Richard Dawkins suffers stroke.

[Thumpalumpacus]

It seems to me that if you're rating the expense of child-rearing on your own standards which you've implied are higher than average, you're rather negating your own point.

                My standards are higher then normal, I'm more angry at world for not giving me a chance at happiness. I had to fight for every bit of knowledge I have cause of the censored education I received. The fight goes on for me to undo the damage public school. It would probably not of avoided the constant bullying, it might of been a little less if it was in a private settings. Who knows, I could of been a lot more intelligent with the back ground of a better education at an earlier age. That possibility angers me cause I was only given a lower American education and had to discover the rest on my own. It was not until I was about 24 I found about unit 731, why was this dark history not taught to me in high school? Why was so much history denied to me when I was in school? The fact Americans was practicing concepts on it's own citizens that Germans picked up on, and it was swept under the rug. If I had been in private school these lessons would of taught and not hidden away.

Schooling is useful, but you have to understand that public schools aren't intended for education, but are rather worker factories, pumping out workers for the economy.

It's good that you've taken responsibility for your own education.

None of this obviates the fact that your numbers are skewed by your preferences, and that there are other ways to obtain the results you desire with children. As a father, I assumed responsibility for my son's education, teaching him to read by reading to him nightly, teaching him arithmetic before he was in kindergarten, talking to him like an adult, and engaging him in discussions about current events and history. Maintaining a library where I could read a passage from any number of historians to illustrate a point. He attended a charter school -- a public school with competitive entrance exams. My son is now attending university at no cost thanks to grants and scholarships, some public, some private.

I can assure you that I've never earned close to 2.5 million dollars in my three-plus decades in the workforce.

That figure is skewed by your own preferences, laudable as they are, but it doesn't reflect the reality of child-rearing here in America.