WisdomWorld

President Obama recently commented that the reason American K-12 education is falling behind other industrialized nations is because kids don’t spend enough time in school. His plan to save our education system from its slow death spiral is simple: on a national basis we should make school days longer and extend the average school year into more of the summer months. Really? The answer to returning our school systems to their once greater glory is to force our children to sit through even more hours upon hours of the liberal indoctrinal drivel that has displaced real teaching in our nations schools? Give me a break. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The spine of our public education system is broken, and no amount of Federal intervention is ever going to fix it. Why? Because it is the full weight of the U.S. Department of Education riding our education system pony style that broke it in the first place. Want to know how to fix it? Read on.

Primary school in open air. Teacher (priest) with class from the outskirts of Bucharest, around 1842.

Before we do anything, we as parents must step back and take stock of the fact that it is our individual responsibility to provide a quality education to our children, not the responsibility of the government. School districts were formed as tools to allow communities to pool their resources in order to assist parents in meeting that responsibility. The current system, which is governed by federal regulations and union contracts, has perverted that original purpose and replaced it with a behemoth of a machine whose goals have more to do with societization than education. The very school systems that we created to assist us have now usurped us, and dictate to us how our children should be taught instead of the other way around. The education of our children is our own individual responsibility. It easy to ignore that fact, but until we face it again as a people our education system is doomed.

What do we do about it? Simple. We take it back.

First of all, the U.S. Department of Education as it exists today needs to be abandoned. The federal government has no place in our public education system, and the very existence of this bloated, rotting bureaucracy is a slap in the face of every student, parent, teacher, administrator and locally elected school board member in America. Our school boards are elected by us to manage a school system that is owned by us, and they need to act that way. When the federal government decides that they are in charge, the elected members of our school boards have to stand resolute and do what they were elected to do. Represent us. If they won’t, they must be replaced. The U.S. Department of Education won’t go away on its own, but if communities across the nation turn their backs on them, and ignore them, they will become functionally impotent, with no more hold on our schools.

Part of the reason the U.S. Department of Education has gained such a stranglehold on our failing school system is that we became lazy. It’s too easy to sit at home, complaining that the system is a mess, and wondering when the government is going to fix it. As parents we have to hold our schools accountable again, and not to some federal agency, to us. We entrust our children to the school system because we believe that the specially trained teachers employed there are better able to teach our children, but how do we know? What do these people actually teach our kids? Reading? Writing? Math? Arguable considering the trending test results. Volunteerism? Activism? Socialism? Those seem to be common themes, but again, how do we know?

It is time that we demand an accurate accounting of everything that our educators are teaching our children. Every teacher must be required to inform every parent of what they intend to teach our children in their classrooms. Their syllabuses and talking points should be posted publicly, and be subject to parental review. If a teacher plans to spend their hour teaching my child how to solve simple algebraic equations, then the pre-class report will be nice and simple. A copy of the worksheet can be posted online on that class’s web page. If a teacher plans to explain to my child why a single payer health care system is preferable to a free market system, then they can post those talking points to the website as well. If the teacher plans to spend their hour teaching the proper construction of a functional irrigation system and instead the conversation turns to the effects of federal endangered species regulations on the local economy, that can be posted to the online class notes, too. These online class notes can be preserved year to year and be a tool for parents to decide what kind of a person they want teaching their kids. If we read them and find that a particular teacher manages to turn daily discussions of Shakespearean literature into daily discussions about the benefits of strong labor unions, we will be able to make educated decisions as parents as to whether or not this is the kind of person we want educating our children.

I know…you teachers out there are reading this and are up-in-arms right now screaming at me that we have no right to hold your occupation under a microscope. Too bad. You chose a profession where your actions will have a profound effect on the direction of the lives of our children. My children. And I want a say in how that education is provided. If putting your occupation under a microscope is the only way to do that, then so be it.

These are simple but important things that we can do to return our education system to its greater glory. Take back control of our childrens’ education from the federal government. Require adequate representation from the school board members that we elect to steward our schools. Demand accountability and transparency from our teachers. Not so tough, right?

Remember, your child’s education is your responsibility, and the school system is nothing more than a tool to help you provide your child the best education that you can. We can sharpen that tool, we can throw the tool out and get a new one, or we can throw the tool out for good and teach our kids at home. In the end, it’s our call. Either way, arbitrarily lengthening school days and school years on a national basis is just face makeup and yet another ploy to keep the power out of our hands and keep it in the hands of government.  That’s what got us into this educational conundrum in the first place.

Update September 11, 2009:  This is a story I wrote last year in remembrance of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. It’s now been 8 years since that fateful day, but the memory of it is still vivid in my mind, as are the emotions that this day brings back. We will always remember the 2819 people lost their lives that day, and that many of those were people who stepped up and became heroes. We will always remember the 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who gave their lives in selfless service to others. We will always remember those brave souls who rose up and fought the terrorists on Flight 93. We will always remember.

National Park Service 9-11 Statue of Liberty and WTC Fire

Today marks the 7th anniversary of a day our country will never forget. I don’t have to explain it to you. If I needed to, you would never understand anyway.

On that morning, I was scheduled to work the morning shift at one of our family businesses, and I was on my way to work at about 5:15am (Mountain Time) listening to the morning news when the newscaster mentioned something about a prominent leader and promoter of democracy in Afghanistan having been assassinated that morning. I didn’t give it much thought until later that morning.

A while later, during a break in customers, I caught the first report that some type of plane had crashed into one of the towers. Wow, I thought, that’s horrible. I wasn’t very good at taking care of my customers for the rest of that morning. Sure, I went through the motions, rang up their stuff, and took their money, but my ears and attention were on the radio that I had turned up to full blast. I listened intently as they reported the second plane had crashed into the second tower. Oh, God! I, along with every commentater, was sure now that this was a terrorist attack. I wondered at the time if it was related to the assassination report that I had heard that morning, but any further news of that was lost in the chaos that was unfolding in New York City.

I listened with horror as they described the collapse of the first tower, and was numb with the realization that possibly thousands of people were dying at that very moment. I had made a few calls home and to other family members throughout the morning, but I felt the need right then to talk to my wife again, so I ignored the customers that were in the store and called home. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but it was enough to comfort one another and keep us moving through the morning.

When the second tower fell, so did my heart. I listened as they described the loss of the firefighters who had entered the towers to save strangers, and the sadness compounded. I was glued to the radio or the television for the rest of the day.

For some reason, I had to be out of town that night, and my whole family spent it in a hotel a couple hundred miles from home. We had all been numb all day. We tried to explain to our three children, who were between 6 and 11 at the time, what had happened. They were too young to truly understand, thankfully, but I know that we were all struggling with what was happening. Later that night, probably after midnight, my wife and children were all asleep in the room, but I was still glued to the television, enthralled by what was happening to those people 2000 miles away, but so close to my heart.

At one point during the coverage, journalists were interviewing people from around the world and recording their reactions to the tragedy that had just befallen the people of New York. Most made the obvious and expected statements — that it was horrible, that their hearts go out, etc. But one person was different. She said something that will stick with me until the day I die. She was a middle aged French woman on the streets of Paris, and when the reporter asked her thoughts on what had happened that day, she said, “Today, we all suffer together. Today, we all cry together. Today, we are all Americans.”

That is when I cried. With my wife and children sleeping quietly all around me, I cried.

Obama’s vision for the future: It’s a new horror movie hybrid form of socialism that was bio-engineered in an underground laboratory somewhere in Chicago that blends all the worst parts of Marxism with all of the worst parts of Fascism, with a pinch of Environmentalism and a hint of Anti-Americanism mixed in just to get that right level of evil.