We Will Get Nothing Right Until We Overhaul K-12 Education

We must overhaul K-12 education before we get anything right, in either domestic or international affairs.


First and most importantly, we will never solve the problems of cyclical poverty, babies having babies, familial dysfunction, drug-infestation, and gang-proliferation at the urban core until we provide the education that we have never come close to providing to African American people and others who came to reside in the nation’s most troubled urban communities.


Actually, we have never provided anyone of any location and any economic status with excellent public school education. But with the rush to the suburbs by white folks and middle class African Americans from the early 1970s, urban school districts were overwhelmed, never adjusted, and educational mediocrity devolved into atrocity.


Only excellent education can give people who have long been denied lives of cultural fulfillment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction the quality of experience that all human beings deserve in this one earthly sojourn.


Imagine if instead of the vapid educational experience that young people of the central cities now receive, they were to receive the sort of knowledge-rich education that I provide to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, now powerfully boosted with our ability to move efficiently through my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (see the snippets that I have posted in the immediately following blog articles). Inasmuch as I also provide ethical and moral guidance (see the article posted on this blog that originates in my compact book, Meditations on the Art of Living), the prospects for young people going forth to a life of highest quality are magnified.


Imagine, indeed.


Imagine if we trained people to understand their history, economy, psychology, government, best nutritional practices, human anatomy and physiology.


Imagine if from their thirteen years in school, young people were alive in the worlds of great literature, visual art, well-crafted music of all genres, and an appreciation for their entire architectural and natural environment.


Imagine if people understood the essential concepts of all world religions and the fundamental underpinnings for cultures across the globe.



Imagine if young people and the adults that they become went forth into the world of this single earthly sojourn imbued with confidence in knowing math through calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics.


Alive in the world of knowledge and ideas, given the sort of training necessary to ascend to university-level professional training of the highest order, people would have the economic wherewithal necessary to end cycles of familial poverty. Generations, stuck over many decades in cycles of desultory and dangerous conditions, would now look to a future filled with hope--- instead of years of incarceration and children born too early, destined to face the same dead-end corners of existence as those who had spilled them forth into the world.


With most people now able to experience lives of cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction, the frustration that leads to violence, crime, and an array of bad decisions would end. Possessing information on all major topics, people would make better decisions about their health habits. People would spend more time reading, thinking, evaluating the world around them. Time now spent watching the banality that permeates television could be contributed to action capable of solving wretchedly abiding problems of homelessness, hunger, and any remnant poverty.


With such changes of outlook and occurrence, we could eventually tear down most prisons, reduce police forces, decrease expenditure on social services--- because people would be living the kinds of lives that would obviate the necessity of institutions built because we have failed to meet the needs of our fellow human beings.


Women might quit smearing their faces with paint and walking around on mini-stilts that are the contemporary form of foot-binding; they might insist on gender equitable marital surnames that tear at the fabric of patriarchy.


Citizens who understand the historical origins of chronic conflicts and abdominal conditions across the globe would have a better sense of how to address the dilemmas faced by so many people in the world for so long. Well-informed citizens who have internalized high standards of ethical conduct vote more wisely, feel more empathically, and act with more altruistic effectiveness. Under such circumstances, wasteful expenditure of life and material wealth could be transferred form war and degrading activity to endeavors that construct a better world, rather than destroy even the meager hope that most people across the globe now foresee.


With the transformation of K-12 education, our people become culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied; they become healthier, physically stronger, morally elevated, joyful in day to day experience, happy over the long term.


The revolutionizing of K-12 education involves the overhaul of curriculum and the thorough retraining of teachers. These are simply stated and definitely achievable but herculean tasks. They will require knowledge of the constituents of an excellent K-12 education, careful planning for the retraining of teachers of necessary intellectual ballast, and generous applications of what my West Texas pappy called “elbow grease.”


So we have a lot of work to do. But the necessary transformation can be achieved.


And understand this: We solve no vexing national or international problem until we get K-12 education right.