Education is the future of our country and as such should require first priority in our national and state budget.
Elementary through high schools have seen their budgets devastated as have community colleges and universities.
Education is being cut across the board.
We, as a society, have seen fit to give education a back seat to everything else that seems more immediate.
Ignoring a problem won’t make it go away. We have taken a short cut that will eventually come back to haunt us.
As a society we seem to have made a plan to have a less and less educated public. Is this really what we want?
The service sector, the lowest paying job category in America has grown by leaps and bounds while our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced.
We still maintain the lead in technology but how long will this last when schools are cutting Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education.
Will life really be worth living after we eradicate the arts from our schools?
We will no longer have musicians or artists; those people who contribute to our culture.
Today’s instructors teach tomorrow’s leaders, and while we have never seen fit to pay them as much as CEOs, we have at least provided them classrooms in which to teach.
Now, with school’s budgets being slashed, we can’t even provide the classes students so desperately need.
California is ranked 49th in education statistics while education funding has dropped 40 percent since 1980, according to an independent analyst working for the Pell Institute.
Meanwhile, the United States ranks 18 in a list of 36 industrialized nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
This is not a good long-term plan.
With the fall of the middle class at home and the rise of China as the next world power, the United States must do all it can to maintain its superiority for the good of our way of life.
California is currently running a deficit of $20 billion solely to repay loans we have taken out, according to the legislative analysts office.
There are several ways to get money; pay off these loans, save the money spent on interest, take the hit even though it might be an uncomfortable cut in social programs, and invest the saved money in education.
Our nation is currently conducting overt military operations in two foreign countries to the tune of $1.2 trillion, according to a recent New York Times article.
Whether or not we agree if these wars should have been launched is irrelevant. In this economic crisis the time has come to choose them or us.
Choose us.
