Email
“We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered those prophetic words over 65 years ago, and while their truth may be no greater today than it was then, the urgency of those words most definitely are as the world’s technology expands exponentially every day.
The question then becomes, “Are we as a society committed to achieving that lofty goal of preparing our young people for the future?”
Sadly, I think not.
I base my rather unnatural pessimism on a number of factors that exist today that quite fortunately didn’t seem so prevalent when I was growing up – things like the high dropout rates for high schoolers; the desire of the tax base to reduce the amount of money that is used to educate U.S. students; the prevalent lack of interest by parents in their children’s educations; the lack of authority given teachers to maintain discipline in the classrooms; the new philosophy of “teaching to the test” and only to the test; the policies put forth by school boards to make a high school campus resemble a prison rather than a place of enlightenment; and the failure of the education system to understand that it exists to serve the students.
So long as we keep trying to shove more and more students into a classroom that doesn’t allow a teacher to work individually with students who need individual help and so long as teachers have to spend half of their time dealing with disruptions, we will never get where we need to be.
We taxpayers need to realize that we are all responsible for the education of all of the children in the community.
Whereas our greatest resource for the future survival of our country is our young people and their ability to achieve their greatest individual potentials, we need to give them the tools to do that.
Remember, the brain that has the ability to find a cure for cancer may be inside of a child who needs the help of the community. Are you willing to risk that kid dropping out at 16 because he saw no benefit in a school that didn’t encourage him to learn? Think about it.
