To me, one of the basic failures of the American education system, something I've written about in the past, is the denial of complexity.

Life is not a multiple choice test with only one correct answer, yet much of current U.S. education focuses on training students to take such tests. When I was going to school, I could also never understand the emphasis on memorization of information that was easy to look up when needed (even back in the dark ages before computers with internet connections). Instead, I always wanted to know how things worked and why things happened -- to try to understand the "big picture." (And, yes, that requires some understanding of math.)

-- Ernest