Before he became occupied with other concerns, President Bush enjoyed referring to himself as the \education president"" and before that, the ""education governor."" His predecessor, Bill Clinton, also used both terms frequently. In fact, everybody likes to call himself the ""education president,"" the ""education governor"" or the ""education senator."" But as campaign strategist James Carville point out, if all these people are telling the truth, our country would be the ""education nation,"" and right now, it definitely is not.
Education is the single most important issue in America today. I don't say this simply because it is the issue that affects me most right now. The education of today's students from elementary through graduate school is, and should be considered, vitally important for America's long-term peace, stability and economic health. After all, the policy issues we hear about on the evening news do not exist in a vacuum; they are all connected, and they are all derived, directly or indirectly, from education.
Take the outsourcing of American jobs. Republicans are correct when they say that isolationist trade policies are not the answer. Democrats are correct when they propose extending unemployment benefits for workers and ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs. However, the reality behind the rhetoric is that in this 21st century global economy, companies can pay their workers seven dollars an hour in Milwaukee or seven cents an hour in Beijing, and tax breaks or no tax breaks, low-tech jobs will inevitably go where low-tech labor is cheapest.
Americans must start competing for new high-tech, high-wage jobs, and the only way to do this is through education. More jobs than ever require college degrees and an unprecedented number also recommend graduate and doctoral degrees. A better education leads to a better job, and a better job leads to more money. More money leads to, among many other things, greater ability to buy health insurance. Greater ability to buy health insurance leads to less money spent by the federal government on Medicare. And less money spent by the federal government leads to lower taxes.
With all of this prosperity stemming from it, why isn't education the government's top priority? The budget for the Department of Education is $63 billion. That may sound like a lot, but it's actually only 2.7 percent of the total federal budget and only six percent of all money spent on education, with states picking up the rest. In contrast, the military budget is $401 billion; the reconstruction of Iraq is at $200 billion and counting, and President Bush's tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy total over $2 trillion. In addition, his sole education accomplishment, the No Child Left Behind Act, does a lot to increase testing but very little to increase learning, and he didn't even fund it completely.
So what is the solution? Let's roll back the tax cuts for the rich and use that money to pay for a huge increase in the federal education budget: $100 billion, $200 billion, whatever it takes.
We need to fund math and science in order to make our technology sector competitive again. We need to fund art, music and other things that stimulate imagination and original thinking instead of just rote memorization. We need to fund health, physical education and sex education. We need to fund peace studies and nonviolent conflict resolution. We need to fund after-school programs so that students have somewhere to be and something to do after school instead of hanging out in the street. We need to fund adult education so that workers whose jobs have been outsourced can learn new skills. We must allow good educators to work their magic, and we must trust them to do it in their own unique individual styles. As compensation, we should offer them the six-figure salaries they deserve because they do more good in their jobs than almost any other profession.
Now be honest. Does all this talk of things like six-figure salaries for teachers sound far-fetched? I can see how it would. But consider that $2 trillion in tax cuts and $600 billion on wars has achieved neither economic prosperity nor world peace. Isn't it worth diverting a small percentage of these huge amounts of money to educate our citizens? To recite one of my favorite quotes, ""I dream of a day when schools have all the funding they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a stealth bomber.""
Nick Barbash is a sophomore majoring in political science and international studies. He can be reached at opinion@daily cardinal.com. His column runs every Thursday inThe Daily Cardinal.
