Supersized" fast food menu bans be damned ! .....