If you deem that you are, then you are part of just 1/3 of America's high school students, according to Bob Herbert in the NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22herbert.htm...1cbe9d193&ei=5087%0A

Herbert makes an interesting inference from his data. He writes, "When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong." Does this mean that the goal for American secondary education is to make 100% of high school graduates ready for collegiate work? What kind of collegiate curriculum is in mind?

As one whose daily work often involves copy-editing material by graduates whose sixteen years of taxpayer-funded "education" have left them incapable of correctly differentiating between "its" and "it's", I doubt if anything would surprise me very much about collegiate, uh, standards.

Nevertheless this report, on Steve Sailer's website (credited, alas, merely to someone called "headache") did interest me:

In Germany, according to the report,

"[t]here exists a 3-tiered education system here where kids who are not academic material are weeded out fairly early on (age 14-16) and sent on an artisan track. Many eventually become Meister, which is an arduous 5-year qualification procedure after the initial artisanship training (2 years) and basically authorizes an artisan to open his own business and train other artisans. As a Meister these artisans often make more money than engineers and other professionals, typically EUR 150-250 per hour, depending in their skill. Those artisans who don't make Meister get more advanced training and become Facharbeiter, specialized artisans.

"When you travel through Germany you can see that the quality of the infrastructure is higher than that in your typical Anglo-Saxon country. It's because of these Meister and Facharbeiter, people who were weeded out of the academic track early on in school and placed on a rigorous artisan track where there is sufficient theory but above all lots of practical training and discipline.

"Training under a Meister is comparable with being drilled by a sergeant, except you don't just learn to shoot a rifle, instead you learn how to do beautiful stone carvings for one of the cathedrals, how to do quality woodwork, how to restore an old building, how to make high-quality concrete, or how to operate a CNC machine in one of the high-tech factories here.

"Most of these workers would fail in academia and are not college material but their handiwork brings joy to everyone and boosts the country's standing and economy. In addition many of them are fairly wealthy and form the backbone of the economy. This is one of the reasons Germany is not so dependent on large corporations as the US and that the political landscape here is not so heavily in the pocket of big business.

"The only real dropouts are a few percentage German sloths who end up cleaning public parks and of course all the foreigners' kids."

R J:

What is comparable in America during and after high school to Germany's artisanship track? I may be dealing with at least one child in my family who is not "academic material," but I sure want to see her pursue high quality training in a satisfying and worthwhile endeavor.