A few years from now We the People and our legislators are going to be complaining even louder than now that our jobs and our industries are being shipped overseas and that Asia holds ever greater control of our financial system, and therefore our entire future.
Our nation is a mess. Cutting spending on education is only going to make the mess worse, as early as this spring when cuts take affect forcing many students to give up school. We are growing our culture of dependency by cutting the best tool we have for breaking dependency; education.
This blog has always been a strong supporter of education. I believe that education is the best tool we have for fixing much of what ails our nation and world. Therefore the continuous news of budget cuts to education is alarming. I understand the views of those like the Atlantic’s Megan McCardle who write about the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education, “There’s no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good–everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress.”
I also understand that in a few years we’re going to hear more from people like Intel CEO Paul Otellini who told the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman that the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent. “As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.
I spent my afternoon yesterday on a campus that is part of the Georgia’s university system and is therefore facing painful cuts. I talked with students and instructors. They’re concerned that required classes might be very hard to get into, even impossible. Instructors will be laid off and courses, even whole majors and departments could be cut. This all sounds destructive.
I must point out that this morning our Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Georgia’s governor Sonny Perdue is challenging these cuts saying that colleges won’t be gutted and called state legislators comments that led to speculation, “Scare tactics.” I wish I could report that his words were reassuring, but Perdue’s record on education is an embarrassment to Georgia, and I promise that I am being too kind.
I have no answer for what to do about the budget short fall in the short term. I have invited a person who is more informed about the details Georgia’s proposed cuts to be a guest blogger here, but I am not sure that person will have the time. So we wait.
But do we learn?
Back in November I wrote in, “California college student victims of vicious cycle of wealth redistribution,” that:
“Students and their parents have been paying taxes throughout their lives on everything they buy and much of what they earn….. The government used the student’s and parent’s money for all manner of programs, many, possibly most, useful and worthy expenditures…. They transferred their wealth and their control to the government with the expectation that when they needed money for college it would be redistributed to them from other citizens. But the money is not there. The government ran out of money…”
We have to break this vicious cycle and give people more control of their money and their future. I wish I knew how to break that cycle immediately, but I don’t. What I do know is that we should learn from these cuts to education that wealth transfer through a central authority is not the answer because when central planning fails it takes the entire system with it. There are no options (take notice supporters of universal health care). The central authorities, the states and the Federal government, are now broke, so instead of transferring wealth they are transferring pain.
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I apologize to my regular readers for my absences and spoty commenting. I am building another project into a business and that is taking a lot of time. The economy is tough but I will succeed.
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I like that snappy and fitting old sayings like “Feed a man a fish, . . . teach a man to fish.”
Conservatives use it to make a point. They simply use the saying to express their belief that giving people something is bad but teaching them to make a living is even better..
The last time our country had a truly effective program for bringing educational opportunity to a large number of Americans was the post WWII GI Bill. The scholarships provided to a huge number of veterans enabled many to get an education they could never otherwise have afforded and reach income levels they could never otherwise have reached, making them more productive members of our society in every respect.
I’m sorry to say that during the previous Congress, in ’06- ’08, Democrats like Reid and Pelosi opposed expansion of such educational benefits for veterans that Republicans like John McCain proposed – they claimed it was unaffordable.
Mr Obama supported spending almost a trillion on the bank bailout and another trillion on a phony stimulus, but opposed higher education spending for GI’s. Sad but true.
I guess Mr Obama just wanted to go “Tom Sawyer” on them… So much for homo-liberalis- compassioninado..
I am also a supporter of education, worked in academe all my life. However, the current protests aren’t about cuts, they are one more way to move leftward and to cause division. Many educated people are unemployed or underemployed. Obama is not doing the right things to restore the economy, so until the far left, which is deeply entrenched in academe, think tanks and non-profits, gets it that he’s driving us over the cliff, there may be more pain.
i couldnt agree more cutting education would make the ecodemy worse and even i know that and im 12.
The increasing costs of education have been going to universities’ capital projects. In their efforts to recruit students, they build palacial residence halls with suites and recreation areas–to say nothing of huge sports complexes. Education has gotten more expensive, and full-time faculty have been replaced by part time, contract faculty who are paid by the course, often with no benefits. As much as I would like to see more money go to education, the money would need to go to teaching the students and making education more affordable.