Think back to your last day in elementary school. Try to remember your best day and your worst day. What would you do differently if you still had several years of elementary school? If you have children in school, what do you think has changed in the years since you were in school? What is the state of education today?

A young couple...call them Missy and Raymod...were telling me why they were planning on home schooling their children. I was curious what made them so adamant about avoiding public school for their own kids. They both agreed that it was mainly because of... 

 ...school bullies. The young man had done better at coping with the problems since he had a purple belt in karate, and a lot of charisma, but Missy had been abused and threatened for many years. They wanted their children to receive a safe academic education, with learning based on facts not fear. 

School bullies are thought to be the cause of many crises in public schools. Some shootings are believed to be over reaching paybacks when years of hurtful comments by the normal kids send an unpopular student on a rampage. We can discuss this more and offer solutions to why school bullies are still around, and how to reduce the damage.

However, the state of education is nowhere near as grim as the headlines would seem. I teach in inner city schools in one of the largest cities in the country. Yes, there is more than enough violence, but there is also a great deal of hope for academic education to help turn inner city students into capable adults. For classroom after classroom, learning happens! Teachers reach out and touch lives every day. Don't give up on public education. Without well educated citizens we all suffer. No democracy can endure with learning based on opinions and no facts!

If you think the answer is isolation from the wrong side of the tracks, think again! Your insurance bills go up when kids turn to stealing $300 iPods to pay for a $20 bag of drugs! Welfare costs skyrocket when academic education for students stops at the third grade, and the rest of the time is overpriced daycare for juvenile delinquents.

Over the next few weeks, we can discuss WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW things are, and how we ought to improve the state of education in the USA and even the world!

Schools have been slow to incorporate computers and other technological innovations. We are still cutting down trees to print textbooks that students rarely read. Our kids today are used to audio and video on tv and dvd. You know what? They are right! The information they see and hear is remembered much better than information they only read, unless they take the time to make their own pictures in their brains...and we are all in too big a hurry for that.

How do we prepare for a world where we can speak with people all around the world for much much less than a three minute phone call across country cost when I was 10. That doesn't even consider that the dollar for three minutes in 1960 would be worth more like $10 today! The world is shrinking faster than the dollar, but teacher salaries are still the same as they were 10 years ago!

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