[M_Six]

I bet the one thing all of the success stories above had in common was an ability to learn. Even if you don't speak a language, you can survive if you can learn.

Part of the problem with unemployment and an apparent inability to improve oneself stems from a lack of even the very fundamentals of learning. Too many troubled schools are passing students along who cannot read at any level. And forget simple math. It's a sin to flunk or hold back students who don't meet minimum standards, so they get shuffled along until they reach 12th grade, then they get handed a completely useless diploma and are sent out into the world, or (all too often) sent off to college on some "scholarship" aimed at disadvantaged youth. While such programs have laudable goals, the same "everybody gets to go to college" dogma that pervades the US these days makes these programs laughable instead of laudable. Even back in the mid-80's when I was teaching courses for the US Army in Germany, I saw high school graduates who could not read the simplest sentences. I asked them how they got past the Army's entrance exams and to a man they answered that their recruiter had taken the test for them. All this passing along of underachieving students is supposed to avoid destroying their self-confidence, but all it does is delay the effect until it's no longer the school's problem.

Schools need to go back to the basics and teach kids first and foremost to read and do simple math. Dick and Jane stuff and multiplication tables. Worry about the cultural mumbo-jumbo and all that tripe later. If kids can't read, they can't learn. Simple as that. If you can't learn, you can't improve. And that's how we end up with so many flunkies who have given up and just put their hand out (or end up criminals).