The most remarkable aspect of America╒s failure to educate its people is the number of basic facts that the schools fail to address during twelve plus years of childhood incarceration. Such salient information as the responsibility of family to care for its young and the aged is ignored. Nobody ever tells the kids that a day will come when they will need to take custodial charge of their parents in their dotage. Students are not taught to save and invest for a future they cannot imagine without some help. Basic facts about our world are withheld for social and political purposes take, for instance, gold.

Everything you need to know about gold could be taught in two school day lectures in science class. Gold is valuable for one reason. People around the world accept it as "currency" for trade and tribute. They do this because of the unique character of gold. Gold does not react with oxygen!

Indeed, it is the only element on the planet that does not corrode, tarnish, rust burn or otherwise oxidize. That means that it cannot be counterfeited. Pure, (24-karat) gold can be tested by the most primitive means or the highest tech assay. It always stays the same. Immutable and gleaming. The simplest test is fire. Gold when heated to just below melting glows with an apricot orange color unlike any other metal. When it cools, any discoloration is the result of impurities, thereby marking the coin as phony.

Also useful for determining the degree of purity is the "acid test" in which a scratch sample of the item to be tested is subjected to several intensities of acid, which dissolve impurities much as the fire, allowing accurate measurement of the degree of alloy.

That's about it! There are around thirty-two grams in an ounce of gold, as opposed to feathers, which only need twenty-eight. A Karat is a measuring device equal to 4.1 divided into 100 percent, making 24 karat the highest rating.

One explanation for the failure to explain the above simple truths is the tendency of government, ours and everyone else╒s who issue paper money, to inflate their currency, decreasing its value compared with gold. At the turn of the last century, gold was officially pegged at thirty-two U.S. dollars to the ounce, meaning a buck would buy 1/32 of an ounce or one gram of oro, you puro. ╩Today a dollar buys 1/1140 of that same golden ounce, giving you some idea of how our government has managed our affairs over the past hundred years.

Another reason that we aren╒t taught the golden rules is the jewelry industry, which loves to sell lesser value for higher prices. In America most jewelry is 14 karat, or 56 percent pure. Nobody in the rest of the world considers anything less that eighteen as a storage of value, and most want 22 karat for their refugee chain fashion. (Chains are the most convenient method of carrying weight while traveling. Coins will tear open pockets by their weight, and gold bars are hard to spend at thousands of buck each).

That's the story of Gold, and considering the impending dollar collapse being predicted by pessimistic pundits, you might just need to know what they never taught you in school.