To: The Dallas Morning News Viewpoints page
Date: May 17, 2005
Subject: Education
Result: not printed

Dear Editor,

Recently Ross Perot wrote in the Viewpoints page about education. Everybody is always worrying about our being able to compete with countries like India and China in the education of our youth, and think the solution to the problem is to throw more and more money at it. Now Mr. Perot, who I respect greatly, thinks it's a good idea to give each student his or her own up-to-date laptop computer. I hope this means he is going to pay the bill, including for the software and the ongoing upgrades that will be needed for both the hardware and software.

A question I have about education in the United States is, with all of India's and China's success, which causes us to be so worried about them, how do our costs compare to theirs? I'm sure their cost-per-student is far below ours.

Of course they don't have all the extra expenses that we do, such as extravagant sports programs, magnificent buildings like we build in the Richardson school district, and highly paid teachers with great benefits and 9-month schedules. Those are the same teachers who feel abused if they don't make as much as the upper-tier attorneys and doctors and engineers and corporate employees. I say "upper-tier" because I suspect there are plenty of people in those professions making no more than teachers; and a good many of them are now unemployed or under-employed, working at Walmart or something. Compared to college graduates on the whole, I bet teachers are pretty high up there.

Besides the economic considerations, another major advantage held by China and India is the fact that the parents in those countries take an active and expectatious role in the education of their children. Here in America, we leave it all to the teachers and the school systems. So that the result for a single guy like me is I pay a big hunk of property taxes every year to support the children of parents who don't do what they ought to be doing in the raising and education of their children.

Mr. Perot also speaks of the need for local control of school districts. Why? In an age where we give drugs to kids who have too much energy, and place no real value in individuality at all, and where the primary objective of everybody in Texas is to pass standardized tests, why not just have one big statewide school district? That would save a huge amount of money and probably produce much better test-takers.

A review of the U.S. Constitution shows that no provisions for education were made there, so I am not sure how our educational system was established. However, one thing I know is that the people who originally believed it is the right of Americans to be educated at taxpayer expense were thinking in terms of the "3 R's" - reading, writing, and arithmetic.  It was their intention that people be provided the basic skills needed for citizenship.    

I just do not believe that extreme measures should be taken trying to bring everybody up to the same level of achievement in school. Everybody doesn't have to be a genius. No special provisions were taken for anybody in my generation, educated in the 50's and 60's, and people got passed for social reasons, yet it produced many capable and highly valued people in sufficient quantities that many of them can't find jobs now that utilize their abilities.

Anybody who really wants to learn has a whole life to do it. The way many people return to school in their 30's and 40's and up, I don't consider it so important to reach a very high level in high school, unless students are so inclined.  Certainly they should have the resources available if they are, but if students can read and write and do arithmetic, and that's all they want to learn for now, I'm happy. If they find in the course of their lives that they need more education, they'll get it.  

Dallas County, where I live, has an excellent community college system where people of all ages become students, and they provide developmental reading, writing and math courses for people who have deficiencies in those subjects, to be able to then go on and take college level courses.  So it's not so important what they did or did not learn in high school.    

Education is like health care and everything else. There's a bottom of the barrel, and we're about there.

Thank you, John Vehon