More kids become disenfranchised due to lower budgets and shitier schools. On top of the fact the most textbooks out there are approved by very conservative organizations often leaving out many facts and events from history and science textbooks that their world view point disagreed with.
Schools have been turned into test taking and not understanding. You learn something for a semester and then delete it from memory shortly after a class is done. Something needs to get figured out, cause it just leads to more issues within local communities that then get reflected in our politics and leads to uneducated foreign policy disasters among other pains on both domestic and international stages.
You bring up some good points, some of which I had not considered but the fact of the matter is that it is all excuses.
Don't understand something? Look it up.
Having trouble understanding something you looked up? Online tutors. Friends. Peers.
Don't like what the textbook is telling you? Who cares, Its what they want you to learn, So learn it. You don't have to agree with it.
Want to learn something your school doesn't find important, doesn't teach or your teacher is too incompetent to teach you? Look it up.
We know, In a perfect world the schools should do all this for us but it wasn't this way 30 years ago and it isn't this way now. Lets not act like this is something new.
Sorry, But everyone just looks for excuses IMO.
The specifics may change to a degree but the fact of the matter is it was the same when I/we? were kids in school. And I can't speak for anyone outside my circle of friends/family/peers but not only did we overcome it, But we did it with
much less available to us.
I fear this conversation is going to get pretty deep but I'm about to medicate and become sufficiently less smart so I'll reply to any rebuttals tonight or tomorrow. =D