One of the subjects making the go rounds these days is all the talk about ‘education’. The general theory is that a quality education of people leads to more jobs, more productivity and a better society. Well, I agree with that principle but only in general terms.
Problem is, the bulk of our school system doesn’t provide a quality education. Certainly not in Arizona.
It’s not about funding either. Arizona spends plenty of money to build, maintain and provide a quality education at taxpayer’s cost to anyone that wants one. Sure, it’s less than most states, but you have to factor in that that education funding is based on tax revenues from income, property and sales taxes on GDP. Arizona’s economy is in the dumps recently, and living in Arizona means you have an average lower income than most of the nation.
In fact, it’s in one of the bottom 10 states. Even during the boom years, Arizona’s average income never ranked higher than 29th in the nation. That’s going to have a huge effect on the government revenue stream.
When you take that into consideration, Arizona spends MORE than most other states, not less, as a percentage of everyone’s income and of the GDP. The fact that our education system is not producing quality students hurts even more when you put it into that context.
But let’s put that aside for a minute.
Why exactly ARE schools failing so badly—and it’s not just here in Arizona, but nationwide. Films, books and studies abound about all the problems in the system itself, which stymies creative thought, has a limiting effect on higher standards, and is controlled by interests other than the actual child’s education. Worse, it provides a virtually limitless stream of taxpayer funds that essentially enslave the borrower to the state and system and its whims.
It would be easy to say ‘oh it’s the unions’ or ‘oh it’s the funding’ but really, it’s a much more complex problem. 
America’s education system has really only been built since the turn of the 20thcentury, while most Americans from an historical point of view were educated in wooden shacks out on the prairie. The fact remains, America’s quality of education has gradually lessened since it has increased access to that education. As the system grew more complex and better funded, kids grew up learning in quantity but not quality. The lack of an Ivy League education never held back Einstein or Lincoln; their greatness didn’t come from a textbook, it came from experiencing life and that meant making mistakes and learning from them, not being told what to do from a textbook.
The reason for this is simple—in order to process more kids through an increasingly growing system, governments increased funding and bureaucratic complexity, and thus were forced to lower standards. Kids are not educated so much any more as they are processed through a system that churns out diplomas and credentials but does little to expand the minds of those so processed.
It is a conveyor belt of clockwork apples, churned out through a European style dual education system, which is more focused on building gears for the machine rather than on expanding minds. It has turned into a method of creating robots to sit in cubicles and process papers for an employer, or to punch a clock from 9 to 5 and dream of better days and better times. It is an education method that has become infiltrated with a political ideal, rather than be exclusive to the study of knowledge and the mind.
Modern corporations and big business has simply outsourced it’s job training to the American taxpayer.
This is the legacy of government and education; just as it is anything government gets involved in—automated, machine like and without soul. Kids and young adults whose minds are so pliable, are now merely fodder for a society that devours creative thought like a hungry lion seeking more weakened gazelles for the dinner table. The public education system is an indifferent, thoughtless brute that cares little for the product it belches from its education factories– soulless and of limited use to an enlightened society.
What America needs to do is get out of the education business completely. Stop funding college educations with an endless supply of free loans and grants that do nothing but perpetuate diploma mills that enrich their masters. Encourage and promote more private trade schools and craftsman by emphasizing quality over quantity by institutional education. Shut down the Department of Education, which doesn’t educate children, but instead has become a huge welfare program.
Most importantly, education needs to set higher standards and hold the kids to them. That means some will fall behind. Some may also not advance. But this is a reality society needs to accept– that not everyone is destined to become a lawyer, a doctor or engineer. Society needs skilled workers of all types, from ditch diggers to nuclear engineers. Education can not always provide those people. It also needs inventors and entrepreneurs– and in this, colleges could never fill the niche. It is not the nature of the beast.
Without consequence there can be no greatness, without difficulty there can be no validity. Nothing great ever emerged from something that was done easily.
