Is education the hope of the future?

If we believe, as I so often hear said by politicians, public official and social critic's, that education is the hope of the future, than why are we so loath to provide it. I see three things wrong with our education system. It's underfunded, over managed and expected outcomes are not clear.

Take a look at many school districts and you will find schools that are not providing the basic tools that their students need to learn the skills they need to compete. Hopefully we're past the stage where we feel that if we throw enough computers at a school somehow we've done the job. In almost all of the schools were we did that in the early eighties and nineties, the teachers didn't know what to do with them. Currently the kids in the medium to higher income school have better computers at home than the schools do, but at least in the area of technology the schools are catching up as far as teaching the skills needed. But just like most of the infrastructure in the United States physical plants, the school buildings themselves are falling short of the needs and requirements. A book could be written on the era where we built cheap disposable buildings and put in temporary class rooms that we are paying for today.

If you look at the budget for your local school separate, if you can, the money spent for actually teaching the children vs. the money spent for managing the schools. It is true that a lot of the management time is spent on mandated programs that have little to do with reading, writing and arithmetic, but the sad fact it can be up to 40-45% of the school budget. The value of these programs and this over management is doubtful. It may surprise you how many educators will agree.

Outcomes in public education are all over the place. The public school is not a simple place were children go to learn anymore and maybe it never was. We learn to socialize in school. We learn how to work together in school. We learn how to identify our strengths and weakness's in school. Now we learn diversity, safe sex, anger management and any number of other things that we may have learned at home in the past, but today mom and dad are both working, so we expect that the school will fill that void.

The problem today is if the school fills that void with something we don't like, if it goes against our personal beliefs, religious practice or morals, we reserve the right to complain about it. This is good except when the alternative is to teach our personal beliefs, religious practices or morals at the expense of someone else's interpretation of these matters.

The school today seems to me to be a microcosm of a community. All of the problems and all of the strengths are reflected there. Schools are a mythical place in the minds of parents. They are the place of either fond or painful memories. But most assuredly they are not the reality that their kids face on a day to day basis