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Its sad that I’ve tried to write this post three times. What I’m trying to do is convince you that we have to spend much more on educating our nations children.

I rewrote the post because I found it difficult to convince you of something so obvious. It is a symptom of our anti-federalist movement that worthwhile spending measures must now be fought for even when the need for them is clear.

What a child learns while in school determines most of that child’s adulthood. His or her performance in school will correlate to how much money he or she makes which will correlate to life span, level of happiness, and every other aspect of that persons life.

You can doubtless name me many exceptions to the rule that education restricts a  persons opportunities. I can name some as well. But those people are so memorable in the first place because they buck such well established trends.

A college degree has always meant that a person can get a better job than with only a high school diploma.

But the high school diploma is losing value every year because the jobs that are lost as technology rushes forward are far more often blue than white collar.

The people most insolated from the threat of technological obsolescence are those who are most educated. A brain sergent is going to be replaced by a robot a century after a farmer has been.

Here are a few steps that everyone with common sense should agree we can take to vastly improve our public schools. These will cost. Good things do..

First. Lengthen the school day by an additional four hours. More time in school means kids have more time to learn. A longer school day will allow teachers to teach their subjects more comprehensively and will give them more time to work with students who are having trouble with the material. As well, a further ten hours a week will leave some time to lengthen things like art, music and gym. While these three things do not directly correlate to job skills in the future these are the things not including lunch and recess which make school bearable for those who aren’t jineezing to find out how the civil war started. Fun has a place in education.

Second. Hire more teachers. The reason for this is that class size has an effect on how well members of the class learn. Smaller class sizes allow teachers to know their students better and leave them more time to speak with students one on one. Up to a point a higher teacher to student ratio is better for the students than a lower teacher to student ratio.

Third. The reason that No child left behind looks like a bad law is because so many of our children have been left so far behind. Twenty states have been allowed by the Obama administration to opt out because they had no hope in hell of getting their stupid children to meet the goals set out in the legislation. A high school senior who made the grades to get into college and makes the choice not to attend should have been prepared in high school to perform well at the college level. Anything less  is evidence of the serious inadequacy of our schools.

Fourth. Standardized testing must be strengthened.

Here is the thing about a standardized test. If that test is on math, you either know the math or you don’t. If the test is on reading comprehension, and the questions are fairly designed if you comprehend what you read you’ll be fine. The point should not be to teach to a test. The point should be to design a test that shows how well the studentry has learned what we want our teachers to teach. Testing is one of the best evaluations we have to figure out what students know and what they don’t know. Again, the outrage over standardized testing is a reaction to some students abysmal performance in a given subject.

Fifth. It should be illegal to deliberately hold your child back from kindergarten until age six. Advantages often accrue to the eldest students in a class of five year olds. If its deemed necessary we can always change the cutoff to make this less tempting.

sixth. The kind of math we teach our children should diverge at some point in high school. If you want to go into mathematics you should be learning theoretical stuff. If you don’t, there’s no need to take Algebra. It makes no sense that kids graduate high school having learned to solve for X but lack the basic know how  to balance a checkbook or understand the contracts they sign with their first credit cards. This is not to say that school should only teach what will be necessary for a high school graduate to know to benefit him day to day. There is intrinsic value in knowledge and in the high schools version of a liberal arts education. But for those college graduates who do not intend to major in a discipline which does not rely on mathematics the last time they’re going to have to solve a complex algebraic equation is on the last day of algebra. English, History,  Science and a foreign language teach students many things about our world. Math teaches students the operations that are required of them to spend and save money. Algebra teaches a child nothing but algebra.

Seventh. Intelligent Design is a lie. It is by no means a scientific theory.  . At the absolute best it is merely a faint possibility with no evidence backing it up and much evidence against it. . Evolution is a scientific theory. The definition of a scientific theory and the definition of your own “theory” of whatever  subject  you have  cogitated on in your spare time today are not related. For the last time a scientific theory is a hypothesis which has thus far held up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. Evolution, gravity, relativity. These are theories.

Intelligent Design is wishful thinking.

Testicles on the outside. An eighty year life span. Cancer, aids, disability. If after a day of thinking about it you could not come up with any improvements to the planets design or the design of the human body it follows that you are more intelligent than whatever force it was that allegedly designed you.

Schools that persist in propagating lies such as this should be stripped of accreditation at once.

Eighth. Students who are struggling academically should be held back earlier rather than later. Passing these students through the grades helps no one but lazy teachers.

Ninth. In addition to hiring more teachers, we should give all of our teachers a raise.  Teachers are why you know things. While it is true you may have been an autodidact after your formal education came to an end, the foundations on which you continued to learn were set by your teachers. Engaged and expert teachers who can make knowledge interesting to students have a quantifiable effect on students performance. We want the best teachers teaching our kids, and the best don’t agree to work for anyone at fifty grand a year.

Tenth. All school food should be healthy. Our ever expanding waistlines prove that we have no trouble over eating at home. There is no need to allow our kids to swell like leaches sucking at an  aorta while in school.

Some of these prescriptions might be setting off alarm bells. The question you might be asking right now is, aren’t some of these dictums statist? And my answer to you is yes.

While a child is at school he is the schools, the governments responsibility. Many parents do a bad job raising their offspring. This shouldn’t have any baring on what our schools do. If a kid wants to eat a big mac, after school he can easily obtain a big mac. If he wants to sit on his ass and play no sports at home, he’s perfectly free to sit on his ass. But we can make him sweat for an hour and a half a day in school.

Children are the most precious commodity in the world, and the responsibility we have as a country to educate them well is sacrosanct. And we are abandoning it.

We must fight for an orgy of  spending on education. Throwing money at a problem will not fix the problem. But developing strategies to fix the problem and appropriating the necessary funds to implement those strategies will fix those problems.

The Obama administrations race to the top program is the right idea but in miniature. The best educated country that has a large enough population to affect the world will be the superpower of the twenty-first century.

I’m selfish. I live in America. I don’t want to move, and so I hope that the our country will make a serious finantial comitment to our public schools.

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