Points I'm Pondering

Point #1: Among the axioms of education is "Every teacher is a reading teacher." It should follow that every teacher is a reader, and that every education major is a reader. This is not being enforced.

Point #2: Another axiom is "All children can learn," or as Adler's Paideia Proposal phrases it, "All children are educable." This one kind of creeps me out, because the assertion suggests that not everyone thinks so. (Contrast "Schooling takes place in buildings," which is such a commonplace idea that no one bothers saying it, though a lot of science, PE and art can be done outdoors.)
As differentiated instruction advocate Jim Grant points out, not all children learn at the government rate (45 minutes a class, 180 days a year, 13 years until you're done)--certainly kids don't learn by merely being present when instruction takes place. One of my concerns about schooling is the amount of time being wasted. Why does kindergarten, which forty years ago was thought unnecessary, need to take seven hours a day? How much time in those thirteen years does a child spend traveling to and from school; standing in line; waiting for administrative items to be in order, for everyone to find the right page and a pencil and paper, for a disruption to be over and instruction to resume? How little time is spent thinking about big questions (or "throughlines" as they say at Project Zero)?
And for all that, if all children can learn and they are each spending 14,040 hours in school (less a few sick days) at a total cost of over $100,000 per student, why are so many finishing school with so little evident education? Right now there are about fifty million American children in public schools. If you add in the teachers (and I'm not including principals, support staff or those in post-secondary education), something like eighteen percent of Americans are going into school Monday morning.
Yet for all the investment of time and money, the average U.S. eighteen-year-old, by all appearances, is not so full of information as to name the capital of Canada (in some cases, I'm afraid, nor that of the United States), not skilled enough at reasoning to find the logical flaw in a letter to the editor, not good enough at math to compare the prices of different sizes of pizza, not engaged enough in civics to go out and make an informed vote for governor, not physically conditioned enough to run a mile, not law-abiding or health-conscious enough to have avoided binge drinking, and not sufficiently exposed to the fine arts to hum along to any classical music that hasn't been in a TV commercial lately. She or he has not learned to speak a second language fluently, is not ready for college math, and doesn't read any books that aren't required. A quarter of teens drop out before graduation. Of those who have a diploma, a fifth can't get into the military because of their low ASVAB scores.
So all children can learn, but many of them don't seem to be learning much in school. Is it possible to get the American system of education to a point that most people will find satisfactory?