Originally Posted by Val
We water down the textbooks to make the material "accessible" and when it's still too much, we just skip stuff and pretend that the kids are still learning geometry. Then these kids get to college and wonder why they get stuck in remedial classes or wonder why college-level material is too hard for them.

Actually, what we've done in response to this is water down college too. Which makes it a self-fulfilling prophesy that "anyone can do college level work."