As a student who has recently experienced America's woeful educational system firsthand, I am profoundly indignant at the place the issue of education holds in national politics.

Increasing funding for education is one issue which almost everyone agrees to, irrespective of party affiliation. No one denies that our children are getting a truly sub-par education, and there is little question that the decline in the quality of education in the past few decades is at least partly responsible for our current economic troubles. Anywhere from 10 to 25% of teenagers don't even reach the end of high school before leaving school. American students finish consistently at the bottom of the list of developing countries in terms of math, science, geography and global awareness. A study by National Geographic found that over 50% of young people cannot name Sudan as being an African country, even though it is the largest country on that continent and the location of this century's worst genocide.

No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration's disastrous program, is extraordinarily detrimental to the system. The act uses stacks of standardized tests to identify the schools which perform well and those which perform badly. They then cut funding for the latter, which usually tend to be the ones most in need of aid in the first place.

Unfortunately, any congressman who votes against the No Child Left Behind act will never hear the end of it. How can you do such a thing? They will say, you are an evil person to leave our children behind!

If we can't Address the Root of the Problem, then the Pining Populace will Soon Smother this now Persistent Vegetative Planet

This week has been deadly to the consumer: food and oil prices have become the personified price form of a flying super villain trapped in constant motion inertia. And the airlines Delta and Northwest are merging, thus making airfare rise due to less competition, (and making your airplane seats less comfortable.) Then there is everything that happened in months and years past: we have the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the HMOs running away with our money, the rich having cut taxes, a staggeringly high national deficit, defective Chinese toothpaste, wages that are too low to accommodate inflation, no policy to address global warming, and the government pumping money into the fine print-filled public relations stunt of ethanol along with the president's sinking ship that I aptly dub Iraq Occupation III, (the Mongols and English made the same mistake that we did with the same results.)

Aesthetically, everything that I aforementioned seem to be the causes and perpetuators of our societal decline, economic recession, and the looming planetary meltdown of global warming, but they are only the numerous effects and manifestations of a much larger problem, that problem being the corporate control of the country and Americans' antipathetic views of education and the world around us.

If we can't Address the Root of the Problem, then the Pining Populace will Soon Smother this now Persistent Vegetative Planet

This week has been deadly to the consumer: food and oil prices have become the personified price form of a flying super villain trapped in constant motion inertia. And the airlines Delta and Northwest are merging, thus making airfare rise due to less competition, (and making your airplane seats less comfortable.) Then there is everything that happened in months and years past: we have the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the HMOs running away with our money, the rich having cut taxes, a staggeringly high national deficit, defective Chinese toothpaste, wages that are too low to accommodate inflation, no policy to address global warming, and the government pumping money into the fine print-filled public relations stunt of ethanol along with the president's sinking ship that I aptly dub Iraq Occupation III, (the Mongols and English made the same mistake that we did with the same results.)

Aesthetically, everything that I aforementioned seem to be the causes and perpetuators of our societal decline, economic recession, and the looming planetary meltdown of global warming, but they are only the numerous effects and manifestations of a much larger problem, that problem being the corporate control of the country and Americans' antipathetic views of education and the world around us.