Education And Competition!

Today we're going to discuss education; public school, government funded, institutions of learning. The process where most of our children are sent for indoctrination, funded by your tax dollars. Now in order to understand this process, we should first examine it's mission statement. What exactly is the government controlled education processes' mission statement? Is it to bring our youth up to speed and compete in the global market? Nope! Is it to prepare them to advance to a higher level of education so they may procure the highest paying jobs and become an asset to the community? Nope! Then what exactly is the mission statement of the single largest demand on your property taxes?

Curiously, it's to promote diversity. Education is further down the list, but the government's priority is to ensure that the playing field is level. So, with that in mind, students are shipped all over town to satisfy some kind of quota system, leaving God knows what size carbon footprint and sucking the tax dollars out of your pockets. Back prior to the twentieth century when the federal government didn't have their hands in the mix, schools weren't focused on diversity, their goal was to create a core of common values essential to a stable society. Does anyone out there feel like this is currently a stable society? Haven't the values of society eroded? And yet we are told that more money has to be poured into the system to keep our children competitive in the global fray. We may not be competitive, but we are diverse, illiterately diverse. Today you have to go to a four year college to get the same quality education a high school graduate received just a few decades ago. We're told if our children are going to be competitive in the job market they'll need a masters degree at least.

Then there's the monuments the school systems erect to edify themselves. Now my school was two story, red brick, and rectangular, you opened the windows when it was hot and they provided heat when it was cold. If it wasn't tiled, it was painted either white or gray. There were no common areas, student lounges, etc. We had classrooms and a gym for exercise. Now we construct architecture that would make Frank Lloyd Wright jealous, containing everything a diverse education system could desire, except the ability to fight illiteracy. We now graduate more students from high school that cannot read or write than ever before, but they are diverse! Somehow prior to all this advancement, we put a man in space using a pad of paper and a pencil for calculations. How did they do that without calculators and computers?

Poor teachers are grossly overpaid, and good teachers are grossly underpaid in a system designed to bring diversity to everyone. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates acquired than by merit. Designed by the collusion between government and the unions. If one were to deliberately seek to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, one could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structure that has developed in the education system of today. But we are all on a level playing field and no one is rewarded for exceptionalism. We don't want anyone to stand out, they might hurt someone's feelings.

Perhaps we should redefine our education system's mission statement! We're about to be told on Thursday, during the President's speech when he lays out his plan for improving our economy, that we need to spend more money on education to stay competitive. Who does that serve? Is the money being spent on education or perks, frills, and attempts to level the playing field? Now all of a sudden the government wants us to be competitive in the global market after we spent all this money being diverse and leveling the playing field. You want competition? Pay teachers for performance!

God Bless!
Capt. Bill