Training Vs Education!

We've assigned a great deal of control over our children's education to the federal government, and the results are reflecting the change. Federal mandates, guidelines, and testing have taken the control out of the local school board hands and transferred it to Washington. The side effects of teaching children what to think, and not how to think is called by some, the dumbing down of America. If you take a long hard look at the issue, you'll realize children are being trained to secure a job. So we've opted for training instead of education. Education expands the mind and challenges you to come to conclusions on your own.

The proper way to educate someone is to lead them to the classics. The greatest example of all, and the book forbidden in today's classrooms, is the TEACHINGS of the Bible. Through parables and stories of those who've gone before us, the out come of good and bad behavior are laid before the student and then a choice can be made. That choice is the student's decision based on the input provided. The ability to make a decision exemplifies the difference between training and education, your challenged to think and come to your own conclusion.

It's not just the Bible that's relied upon in a classic Jefferson education. Writings of history provide wonderful inputs to dwell upon. Plato, Socrates, the iliad, the list goes on and on. Understanding how the greatest minds of history made decisions and came to conclusions, expand your thought processes, so you learn to find the answer within. Kind of polar opposite from turning on the computer and asking it what it thinks, so you can be led to a decision, based on questionable input. Who knows how qualified, if at all, the author of what you read in cyberspace? Don't get me wrong the computer is a valuable research tool, but it is limited to the experience and ability of the information's author, most of whom are nom-de-plume.

Where has this taken us? Well we have a government full of politicians right now running our country based on classroom theory, they learned from teachers, who were also told how to think. Why does it take weeks and months to make a decision in Washington? Perhaps they don't have the reasoning ability taught by the classics to base their decisions upon? Others have walked in their shoes in history and faced similar problems, the results of their decisions are there to base Washington's policy's on, yet it goes ignored. Why? Because our education system has failed to teach to students think, and it trains it's graduates for a task. These were trained to be politicians and lawyers. The results speak for themselves.

God Bless
Capt. Bill