A "way out" for the USA is stressing "stellar" education to encourage the competative advantages of intelligence and invention for the next generation.

Competitiveness is what brought the present situation about. And if the US is to stay "competitive" in the global capitalist economy, the present educational strategy is spot on: no educational resources are wasted. Only a small elite needs to be really well educated, so they can run the show; a larger group needs a certain amount of technical knowledge so they can do the steadily diminishing number of jobs that really require it; and the vast majority are most profitably kept ignorant and superstitious so they'll go from one McJob to another convinced that Jesus is looking out for them - it's far cheaper to give them Bibles than microscopes, and you certainly don't want them learning enough history to understand the world they're in. The more of the population that stays ignorant, the better the capitalist system is functioning.

Th 1 brite lites th txt gnr8tion. There has never been mass literacy on the present scale in all human history. It's not literacy as measured by book reading, but worldwide, the volume of words being written on mobile phones FAR eclipses the text production rate of any previous age. People ARE getting educated, but not by teachers and not in ways directed by the capitalist elite. Nobody knows where that's going to lead.