One interesting aspect that the poster brought up was attributing some of the deficiencies to culture. Cultures which emphasize rote memorization in their education are usually maligned by western cultures because they result in individuals who lack the ability to improvise and adapt. Does anyone have any examples that go the other way (i.e. cultural aspects of western education that result in an individual being poorly suited for an occupation...even to the point of causing fatalities like being an airplane pilot)?
HNLIS (who replied below): you've been "hellbanned" since your first post. Probably related to your username, since most of your comments seem reasonable.
And yes, GA airports are getting shut down, but GA is still more popular in the US than in a lot of other countries. Alaska has a huge amount that is never going to go away, too.
Specifically, I think teaching k-12 is an occupation that requires a great deal of knowledge acquired via route memorization.
Anecdotally, my third grade teacher didn't understand long division, my eighth grade history teacher didn't know what an annotated bibliography was, and my 9th grade geometry teacher was debilitatingly dyslexic. While this didn't kill me, millions of Americans graduating college are crippled by debt - perhaps because they couldn't do the simple math required to make a budget and understand what would be required to pay it back?
My experience is that it's not a problem when a teacher doesn't know some particular fact from memory as long as he can say "I'll get back to you on that," and subsequently go and look it up.
I suspect the people falling into the college debt trap are by and large not doing so because they couldn't do the math. I suspect they are doing so because they didn't realize in the first place that they should make the decision with the part of their brain that does math calculations rather than the part that does social status calculations.
