Education and the degradation of our technological advantages

From time to time I get into a mood where I find myself questioning whether the US has a long term plan for anything.... This is one of those times. I am 42 years old, a product of the Kennedy era of public schooling, where tremendous support was given to NASA, and the geeks at mission control were the penultimate representation of problem solvers, and creative thinking. We were able to trust that in a situation such as the one that developed on Apollo 13, that there were people capable of dealing with whatever problems arose. I no longer feel that confidence. This is not meant as a slight to the people in those positions now, on the contrary, I fear that you may never be able to retire for want of replacements.

Over the summer we hire young people from high schools and college students returning home for the summer. I have recently come to work with several of them. One of these kids was recently being shown how to measure a piece of wood so that hardware could be applied. The lady that was teaching this person demonstrated the points to measure, and then said, "You take this measurement and divide by two to mark the hardware." At this point, the student pointed out, "I don't know how to divide, the other people just 'half it'." The lady that was teaching this person was as astonished as I was. There is another student who will be a senior in high school this year who is unable to multiply even single digit numbers.

Now, I am not picking on these kids, they are merely representative of the poor state of education in rural or low income areas. From what I have been able to gather in Minnesota, school districts are horribly under-funded. In order to compensate for the lack of federal funding, property taxes have been raised to the point where people cannot afford a further increase. School districts have done what they can to cut programs, staff, and many have consolidated across vast areas. In these cases, students are faced with long bus rides to and from schools. As fuel prices rise, busing is decreased, so students in outlying areas are unable to participate in the remaining extra-curricular programs because there is no transportation home for them.

With this in mind, I did a little research on the federal budget, just to see whether it appeared that there was adequate funding. You know, to try to get my head around whether we were squandering money in the wrong places or there just wasn't enough of it to go around. I found this graphic on The Washington Post web site. This shows that of the $2.5 trillion budget, a mere three percent goes to education. We spend nearly three times that amount on "Other," whatever that is. We also spend nearly three times the amount budgeted for education on interest for our national debt. I won't even go into the amount spent on national defense in relation to the education budget.

My feelings here are that money spent on education is an investment in our future, and the future of the United States. Our technological advantage has been our strength since the birth of our nation. From mass production of flint-lock rifles, using templates to cut the pieces, to the Apollo program, we have always embraced free thoughts and ideas. With the present administration we have turned our backs on these ideals and have taken great strides towards making it impossible for our country to remain a superpower.

These are my thoughts on this. As I continue to cogitate, I will probably add more to this post.