Ejucashun

If there is one, single thing that is most important to keeping this country alive, it is taking back the education of our children from the leftists who are running our public school system.

Just as the children of the old Soviet Union were inculcated from day one with propaganda, so are our children in this country having these leftist messages drilled into their heads.

A couple of years ago I went to my ten-year-old step-daughter’s school to have lunch with her.

As I walked through the front doors I almost went into shock.

Covering almost every inch of the walls were posters that the kids had made featuring “diversity” and environmentalism.

Why, I wondered, was promoting the left-wing agenda more important than reading, writing and arithmetic? When the hell did this happen?

I’ve had it with Republicans who are terrified of blaming the teachers. Over and over I hear them say things like, “I’m not attacking the teachers, but the education system is out of control”.
Well, here’s a little heads-up on teachers.

The following isn’t an original thought, but it’s one that makes a whole lot of sense when you look at our colleges and Universities.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s a lot of people got out of going to Vietnam by going to college. If you were in college and maintained a decent grade-point-average, you didn’t get drafted, which means that a lot of students weren’t there to gain an education, but to avoid the war.

Now, if you were in college, but weren’t necessarily there to get an education, what would you do? Why, take the easiest courses available, of course. And what were the easiest courses? Why, Liberal Arts, of course. And what did a degree in Liberal Arts qualify you for? Why, not much, other than teaching.

And so, you had a large number of people who got out of college and went into teaching by default. Now, that’s bad enough when applied to the public education system, but a very large number of those people weren’t just afraid of being killed in the war but were actively against it. In other words, they were liberals.

So now we have a bunch of liberals who are suddenly flooded into our public education system and also teaching at the colleges.

At some point (I don’t think that it was planned) they realized that they had the whole next generation of America sitting in front of them. They realized that these kids’ heads were empty. They realized that they had the perfect opportunity to stuff these empty heads with their own views and, therefore, shape the thinking of an entire generation, who would go on to teach the next generation, and so on until critical mass was achieved and communism was realized in America without the use of one evil, icky gun.

And there you have the American Public Education System

And now you have more people graduating from college with a Liberal Arts degree and finding out that they are qualified to do nothing but join the Teachers’ union and get a job teaching. I actually saw one recent college graduate who said that she had a Liberal Arts degree on the news say something to the effect of, “I guess (like) if I can’t find a job soon I’ll have to (like) go into teaching or something (ya know?)”.

Picture the teachers in your school (if you can remember back that far). How many of them were really into it? How many of them were just gung-ho about teaching kids to think and how many were just there doing what they had to so they could get paid?

Of the teacher’s that I had, I can think of maybe three who were truly excited about what they were doing. Out of probably fifty or so that I had from Kindergarten to 12th grade.

Even most of the teachers in the post-secondary schools that I’ve went to obviously didn’t really want to be there.

Most of my teachers had the attitude that God (if they believed in Him), was punishing them by forcing them to sit in a room with all of these worthless children. I always got the impression that they’d rather be substituting for crash-test-dummies than pursuing their current occupation.

Yeah there were plenty of kids who were complete idiots and those of us who liked to see what we could get away with and I’m sure it’s no different today, if not worse. Teaching kids like that wouldn’t be any fun, but these people either A) chose this career or, B) graduated from college qualified to do nothing else.

In other words, they made their own bed. Now, if they’d just lie down in it and quit whining.

Teachers’ pay

If you have ever watched the network news or read a newspaper you KNOW that teacher’s are vastly underpaid and hugely overworked for the heroic service that they provide.

But, hey, wait a minute. Let’s think about this.

They say that the average teacher’s starting salary is about $40,000 per year.

They work 9 months out of the year, officially. And how many “Holidays” and “Vacation” days do they get every year?

I drive by our local High School every day and, as often as not, on Mondays and/or Fridays the parking lots are deserted except for the occasional tumbleweed.

So let’s make that nine months eight. I guarantee you that they get at least a month off when you count all of the days off that they get. Anyone with a kid in school will verify this for you.

If you extrapolate that into the 12 months that the rest of us actually work, it comes out to about $55,000 per year. That would be a lot more than what I make working 12 months out of every year. And I have almost 20 years of experience in my trade. That’s their starting salary.

"But”, they will whine, “I went to college for four years!”

“So what?” I ask. I have six years of post-secondary education. And I did the vast majority of that while holding down a full time job. In other words, working all day and going to school at night. Don’t whine to me.

And every year they say that they need more money. Well, we’ve been giving them more money every year for the past 30 years. What’s changed? Nothing. Class sizes haven’t diminished even though the student population hasn’t increased, test scores are actually going down and, from what I see around here, brand new schools that look like they were designed by futuristic architects gone mad, are being built all over the place, laying waste to their claim that students are being taught in ramshackle hovels.

We’ve been giving them exactly what they told us they needed to change things, but nothing has changed.

In other words, the money is going to the unions, administrators and beauracracy instead of to the classrooms where it belongs. We have given them, literally, hundreds of billions of dollars and they haven’t fixed one thing. Not one thing!

But that’s typical of the Democrat party. If they were to actually fix a problem, they couldn’t get any more money from you to fix it, could they?

Of course, you’ll hear them whine, “But we are teaching your children! America’s future! Surely that’s worth more!” That may be true if you were teaching them to get along in the real world instead of teaching them that SUV’s are destroying the earth; guns are evil and will sneak out of daddy’s gun case to kill people by themselves; gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and trans-specieists are no different than anyone else; “homeless people” are homeless because they’re either A) abused women, B) hopeless alcoholics whom “society” has forgotten, C) poor immigrants or, the liberals’ favorite, D) the entire family who, through no fault of their own, is living in a station wagon.

We’ll get to the homeless soon, too.

In other words, teach the kids what they need to know to secure a good job when they graduate from school. Teaching them that gays are no different than you or I will help them in no way when they’re writing a resume. Teaching them that SUV’s are destroying the earth can’t possibly help them when they’re asked if they have any PC skills.

In fact, it’s not hard to imagine one, when asked whether they have any PC skills, popping up and saying, “Sure! I know all about Political Correctness!!”

I actually have a scheme (Al Gore would have called it a “risky scheme”) to pay teachers outrageous amounts of money, thereby making them rich. Then the Democrat party would turn on them for being rich. Once the Democrats abandoned them, we could finally have schools that taught what matters.

Yeah, I know it sounds good at first glance, but it would never work. They haven’t turned on Barbara Streisand or Alex Baldwin or the rest of Hollywood for having more money than God, have they? Or Bill and Hillary for that matter.

Educational Spending

In Minnesota we spend 40% of the entire state budget on education. That’s almost half of every dollar that I give to my state government!!!

30 years ago the “educators” were whining about class size. There were too many kids in their classrooms. They couldn’t give them the personal one-on-one attention that the kids needed, so they said.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. Every year we hear from the same people that class sizes are too big. And every year we give them more money. And, as with all liberal programs, the problem never goes away because too many people are making too much money off of it. Not to mention the votes that they buy from the uninformed for standing up for our “poor, put-upon teachers” in the teacher’s unions.

The NEA is one of the largest lobbying groups in the country. They are also one of the largest contributors to the Democrat party

The money just keeps rolling in, and it will never stop because the National Education Association, not to mention all of the local unions, gain power for every person in their union. Which means that they’ll never actually cut back. That would be cutting their own power and, if you look at the Democrat party’s history, you know that will never happen.

In normal unions, the labor is in the union, and management is not. In a government union everybody is in the union. Think about that. In all other unions, things are negotiated between Management and Labor and they come up with a “fair” settlement. In a government union they’re all in the union. Not much negotiation there, is there? Both sides just say, “We want more”.

Here’s a little tidbit for you: the only people who get excited about unions are union people. Everybody else thinks that they’re a joke. I know, because I refuse to work for any union, and all of my co-workers agree. When we see three people standing there watching one guy do a job, invariably someone will say, “When did you guys join a union?”

So, why haven’t class sizes gotten any smaller? After all, they kept telling us that all they needed was more money. We’ve given them more money every year for 30 years and nothing has changed! If anything, it’s gotten worse.

This may be one reason: there’s a local school district here that spends 40% of its budget on administrators. That’s almost one administrator per teacher. What do administrators do? Ya got me. I remember a couple of ladies in the office at the High School that I went to. I assumed that they were the administrators.

But there’s apparently this huge beauracracy behind the scenes sitting in meetings for 6 hours (in addition to the two-hour union mandated lunch) every day deciding on whether they should change the football team’s name to “The Diversityville Nice People” so they don’t offend any of Mother Earth’s forest creatures by calling them The Panthers.

Add to that the fact that the high school that I went to now has six vice-principals instead of the two who managed to control the place while I was there, and you have liberalism run rampant. There aren’t any more students, why do they need more vice-principals? Ya gotta figure that these people are making at least $75,000 apiece. Multiply that times the 4 extras and you come up with an extra $300,000!!!

Class sizes haven’t went down and they never will because school districts don’t hire additional teachers. You’ve only got so many rooms to put teachers in! If you hire 10 additional teachers, then you need 10 additional classrooms to put them in, right? Does that mean that because of evil, Republican “cuts” (we’ll get to the Democrat/liberal definition of “cuts” later) that we’re demolishing classrooms and making the physical size of schools smaller?

I drove by my old high school last spring and, on the school’s message sign it said, “Congradulations” to the seniors. I shit you not. It should be “Congratulations” to those of you who have been in the public school system lately.

In other words, the education system in this country has become just another arm of the government bureaucracy. You’ve got millions of people on the union payroll shuffling papers and sitting in endless meetings just so the union can claim huge membership numbers and, therefore, influence the agenda of the legislatures, not to mention all of the money that they bring in which invariably goes to the Democrat party once the union bosses have taken their cut. In other words, the education of our children has become big business, liberal-style. Teachers are just more government workers who expect to be taken care of from cradle to grave no matter what their performance.

The only difference is that “Big Business” works to become more efficient, even if that means laying off some workers and, while that is unfortunate, it makes the company more profitable and/or efficient.

For the Public School System, inefficiency is what helps them bring in more money. If they have any money left over at the end of the year, their budget isn’t increased. So they have every incentive to spend every penny they have. Which means that educational costs will never go down, or even stabilize.

The education system (or any other government bureaucracy, for that matter) tries to keep itself as inefficient as possible, therefore always needing more employees and, therefore, more money from you, the taxpayer.

Believe it or not, I'm not done with this subject. My daughter started Kindergarten last fall and, if anything, it's even worse than I thought.

- The Exile