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!
And in this way our children are becoming the political tools of Washington, their cause exploited for votes and then forgotten about until the next election. This is unacceptable in America, a country which thinks of itself as a land of opportunity. State by state we have to rethink our system: boosting teacher salaries, renovating run-down buildings, expanding important programs such as foreign language and science while scaling back the standardized tests which waste time and turn kids against school.
Barack Obama has been going through a tough few weeks. He has lost his message of hope as he gets caught up in the negative political scene that is Washington. Obama is in a rut, and needs to pull himself out by identifying a consensus issue which must be addressed. He should unify the country around reforming our education system. My generation is growing up cynical and uninformed, and Barack Obama is in a position to change this.
Our future is at stake. Let's quit the hollow rhetoric and solve the problem.
"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child."
--George Bernard Shaw
-The Young Sentinel