Is Health Care More Important Than Education?

I don't think so. I believe that the education of our youth is absolutely critical to the continued success of our nation. If our children are not educated, and educated well, we lose our ability to compete in the world. We rely on immigrants to do the research, design and engineering for our nation. How can we possibly succeed if we aren't teaching our children?

And yet what are we focusing on? Universal Health Care and taxation on our energy usage. Oh yes, by the way, they're sneaking that cap and trade thing in on a vote tomorrow so you might want to contact your congressmen about it.

They tell us that 47 million Americans don't have health care coverage. But 34 million ADULTS in America can't read. That 47 million uninsured included children, but the 34 million illiterate is just our adults. And what's a bigger emergency to our government? If somebody cannot read how are they ever going to reach any level of self-sufficiency? Maybe if they could read they'd have a job that offered them health insurance. Ever think of that Obama?

For their science scores, our youth are currently ranked 17th out of only 30 countries tested. We're in the BOTTOM 50%. In math it's even worse. We're 24th out of 30. That means we're in the BOTTOM 20%. How ugly is that. We are flat out not giving our children the tools they need in order to be competitive in the world. And what are we doing about it? Not a dad gum thing! The dumbing down of our youth is a far bigger emergency that health care but it's not even on the radar. What has the Obama administration done about education so far? They cancelled the voucher programs in DC. A program that sent kids to a school that was actually teaching them something.

So what is wrong with our educational system? Here are some of my theories. We're focused more on the teachers than the students. We teach our kids what to think instead of how to think. We throw money at it without ever analyzing the problem and identifying the causes. We spend more time and effort on the disabled than the gifted. (Now before you start screaming at me, I'm not saying we shouldn't put time and effort into the disabled, just that we should put as much if not more into the gifted). Bad teachers can't be fired because of tenure. There is no "pay per performance" in the teacher's union. We can't get rid of the disruptive and downright dangerous students in our schools. We write our curriculum for the lowest common denominator instead of trying to bring those kids up to a high standard. And finally, too many parents aren't involved in their child's education.

But what are we doing to fix this issue and ensure that our children can compete with the rest of the world? Nada, zip, zero. In all of the social programs we have out there to help the poor, giving them the education they need so that they WON'T be poor isn't even on the radar.

Obama talks a lot about how much health care is costing us and why it's yet another emergency, but how about what a bad educational system is costing us. How much more would we be collecting in taxes if our children were so well educated that we led the world in engineering, inventions, economics, etc?

We are currently not only saddling our children with a mountain of debt, we're denying them the education they'll need to actually make enough money to cover it.

If we continue with this trend, I wouldn't be at all surprised to have our current youth attempt to slap the wrinkles off our faces as they reach middle age.