College graduates and the English language

I often have to read. It is necessary for my job, raising children, even just when I am sitting around watching TV. As I age though, I am wondering what is happening to the English language. I don't blame the students. I blame the educational system. With the "no kid left behind" belief, I feel a few important details are often missed. This issue affects more than just English. Let me expound:

• Strawberry sundae, not sunday
• You eat doughnuts from Dunkin Donuts. Donuts is part of a name. This is simular to catsup and Ketchup.
• The word "got" should never be used. For Pete's sake, do not use "gots."
• Stop ending sentences with adverbs that end with "ly."
• The period at the end of a sentence is placed inside the end quote.
• You jury-rig something.
• There are 15 uses for the word "capital" and 2 for "capitol." Capitol Records is a proper name.
• Etcetera is etc.
• The word ask is pronouced (sk). I do not want you to axe me...ever.
• Do not end a sentence with a preposition such as on or in.

History:

• Columbus nor Amerigo Vespucci discovered the new world. There were 10 million natives already here.
• There were other attacks on United States soil. If you only count wars after the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War was a large engagement. If you are only considering foreign attack on U.S. soil, the Japanese during World War II lauched balloons carrying incendiary devices that landed in the California forests.

Geography

• There are 50 states in the United States.
• The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C.
• New England is not a state, nor is it near old England. It is a region is the Northeast of the United States. This is like the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic etc.
• Everyone does not roll back or forward their clocks. Hawaii, Arizona and part of Indiana does not change time in the U.S.
• These are just a few of the examples I can provide. If you have children, please teach them the grammar that seems to elude the educational institutions. Maybe then the next time I see an interview on the television, it will not be filled with "gots to axe ya" and "all 52 states."
  

:edit: My sister is currently working on her second master's degree and has informed me that the fourth bullet under English is incorrect. Therefore, to avoid confusion, you may or may not pay attention to that bullet. It may be a case of hypercorrection.

Hypercorrection

Prescriptive grammarians, castigating various commonly used phrases of a vernacular language, run the risk of encouraging hypercorrections. Hypercorrections are the solecisms introduced into human speech by the strain of the effort made to avoid some form that the prescriptivists have forbidden.

Told to avoid using you and me as the nominative case (e.g. in "You and me are going..."), people will avoid the phrase you and me even when it appears in the oblique case, and will end up saying things like, "Between you and I..." Similar confusion surrounds the pronoun whom; people assume that whom is the formal and fancy version, and end up saying things like "Whom might you be?"

Told that they should never "drop" the ending -ly from adverbs, people produce new words like thusly, soonly, and fastly. Spurious adverb forms also appear behind words that are serving as a copula, and thus would call for a simple predicate in traditional grammar: "my eyes are going badly".

Another area of hypercorrection involves Greek and Latin looking words like octopus; the spurious plural octopi likens the octopus to a number of Latin words that form irregular plurals in -i. (Were there actually a classical plural of octopus, it would be octopodes.) Platypus, cactus, status, hiatus, rebus, syllabus, mandamus, and caucus are sometimes inflected the same way; none would be inflected that way in Latin or Greek. Virus sometimes gets the even more inappropriate pseudoclassical plural form virii, which presumes Latin *virius, and would pluralise bus as bi. All of these words take the regular English inflection in -es, but a few of the hypercorrected forms, such as cacti, have passed into such common usage as to be considered acceptable by some, despite their origins.

When pronunciation of learned words goes astray, it is sometimes called a hyperforeignism. For example, someone might assume, upon learning that the -s is silent in Mardi Gras, that coup de grâce is pronounced "coo de grah".

Another kind of hypercorrection arises when people try to use accents from foreign languages, often adding them spuriously. For example, one often sees habañero peppers, which should be habanero, as a consequence of a misapplied analogy with jalapeño.