locally grown

[kandrathe]

I always have mixed thoughts about the subject of education. First I fully agree that teachers should get bigger salaries, but the problems begin with the children and their parents. Even when you have don't have the best funded school with the best teachers, you should study and 'go for it'. And lets be clear, studying for an exam in high school is not in anybodies list of 100 most difficult things you have to do in your life.

In the US, one good thing that has come out of "No Child Left Behind" is that it has forced the primary and secondary education systems to define in excruciating detail what learning objectives need to be mastered before ascending to the next level. This enables the sources for education whether they be the home, private, or public education to all compete on a level field with the same clear objectives. Then, parents can determine which path will bring the child to the best outcome. The only sticking point, as I see it now, is funding. If home based, or a private school fails to deliver to its education objectives the parents will move them to a school which will allow the student to progress. But, if a public school fails, until the latest accountability measures were put into place it would continue to be a conduit of uneducated youth.

So consider this model for building a car; 1) you can write to BMW, and for a nominal fee to cover costs, they send you all the parts and an extensive guide on how to do it yourself. 2) you can go to BMW deluxe, and highly skilled and competitively paid workers will build your car to your exact specification with a high level of customer service and individual care. or 3) you can have the government factory build the car for you inexpensively with variable quality, no guarantee and sometimes outright failure. Yet, everyone in the US clamors for option 3 when it comes to education, while it serves to make building them cheap, it also undermines the profitability and competitiveness of option 2. So, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that there is no role for government in insuring that education be of high quality and universal, however, it's just the world has experienced repeatedly the relationship between price, quality and competitiveness in the manufacturing arena. I believe that if education were to allow their workers to be competitive, then you would see wages increase, but that would also mean that parents should be responsible for paying the price for their children's education.

After secondary school, the colleges and universities have for years worked on creating equivalences which allow the credits for a Calculus course taught in one school to akin to the one taught half way across the world. Other than the accreditation of the college or university, the requirements for a degree in civil engineering from one school is pretty similar to any other.

I am an advocate though, for all people to get as much classical education as they possibly can, but this requires people to seek it, work hard, and prove the investment was worth it. I believe only by making that investment personal will we be able to insure that we are not wasting our effort and resources on those that will do little or nothing with what has been given to them. It was daunting to have such a mountain of student loans when I graduated, but it was worth it and I had them paid off in a mere 10 years and that was due to the salary my education was able to help me secure. Unfortunately, not all scholastic endeavors have lucrative vocations awaiting their graduates. Which then, each school puts limits on how many "unnecessary" people (and sometimes even the necessary) are funded and allowed through the university system.