Reading the text of President Obama’s first weekly address is a lot faster than watching the video, but here’s the video anyway:
And here is the paragraph in the text that caught my eye:
To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools, building state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries, and labs to improve learning for over five million students. We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students, and triple the number of fellowships in science to help spur the next generation of innovation.
Go ahead and renovate and modernize K-12 school buildings — but construction won’t by itself improve learning. You need a surrounding culture that supports education. That includes a sane curriculum. Conservatives need to spend time, treasure and talent in overhauling curriculum.
As for the Pell Grants: they’ll be a waste of money, unless you think padding the bloated budgets of colleges is a good use of money. A goodly chunk of the Pell Grants will simply go to waste. Students who really want to get into a college can already do so. It’s better to make it harder to get into and stay in college — that would restore some luster to the achievement of a college degree. Let me say this boldly: not all children need to go to college.
The science fellowships will go to graduate students who have already shown marked interest in science. A good many of them will be foreign students, because the current educational curriculum extinguishes most children’s natural curiosity prior to junior high school. Doing well in science requires doing well in math, and both require a lot of hard work.
Children naturally avoid hard work. Discipline, patience, perseverance must be taught and enforced in order for these virtues to be adopted as personal habits. The little barbarians have to be civilized. Instead, pop culture celebrates and rewards indiscipline, impatience and immediate gratification.
Merely raining money on existing educational systems will not improve anything except, maybe, the paint on the walls and the wiring in the walls.
Tags: barack obama, economic crisis, economic stimulus, Education, Politics, public education, weekly address
