Educator


Elsewhere throughout the Western world, the facts are hardly more encouraging. A British survey sponsored by The Sunday Times, for example, found 42 percent of those tested were unable to add the menu prices of a hamburger, French fries, apple pie and coffee. Moreover, one out of six British inhabitants could not correctly locate Great Britain on a world map.

All told, these dismal figures translate into a depressing economic scenario with annual costs to businesses in lost production and re-education now past the $300 billion mark. And when one factors in the grim links between illiteracy and criminality, world educational failures become too bleak to tally.