Education is failing. Or maybe a way to say it is that we are failing education. We will hear a lot about education during the year and a half because it will be a real hot election topic. Every politician will become an expert in education just so they can win votes. You will hear candidates like Mile Pence, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Doug Burgum would eliminate the Department of Education. You have Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, and Tim Scott say that we have to destroy the Teacher’s Union. So some want to destroy the people that over see our education and some want to destroy the people that do the educating. When they are done, what is left of education?

I will admit that all the changes to education that the Republicans made during the Bush Administration didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What in the hell did “no child left behind” mean? It was a buzz phrase that rolled off the tongue real well but what did it mean and how were we going to accomplish that. The Department of Education’s origin goes back to 1867 when Andrew Johnson signed legislation for a Department of Education. It was supposed to be a way to collect information and statistics about the nation’s schools and provide advice to schools in the same way the Department of Agriculture helped farmers. At the time it was small and was not a cabinet position. It was housed under various other departments over time and eventually came under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Jimmy Carter was the one that advocated the creation of a cabinet level Department of Education in 1979 and it became a reality in 1980. Many Republicans opposed the creation calling it unconstitutional and deemed it an unnecessary and an illegal federal bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs. By 1984 the Republican Party dropped an objection to the Department of Education from their platform. After Newt Gingrich, Republican, led a takeover of both Houses in 1994 spending on education actually soared. In 1996 the abolishment of the Department returned to the party platform but when Bush won in 2000 he actually expanded the department.

I have always looked at the Department of Education as something that started out as a good idea but has grown from what it was originally intended to so. It became too big and too cumbersome to control. I think it has turned our educational institutions and our teachers into political pawns, being used by both parties. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was more of a slogan than it was an attainable goal. In many cases I think that it did a lot of damage to the poorer students that instead of being pushed along in the system to be held back and eventually dropped out of the system completely. When you are almost old enough to drive to school when you are in middle school because you had been held back you don’t have a lot in common with your fellow students. Education is a very complex issue and in most cases they will not be solved by people like Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence. The finish line for every student may be different and trying to make it all the same may be one of the failures of the system.

I always break things down to their simplest form. What do you need for a school? I have always said the three main ingredients are a student, a book and a teacher. I would say that everything else is fluff but that would be an exaggeration but I always thought that you like build a business you build education from the bottom up. You don’t hire the CEO first. I know that you need a quality building and a community that is committed to education. If the community is not committed to education the Teachers are fighting a losing battle. I also know that you need to have family involvement in the education of the child. By that I mean a family structure that makes sure the child in prepared everyday to face the challenges that they are supposed to face. Are they well fed? Have you checked to make sure all homework is done? Have they bathed and dressed themselves properly? If things like this have been done the child will know that you think that their education is important to them. Do you try and help support the teachers or do you throw up road blocks making harder on the teachers? If the child knows that you don’t respect the job of the teacher will the child not respect the Teacher either?  At home is where education starts not the classroom. It is the change of the home environment that has changed education much more than anything else.

Tell a teacher how to teach is not helping a child’s education. Telling a teacher what to teach is not educating children at all. Education is not something that shouldn’t be able to change because someone doesn’t like it. Not liking something has very little to do with education. Just because you are a racist doesn’t mean that everyone should be denied being taught real history. Too many of us have learned our history from Hollywood and not enough from books. When something is based, supposedly, on a true story it doesn’t mean what you are watching is real history. Growing up we had historical movies on how great America was by showing us how Edison invented the light bulb or how Alexander Bell invented the telephone. It was always about America exceptionalism so we grew up with a very one sided view of what America really was. When I was in middle school the movie “How the West Was Won” came out and entire history classes went to the theater to see the movie like this movie reflected the real history of this country’s western expansion. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie but it was a piece of fiction. I don’t remember seeing a single Black person in the entire movie. The only Indians were made to look like savages. Hollywood should entertain and real history should be learned from books written by real historians and not by Hollywood scriptwriters.

We have groups now claiming that they want to take back our education and that thought scares me. We have people wanting to bring back prayer into our schools when I can’t remember a single time praying in school in the 50s or 60s. We have people saying that they don’t want Critical Race Theory taught in our schools when in reality they don’t want Race taught at all. They talk about education grooming children when what they really want to do is groom our children. This has done before in history with deadly results. You can’t say gay. You can’t say the Rosa Parks was a Black woman. We ban books. Not just any books but classics like “To Kill a Mocking Bird” and the “Diary of Anne Frank”. We have people in Florida calling classic art pornography. There are White people that only want history taught that makes them look superior. What we have is a minority trying to dummy down the majority and that is not helping the our educational system. Please leave religion out of our classrooms, all religions. I remember when the entire Catholic Mass was in Latin. People were believing in words that they didn’t even know what they meant. Our classroom are meant to teach child how to think and teach them how to survive in a very diverse world that keeps getting smaller. A world with many colors, sexual identities, nationalities and religions is what are facing these children when they enter the working world.  

To be honest with you I really don’t care what happens to the Department of Education. What I care about is Education being handled by real educators. I really don’t want bigoted amateurs trying to tell professional educators what to think or what to teach. Our Educational system has deteriorated because our families have deteriorated. Hate is not taught in our schools, it is taught at home. Racism is not taught in our schools, it is taught in the home. Things that are lacking like love is not taught in our schools, they taught at home.