Andres Valloud expresses astonishment at what passes for college level coursework these days. To be fair, the grade school level math he noticed was not coursework, but review - for the high school level math that was coursework.

A few years back, this might have surprised me, but my uncle has been teaching that level of remedial math at a university near him since retiring as a high school teacher. Some of the stories he tells about the students he gets are amazing, in the "how did they get to college" sense of amazing.

The problem seems to be an excess of compassion that is not linked to common sense. It is no favor to pass a kid through school when they continually fail basic subjects, and it continues to be no favor to them to send them to a college where they are certain to fail. Without basic standards being enforced, all this compassion yields is tragedy. Better to fail kids early, when there's a chance they'll learn something from it, than to feed a sense of entitlement.

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