When was the last time you read one of the college catalogs that your tax money supports? Hey, it is your money! It has been a while for me too. The weather has been bad and I have gotten so bored that I picked up a current college catalog and started reading thru it. It is a little slow reading, but there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. I think the best way to read one of these is to imagine that you are going for one of the degrees that the college offers. I chose education and here is some of what I found.
First, there are all kinds of different types of public school teachers that you can become. If it were me, I would clean house and only offer a couple of types. Think of all the dead wood that I would eliminate. It seemed to me that there were far too many majors or minors devoted to language. I have no idea why that is except it has been passed down that way from 1,000 years ago when us humans were first figuring out how to write down our spoken languages. I see no reason for our tax money to be used to support any language except English and I would put some limits on that. This one point alone would allow me to get rid of at least 90% of the language department faculty and allow them to go out into the world with all their knowledge and get "real" jobs. The other area is Art, Music, Dance, and Drama. These look like games to me and we don't need to be using our tax money to show people how to play games and then to pay them again to teach our kids how to play games. I would eliminate all of these. I noticed also that some courses have fancy names. They don't call it PE any more, but it is still the same thing. When I was in school, we did not have anyone called a PE teacher until we got into high school. I think the only reason that we had PE teachers was to supervise the shower room. We did not have shower rooms in grammar school either. Most of us just took our showers at home and we seemed to have stayed clean enough. The other area that is new is the program to "save the world". In my state it is even a law that you have to take these "save the world" classes to graduate and get a license to teach. It is interesting that the main threat to the world and the human race is over population and high school drop out and the classes don't seem to address that area at all. Oh, I forgot, before we invested so much in PE teachers, our kids were a lot slimmer. You have to ask if our investment has been worth it or not? They still have a big commitment to "student teaching" were the kids have to go out from the college and actually participate in teaching a class. I just hope that my kids are not used as Genny pigs for student teachers. I don't want my tax money spent on green horns. In the college catalog that I have been reading, they state that student teaching is one of the best way that teachers learn how to teach. This gets interesting because if this is one of the best way, all these other things that our tax money is being used for must be "worst". Logical to me. If that is the case, why don't we just eliminate teachers colleges? That is the way they do it for college and university teachers and the way they used to do it when we had higher SAT scores. You have to look at the facts once in a while to see what is really going on.
Now the bottom line. We are spending more but getting less by every measure. Our kids have lower SAT scores, our kids are fatter, our drop out rate is higher, more of our kids are getting knocked up out of wedlock. We can only be sure of one thing and that is we are paying more. I think it is time to try a different "course" and I don't mean a different college course.
