After last night’s election, it’s time to begin thinking about where we should make the first cuts to the Federal budget.  Obviously the spending we most need to address is entitlement spending like SSI, Medicare, Medicaid, etc, but we’re all realistic enough to know that even the TEA Party endorsed Congresscritters won’t touch that with a ten foot pole yet.  So what discretionary spending should be targeted first?

The answer depends.

The GOP base is willing to cut just about everything.  We’ll have to see what the politicians are willing to cut.

I’d imagine that the Department of Education, the FDA, maybe Health and Human Services, they’re all looking at cuts.  However, if the choice were up to me, I’d start with the DoE or the FDA.

I ‘ve already heard the libbies screaming something like…

“The plan is to dumb down our kids and starve everyone? Great plan!”

Well, no, libby, that’s not my plan.

What, you can’t teach kids without the Department of Education?

I wonder how humans managed it the hundreds of thousands of years of human societal evolution BEFORE we got the DoE…

What, you can’t feed yourself without some bureaucrat in the FDA telling you what to eat, how to open your mouth, put food in, and chew?

What are you? The most useless, spineless, moron on the planet? I taught my kid how to read with a Dick and Jane reader I bought for $5 at a yard sale BEFORE she went to school. I taught her addition and subtraction with a handful of rocks out of the drive way BEFORE she started 1st grade.

Give me a break.

Abraham Lincoln did his math homework laying in front a fire, writing on the back of a shovel with a piece of freakin’ charcoal.

And learned the subject.

We’ve got high schoolers with computers, calculators, and forty-five books who still don’t have the basics mastered and would look at you like you’d just stepped off a flying saucer from Neptune if you asked them what a square root was.

Calculus has been successfully taught for 700 years, the vast bulk of that happening before public education and computers.

They put a man on the moon using a slide rule.

Square root?  Heck, today’s high school seniors probably think it is part of a freakin’ plant, fer the love of pete.

Again, I’ve already heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth:

“Unlike Lincoln’s time, we have to learn things that can’t be taught with a piece of charcoal and the back of a shovel… Maybe you’re happy with teaching your kids with methods they used prior to the industrial age but most of us want our kids to learn using modern tools, like calculators and computer based spreadsheets.”

Sure, teach the kiddies computers.

But teach them 1+1=2 first.

You don’t need to spend money on a computer to teach them that.

Wake up and smell the roses, morning glory: We do not need to spend boat loads of money on education.

We certainly don’t need a bureaucracy in DC forcing us to do it their way, teaching what they want taught, at the point of a gun, especially since we’ve got plenty of evidence that their way, and their teaching syllabus, blows.

I taught my kid how to read and do basic arithmetic BEFORE she went to school.

And it cost me less than $6.

So let’s make cuts to the DoE.

And here’s how I think the cuts should be prefaced:

What is the minimum level of public education a person really needs?

My grandfather, who is in his 80s, dropped out of school before he was in middle school.

By then he already knew how to read and write, knew basic math, could count money, etc.

Once you get to that level, do you really need to teach someone anything else?

CAN you really teach them anything else?

Education is a state of mind, an expression of an inner desire to learn, to know. The level of education anyone receives, regardless of how much school time they get, varies from individual to individual. Once a person knows how to read, the rest is pretty much up to them.

Want to learn another language? Good!  Buy some books and learn, you don’t need to take a structured course.

If a person chooses NOT to learn, will any amount of school time make them learn?

No.

So, if as a society, we developed a syllabus that had most people reading and writing by 5th or 6th grade, why shouldn’t we consider that to be an appropriate amount of public education? Everything beyond that would be personal education that you’d fund out of your own pocket. Thus, everyone would get the tools they’d need to get an education if they so decided, a basic education, the people who wanted to go to beyond and learn things that not everyone would want or need to know that could pay their own way, and we could cut 6-7 years’ worth of education expenses for every school child.

We have libraries for a reason.

As No Child Left Behind is demonstrating, requiring equal results for all children means that the kids cannot be equal in the eyes of the law. You must prop the underachievers up, and knock the smart kids down, to get everyone to the point where we’re all equally educated when we leave high school.

And it costs a crapload of money.

Time to do away with the DoE!!!

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