The Trouble With Johnny.

Boy oh boy, we're still having debate on education, can ya believe it? I can tell you the problem in education in one word. Respect. That's it. Case solved. All we have to do is respect education. Huh, I'll bet you thought I was going to say respect teachers, didn't you. Well I just did. I said respect education. Since teachers are large a part of education, we need to respect them. We need to respect school officials too. And students and even parents. Because they're all part of education. Ya know what? We even need to respect taxpayers too. Because taxpayers are part of the education process. And the thing is, education desperately needs all of the above. So teachers need to have the respect they deserve including more pay and smaller class sizes and more support and parent participation. At the same time, the taxpayers need respect, because we're going to be expecting them to pay for all those things the teachers need and the students need. I need an analogy here. Let's see, hmm, well they need the kind of respect corporate CEOs, bankers and Hedge Fund Managers get. No, wait. These people aren't well respected. They are well paid though. But wait. They're over-paid when they do a good job and way over-paid when the do a lousy job. No they aren't the kind of analogy we need here. We need to be able to point to someone who deserves and gets respect. Well that leaves out politicians too. We need education to get the kind of respect that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs get. The thing is, they deserve respect because they were extremely successful. But you can trace their success back to education. Now you can claim that they didn't earn doctorate degrees or anything like that, so education wasn't all that important. True, but they did receive K-12 education which afforded them the basics. And what would you be willing to bet that they had inspiring teachers or maybe parents who encouraged and pushed them or well funded schools with the students in mind or maybe all of the above. I think what happened to them is that at some point, they recognized an opportunity. But until you recognize such an opportunity, you'd better not curtail you education. And under no circumstances should your education curtail your opportunities to better yourself. Pay attention politicians.