Ameliorations

Welcome to the new Ameliorations, Ameliorations 2.0. I’m finally going to get back into covering the news, but this time not as a passive bystander. I will be actively seeking out stories as well as providing opinion editorials. For those of you who want a return back to personal blogging, you can still get that. Ameliorations 1.0 is alive and well and where it belongs. I’m sorry for the suddenness with which this hit some people, but this is truly something I’ve been wanting to do for several years. With that in mind, I’ll be attending classes at Motlow as a full time student resuming my studies for a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Of course these changes won’t happen immediately, and it still may be several months before I begin my reporting as a Citizen Journalist, but the beginning of every successful endeavor is preceded by a well laid foundation. I consider this rearrangement of my blogs to be part of the well laid foundation. I have the tools at my disposal to do what people all over the world are doing today, something that even 30 years ago wouldn’t have been dreamed of by someone who wasn’t working for a newspaper, magazine or other media company. Let’s see where this amelioration takes me, takes us, and go from there. At the very least, I know I’m going to enjoy the ride.

Education in America has come a long way since this country was founded over 200 years ago. We’ve gone from blackboards and chalk to computers and projectors and overhead transparencies. It started out with those who wanted one could get one beyond what their parents gave them, if they could afford it and had the time. That wasn’t an issue though, while there was skilled labor, you could get all the on-the-job training you could stand. Time passed, more people could afford basic education for themselves and their kids; kids became smarter, communities grew larger and schools formed with voluntary education in mind. Some parents home schooled and the ‘public school’ was formed to deal with the rest. It was able to give a really good basic education, most of the time preparing students for college.

We were turning out students on par with more developed nations around the world at the time. Then our government got involved and started making basic and secondary (high) school education mandatory. To pay for this all they started to levy taxes and those who didn’t go to school had their parents fined and, more recently, jailed. Now our schools are in terrible shape. While we turn out some pretty smart people from time to time, and some of them even manage to find decent jobs stateside, for the most part the public education system as we know it today, mostly funded by state and local taxes, has taken a nose dive. Everything from budget shortfalls to bullying have escalated to such exaggerated levels one has a hard time truly understanding the scope of the problem. Incidents like Columbine and the Virginia Tech school shootings are just the dramatic tips of a mountain of problems that extends far below the surface. Are schools any more or less safe then they were 100 years ago? Guns and knives existed 100 years ago too and by and far were much less regulated then they are today but the worse you ever had to worry about in a school yard fight was a fist in your face. As the years have gone by and government regulations regarding schools have increased, so has the level of danger to the student.

Recently schools in Cumberland County, TN (News Channel 5) has had its doors closed for the past two weeks due to a 5 million dollar budget shortfall as of 22 August 2008. Of course its budget is predicated upon collecting taxes and having enough left over from other projects that are going on as well as the other functions of government. This inability to be able to pay for public education has three points of failure, as I see it.

• Funding for it is based upon levying taxes and those taxes have to be specifically earmarked for the education fund so they are essentially spent even before they are collected.
• It is government run and mandated and is thereby already doomed to failure.
• Attendance is mandatory for all, unless you can find private schooling or home schooling. Since everyone is generally subject to the taxes levied to pay for home schooling, most middle class families (a good majority of the U.S. population) just doesn’t bother with any of the alternatives because they can be a hassle or just too expensive

Let us take a look at the problems we have here.

Taxpayer Funded

The problem with this fail point is that the taxpayer base is always fluctuating. That, coupled with the incentive to spend instead of save, has always been a problem with our government. This incentive to spend has come back to haunt the Cumberland County school system and it is the kids who are paying the highest price. The fact that a project seems like a good idea doesn’t mean it is, and it definitely doesn’t mean that the government should take up the project. If it’s something the community wants, they should directly hire a contractor to do the job for them. Hiring out to the lowest bidder isn’t a new or complex idea or process.

It’s Government Run and Mandated

As we’ve seen throughout our own history, government run projects almost never go as planned, nearly always run over budget, and are overflowing with restrictions on how things can be done instead of letting the contractor get down to the business of doing a good job. Private and home schooled students have done consistently better on standardized assessment tests across the nation yet there are many states, Tennessee included, that seek to ban home schooling outright. One can offer a whole number of theories on the reasoning from lack of governmental control and indoctrination to lack of social ties to peers. That being the least plausible, especially in tight knit communities and especially those with a variety of junior league sports available that aren’t school affiliated. If we are truly concerned about America’s youth getting the best pre-college education they can, and private and home schooled students are out preforming public school students, we should be shutting down public schools instead of banning home schooling and home school collectives.

Mandatory Attendance

Mandatory attendance in included as a point of failure for one very important reason, when you force or draft someone into doing something against their will, they may resent you for it and will respond in a very predictable manner. If you force someone into the army they may desert. If you force someone into school they will rebel at such heavy-handed measures. They won’t do their homework or school work. They’ll get into trouble. There are many ways in which they will lash out. Knowing this — why do we continue to force our youth to participate? Will it better their lives? Maybe they’ll truly be happy as farmers or nursery workers. Maybe they just want to flip burgers all their lives.

We have several generations of youth who don’t know who they are or what they want to be because they have so many adults telling them what they should be. Soldiers. Doctors. Lawyers. Good Americans Who Fight the Good Fight. Let’s dispense with all of that and let them decide for themselves. Let them experience what life is really like with all the ugliness that goes with it. Send them out on a quest to discover who they and what they want out of life for themselves. So what if they make the “wrong” decisions? It is their decision to make. If we truly respected that, we wouldn’t force them to do anything. After all, all previous generations that have grown up with such heavy-handed measures have resented it just as much as the current one does. If we didn’t like it then, why would they like it now?

As for this school in Cumberland County, instead of correcting the budget shortfall, instead of home schooling their kids until the schools can open again, until they find beneficial alternatives both students and parents are protesting, and the county mayor is taking the school board to court. I wonder where the government gets that incentive to spend from in the first place. Don’t you?