Education: The one resource we can’t afford to screw up – but are.

We live in a society that likes to think that its most important resources are the physical ones like gold, diamonds, oil, or just about anything that can be translated to a dollar amount. However when it comes to the intangible resources we slough them off as if they aren’t important – something that we can worry about later.

The most important intangible resource we have as a society is the education of our children and right now it is in a state of crisis in the US, and to a degree in Canada as well. Like everything else in our society it is seeing massive waves of change and not all of them are for the better. As these waves of change come crashing down around us our children are increasingly finding themselves adrift in a world that has continually downgraded its responsibility to the future by denying children the best of class education that they need, and deserve.

As Alvin Toffler, noted American futurist, wrote in Revolutionary Wealth:

Perhaps the greatest case of wave conflict in America will be paid by nearly fifty million children currently compulsorily enrolled in schools that are attempting to prepare them – and not very successfully at that – for jobs that won’t exist. Call that stealing the future.

Education is about far more than jobs. But the schools, with minute exceptions, also fail to prepare students for their roles as consumers and prosumers. Nor does this system, by and large, help kids cope with the rising complexity and new life options they face in sex, marriage, ethics and other dimensions of the emerging society. Least of all does it succeed in introducing more than a tiny fraction of them to the enormous pleasure of learning itself.

This is what happens when education becomes more about the bureaucrats running the system and the politicians looking to constantly make brownie points. This is why we have states like Texas looking to influence the rest of the countries schools through the textbooks used in classes. It is able to do this because it is the second largest purchasers of textbooks, next to California, and the Texas school board want to adjust what it calls a liberal bias.

Brian Monroe writes in a Huffington Post article:

After two years of heated political debate, the Texas State Board of Education spent the past week incorporating their own conservative values into final guidelines for history and social studies classes taught in the state’s public schools for the next 10 years. They voted late Friday to adopt a host of sweeping changes. In the process, their decisions may force the entire nation to also adopt their radical right-wing re-write of history.

Among the proposed changes were plans to “teach” children to challenge the “solvency” of “long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare” and other euphemistic views of history that, for example, would refer to the slave trade as simply the “Atlantic triangular trade.” Oh, the conservative members of the board also hoped that no one noticed that they omitted from textbooks the name of the 44th President of The United States: Barack Obama.

If there is one thing that education must be is unbiased in anything being taught. By propagating personal political or religious biases we are short changing our children and their ability to make informed decisions based on what they have learned in the past. We in effect are feeding them a poisoned apple and crippling them before they have even left the starting gate on life.

Not only are we crippling our children with biases and prejudices we are also crippling them within the very walls of the places that are suppose to be enriching them. From California to New York schools are seeing massive cuts to their budgets. Teachers are being laid off (but all the school board members keep theirs), classes are being cut, and those that remain deal with larger classes.

Some will say that we’re going through a really hard economic times and we need to save money where ever we can, even if that means making cuts to education. Others might also suggest that the education system already costs too much and that there needs to be cutbacks. Yet politicians vote themselves pay raises, CEOs are getting insane bonuses even though their companies are failing, sports stars are signing massive multi-million dollar contracts.

The students? Well they get a standard of education that is seeing them slowly slipping down the global ratings of education excellence. They get a learning environment where getting a teacher that truly cares about teaching is more of a lottery draw. They get to try and survive and learn in a environment that sees more violence on a daily basis that you would see in downtown areas.

While it might be nice to daydream that all these cuts to the very lifeblood of our economic future will be good for the system in the long run is short-sighted. How can a society that consistently sends students who are so ill prepared in even some of the most basic skills out into a working world and expect that they are going to return the country to any type of prominence?

When all you are doing is churning out students that will be lucky to get jobs at WalMart or some other minimum wage jobs how can you expect them to be able to compete against students from other countries for those all important jobs in science, technology or even big business. How can you possibly expect to be able to produce the next crop of CEOs or entrepreneurs when some of those students can’t even read or perform basic math.

As Bill Gates said in 2005

America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded…. By obsolete, I mean our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today… This isn’t an accident or flaw in the system; it is the system.

There is hope though but it is so mired in politics that one has to wonder if there is really any light at the end of the tunnel. Against a lot of odds groups like Teach for America, Knowledge Is Power Program and New Leaders for New Schools, and other education reform groups spread across America, are trying to bring about change. Change that could see our children be able to excel, to have the best education possible.

We need change t o education. We need to understand that the education of our kids will provide us with the most important resource that any society needs in order to survive and flourish. With every cut to education we make we hasten our headlong rush into oblivion. You can’t build a successful and creative society when everyone is a WalMart greeter or they believe that there is no future for them.

Instead of cutting education budgets we should be increasing them. We should be doing everything we possibly can to encourage our children to strive to be the best and the smartest in the world. We should be giving them every tool possible to be able to compete in an increasingly competitive world that is leaving them behind. We should be encouraging, and rewarding, those teachers who rise above the mediocrity and do everything they can to show our children that there is indeed a future and that they can help shape it.

If we don’t then the we will only have ourselves to blame as we all fade away from the world stage.