The Dumbing Of America

When I was growing up, it was a given that the United States produced some of the best and brightest in the fields of science and technology.

Nowadays, the products of American education can barely muster the skills to extrapolate how many miles they get out of a gallon of gasoline.

No wonder Bush is still president.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.