You will see why this title is so significant in this blog and you allowed it to happen!
I am not sure when I heard this old saying for the first time. How about you? I know that it has been around for many thousands of years and for good reason. A few years ago I had a visitor from Hungary and we went out to the hen house to collect some eggs for breakfast. My friend was very excited to be able to actually go out in a real hen house and collect "fresh" eggs for her breakfast. We had along our standard egg basket and we collected a couple of dozen nice fresh eggs. My friend carried the basket of eggs and we walked along talking. Suddenly she tripped on something in the grass and fell and dropped all the eggs and broke them all. She cried that she was sorry and for several years after that she kept on saying that she was sorry about the eggs. What was the lesson? Don't put all your eggs in one basket!
I think you get the idea why this is such an important saying and it applies in more places than you might think. Look at our public schools? It seems that we are driven to consolidate school to make them larger and larger. If we have more than one school in a community, we want a single superintendent to be in charge of the whole works. We even want some kind of centralized body at the state level to direct how each school should be run. If that is not enough, you allowed our federal government to create a federal department of education. How is that for putting all of our eggs (children's minds) in one basket? You allowed it to happen.
Most of you only looked a the good side and did not think about what might happen with all the eggs in one basket. The USA economy which has been the most productive of any economy in the world works on the free enterprise system. That is where many people are allowed to try their economic idea and depending on how good they are to succeed or fail. but notice that they do not "all" fail. The good ones are the ones that have provided the USA with such a high standard of living for the average person.
When you put all your eggs in one basket as we have done with education, it only takes the wrong person or idea to spoil or fail the whole thing. Right now, the USA spends more on education per student than any other country in the world, yet we have one of the lowest literacy rates in the whole world. Did you ever think about why? We are not only among the dumbest, we are getting even dumber every day while the economic demands of the future reward the smartest.
We have put all of our eggs (children" in one basket and we have broken almost all the eggs. We have to recognize our error and get it corrected as fast as possible and you know what that means. We need to get back to 100% local control of our schools even allowing more charter schools,
For the record, my old country school that was started back in 1835 is still there and only answers to the locally elected school board. It has grown a little in that time and now has three school rooms and about 60 kids from first grade to eighth grade. We need more of this kind of thinking where we do not allow all of our eggs to be in the same basket.
