No, we haven't and that is in large part due to the same motives that also encourage that negative view on education that you mentioned.

I'll probably get some flak for saying this but the United States has always been an enterprise first, a nation second. I suspect our colonial roots has a lot to do with this. The colonies were privately owned by corporations chartered by the king and they were populated by people who functioned as working components in the colonial enterprise. The revolution only succeeded in a change of management. The corporate function of the population remains true to this very day.

This is a fundamental contrast with countries like France where the people existed BEFORE there was an actual reason for them. I think this is why countries like France put people first and in America we put business first.

Understanding this makes it easy to see why education is such a low priority here. The business that brought my family to America was in the aerospace industry, which in the early 60's was drawing most of it's talent from Europe, my father included. Here's the logic that justifies this...

If a company is forced to pay taxes to fund domestic education programs, they might get a 20% return in the form of successful graduates worthy of hiring. But they could get a 100% return if they save their money for selecting workers that have already graduated with engineering degrees from programs funded by other countries.

I would be less inclined to believe this is I only had that single example to go by, but now that I am also an engineer, I am noticing that most of my co-workers were educated outside the U.S. and this has been the pattern for the last 20 years.

I also read recently that immigrants are the most educated demographic in the U.S. Of course many people in rural America will automatically think of migrant farm workers and think the statement is absurd, but the fact is most immigrants coming to this country are highly educated and they are going to the cities where the white-collar work is with legal visas.

So the pattern seems to remain the same. If we were a country that puts people first, there would be a higher priority on educating our children. But if we are a country that puts business first, that 100% return on investment for the business will take a higher priority than educating our children.

The same pattern applies to healthcare. Most Europeans get healthcare because they are people, but in America you have to be employed.

Enterprise first, nation second. Not a very "patriotic" slogan but it explains a lot.

I have two of Paul Johnson's excellent histories, "The History of the Jews," and "The History of Christianity," in addition to his book on Darwin, delving into the tragic flaws that led Darwin to support the burgeoning eugenics movement that contributed to Hitler's holocaust in Germany.

"Paul Bede Johnson CBE (born 2 November 1928) is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author of over forty books. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian." (Wikipedia)

Paul Johnson wrote of his childhood in a book titled:"The Vanished Landscape : A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries"

From it's description on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0753819333
/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p5_i5

"Paul Johnson, the celebrated historian, grew up in Tunstall, one of the six towns around Stoke-on-Trent that made up the Potteries'. From an early age he was fascinated by the strange beauty of its volcanic landscape of fiery furnaces belching out heat and smoke.

"The Staffordshire Potteries is the industrial area encompassing the six towns, Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton that now make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. North Staffordshire became a centre of ceramic production in the early 17th century, due to the local availability of clay, salt, lead and coal.

"As a child he often accompanied his father - headmaster of the local art school and desperate to find jobs for his students, for this was the Hungry Thirties - to the individual pottery firms and their coal-fired ovens. His adored mother and father are at the heart of this story and his older sisters who, as much as his parents, brought him up."

"Children made their own amusements to an extent unimaginable today, and his life was extraordinarily free and unsupervised. No door was locked - Poverty was everywhere but so were the Ten Commandments.'

"The book ends in 1938 as the 11-year-old author queues at the town-hall for a gas mask."

There is one brief paragraph above printed in BOLD print, which IMHO, explains the most significant factor that changed in England, in the United States, and in the western "civilized" world since Paul Johnson's childhood in the 30's that created a society that is no longer safe for a child to play outside anywhere unattended.

That is the removal of the presence, knowledge, and respect for the Ten Commandments, and by extension, the knowledge of the Word of God, from our homes, our schools and our public buildings.

Yeah, I wanted to get my point out there. Partisan comments always seem to interfere with that. LOL

But to give some credit back to America, I think it's important to note that some of us ARE trying to put people first. I would call them liberals because they were not always Democrats but they were always fighting the status quo and because over the last century those liberals of various parties actually made America better than it's original design and it was always in the interest of the people. But the bias from the plutocracy that owns America and has since expanded to global proportions is still pushing business first.

Today, it seems that generally speaking, the liberals and the people they fight for are represented in legislation by Democrats, while the plutocratic .01% are championed by Republicans who are in turn supported by the useful idiocy that has consumed roughly 40% of us.

That's my personal take anyway.

I noticed in your response to Blade that you used wisdom as part of your definition of an intellectual. I would disagree that wisdom is a component of the intellectual model of today. A stated component, perhaps, but not a true component. Or we wouldn't have all those pesky unintended consequences. Have you ever worked with a "flower" chart? Roots, stem, petals (going around and back to beginning), then the stamen? Getting to the stamen (true replicable change/addition/sustainability) is the goal. It's a bee-ach of a model because it stretches the mind.

Thank you and ist's a real pleasure talking to you, Let's all put them back in the closets where they belong right?. let's have the children be born so they can be raped abused, exploited and starved, a much more compassionate thing to do. And even though we are a country comprised of immigrants, let's all put a new saying up on the Statue of Liberty that reads "We're all filled up here so get the f**k out." With the exception of people with a spendable income. Read Straight up post it fits the new right such as yourself to a T.

Thank you and ist's a real pleasure talking to you. Let's all put them back in the closets where they belong right?. Or have the children be born so they can be raped, abused, exploited and starved, a much more compassionate thing to do. And even though we are a country comprised of immigrants, let's all put a new saying up on the Statue of Liberty that reads "We're all filled up here so get the f**k out." With the exception of people with a spendable income. Read Straight up post it fits the new right such as yourself to a T.