The Future: Education

"None of the candidates really look beyond the walls of ......
We haven't paid attention to the future generations. I have told them: stop talking about housing problems and start looking at education. None of them really had a sense of the continuity in the .... world. You care for your children, but you don't care for your grandchildren. What we have suffered from so far is the absence of leadership."

Think about that quote. Let it sink in.

Now, think about our government’s lack of attention for decades now to education and watching our government get more and more ineffective. People with money being given more and more power only to predictably run things based on how much they could make, not on what was best for their company in the long-term and for the country.

Now, know that the quote is from Suleiman Mutawa, the former minister of Kuwait when talking about Kuwait and the Arab world back in the early 1990s.

Luckily, Obama has talked about it and hopefully follows through on his rhetoric of "army of new teachers" and being a believer in "holding teachers accountable.” The concern is the Democrats’ ties to the teacher’s unions. At least President-Elect Obama is open to charter schools and some other things that don't make teacher unions entirely happy. We'll see. It'll be on the citizens of the United States to make this government finally confront the problems in our education system.

One of President Bush's biggest failures has been the lack of actually funding No Child Left Behind and paying attention to education. Let us be clear though, every president has ignored education for far too many decades. Essentially, our government has believed education will take care of it self. We are living in the results.

We could, to our detriment, get caught up in the argument of too much ideology being taught, too much partisan views being taught on our youth, but our biggest problem is simple math, standard science, and spelling and grammar.

In trying to teach the intentions behind, and the implications of, certain events in our history you end up teaching ideologies instead of facts. The context of the times in which an event occurred is important, but there must be a careful balance between teaching the facts and the potential to impose ideologies. What happens after a specific event rarely gives an accurate and true context to an event, which is one thing to keep in mind as well.

We cannot ignore the saying, "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." Look at this financial mess, with too many similarities both in how we got here and how we're trying to fix it, as well as how we dealt with the great depression and the savings-and-loan problem of the 80s.

This country is clueless in its history. Liberals today don't know it was Southern Democrats who filibustered against the civil rights’ bills. Conservatives today don't know it was Republicans who wanted everything to do with religion stripped from governance of this country. Don't misunderstand either of those points. It was a Democrat that got the civil rights bills started and passed in the end. Republicans were religious people; however, they did not believe religion should play a role in dictating laws and policy. Religion was to be a deeply personal thing, practiced and talked about privately and/or among friends.

One thing our Founders understood, especially Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, was that educating the populace was the key to keeping this country afloat and prosperous. Maybe we'll get a Congress and a President that understands that some day. We can only hope that day is upon us.