[from Bob Alm]
Re: Big Government. [see http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-adults-score-below-average-worldwide-test for the Associated Press story that is the source of the above image]
Big Government has been involved in education for fifty years while results have deteriorated. The Department OF Education is just one of fifty or one hundred departments that have expanded our federal government and caused our spending to grow completely out of control. It’s not only the day to day cost – hundreds of thousands of employees have been promised retirement benefits that appear only as unfunded liabilities that exceed $90 trillion dollars. Staggering!
What is worse, our electorate is now made up of millions of poorly educated citizens
who want more and more benefits from this Big Government. Our poorly educated work force can not keep us competitive in the world wide market place ergo our economy suffers. High corporate taxes – Big Governments’ income, is another significant factor.
Now, we have a charismatic president, capable of delivering stirring rhetoric, but ill prepared to govern this massive government.
Big Governments’ answer to our education problem is the same answer it has for every problem – THROW MORE MONEY AT IT!
After eight years of night school and forty years in business, one thing I have learned is, decisions are best made at the source of the activities. Education is a typical example.
Local government and local school boards produced a good school system years ago, before the government became involved. Yes, the situation is different today – the internet should be a part of the education system, but make the decisions locally – please, don’t have Big Government mess it up.
Bob Alm
1 comment:
Bob, thanks for giving me your permission to share your well-expressed views with our TVPClub audience.
Clearly, something has gone wrong with US education and that something coincided with greater federal involvement.
Even "no child left behind" which was a great cooperative effort by Democrat Teddy Kennedy and Republican George W Bush, while helping some, has been screwed up by the Feds and does not yield the benefits I had hoped for when I supported it.
I agree with you that new technology, which you refer to as "the Internet" has great potential, and, I guess, a federal role, but the specific use and content of educational materials using this great technology should be left to the individual states and localities.
Perhaps the role of the Feds should be limited to subsidy so that children below the poverty line can have iPads (or other tablet computers) and then let local ingenuity, and both volunteer (such as Kahn academy which is now subsidized by Bill Gates) and profit-making enterprises compete to provide the educational materials, with the ultimate choice in the hands of local school boards, teachers, parents, and individual students.
Ira Glickstein
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