Lost in the Wisconsin fracas is one very important fact about American education: it sucks. I mean, it has got to be the worst education system any Great Power has ever had. If an enemy was seeking to slowly destroy us over time, they could do no worse than to impose upon the education system we have today. We expend an astounding amount of resources on education and get very little in return.
One wonders – how many 20 year olds know what happened at Lepanto? Have heard of Metternich? Are familiar with what de Gama did? These are just three very important bits of information – lack of which would leave any person of our society with a flawed understanding of why things are they way they are. To me its not so much a matter of test scores but a matter of just how little they know when they get through the public school system. If you’re scoring high on a test which doesn’t really indicate knowledge, what is the point?
Not knowing things is pretty bad, but if the school were at least imparting good character then the deficiencies of education could be made up. The trouble is that the formation of worthwhile character is frowned upon in school. Teaching kids to be honest, sober and hard working can’t be fitted in to a scheduled filled with self esteem building and instructions on the finer points of sexual acts. There is a definite air of slipshod morality among our youth – and only those lucky enough to go become soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines seem to escape it. While there is often generosity on the part of young, there is little concept of sacrifice, while such things as respecting someone enough to not have sex with them until marriage is increasingly alien.
I have all kinds of respect for teachers. Often they are burdened with trying to fix kids who have been wrecked by indolent parents and/or kids who have been so polluted with popular culture sex and violence that its hard to hammer any sense in to them. Budgets are tight for the class room – supernumerary levels of administration taking first priority in funding in all too many schools (out here in Clark County, Nevada, about half of all school district employees are not teachers). In this fight over education we must remember to not belabor the teachers. There are some stunningly bad ones out there, but the general run is pretty good – and they are doing a job most of us would run away screaming from.
And yet, the system is broken – and it didn’t just get broken yesterday. We started the process of wrecking our education system about a century ago, though the real work of destruction didn’t hit until the 1970s. We, the people, got it all wrong. We allowed people who wanted to live off the education system to run the show, while teachers, students and what is learned are allowed to rot. Lots of ideas have been and will be put before the American people – but in context of today’s debate, the best move we can possibly make is to get the unions out of the education picture. It is unions which provided the muscle and the (mostly Democrat) campaign donations. In large measure, what has happened to American education is the result of having union bosses call the shots – just as they are in Wisconsin.
The whole of education must be reformed from top to bottom, and this cannot be done while unions retain their collective bargaining power outside of wages. Keeping the unions around means we’ll have a large, well-funded and decidedly Democrat organization undercutting the needs of educating – and prohibiting the rest of us from trying to fix it.
Walker and the Wisconsin GOP are simply doing what is necessary. It is the only way to clear out the union-created cobwebs which both destroy education, and prohibit anyone form fixing it. Well past time to get done with this and get on with the real issue – educating the kids.
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