[9th Engineer]

I'm not saying every American has a good chance of becoming a millionare, but it's perfectly possible to live comfortably. We are moving away from an industry focused on unskilled labor and trying to become one of businesses, skilled workers, and academics.
I take a rather strong view on this but it is coupled with an even stronger view of our parallel resposibility to provide an education that can take every student as far as they are willing to go. I cannot emphasize this enough, the single most important part of everyone's life before the age of 20-25 is becoming educated, and it is my generations fight to make it possible for every student to have the opportunity. Unfortunately we are still far from this, I absolutely admit it, and it's mostly because of the ignorence in our society about the times we live in and the irresposibility of many members of the older generation. Parents must never burden their children with responsibilities that stop them from persuing their education. I personally see this as an afront as serious as physical and emotional abuse, and it is certainly shameful. It may not be malicious, but if it exists the student should have the opportunity to escape it. The Japanese treat highschool very similarly to how we treat university, and students will sometimes travel and live on their own in order to attend the best highschool they can. We should make an effort to start some sort of subsidized housing programs around highschools for students comming from bad homes, and perhaps even a type of dormatory would be a good idea.

I know the typical response is "what do you think will happen if you put highschool students in a dormatory or give them their own appartment? You must be absolutely crazy to think that anything like that won't be completely destroyed on an annual basis". But that is assuming highschool students keep the same attitudes that they do now. They don't have a sense of responsibility because they arn't given any, I got to see the flip side of this while I was staying at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Over there, any student who fails out or is expelled for damage or misbehavior(it's alot easier than over here for this to happen) will probably be stuck selling noodles from a street cart for the rest of their life. Guess what? Dorms that are 15 years old are in perfect condition, there are no problems on campus and everyone treats their academics as a matter of life and death. Even if you think it sounds brutal I can tell you it really isn't. The students are happy and go about their business just like any American student does. There are coffee houses, lounges, and concerts held on campus for entertainment and it's all done at low expense because the students actually act like reasonable people. This is our generations fight now, and we need to increase advocacy programs that address this issue.