Friday, February 29, 2008

Breaking the Bars

The word is out, 1 in 100 Americans is in jail or prison. If you think that does not sound so bad, consider this; 1 in 15 African American males is among them. Think about the implications here. Is it because they have a criminal nature? Of course not. I suspect they have less opportunities is this great country of ours and there comes a time when ya gotta do what ya gotta do to survive. Just one more reason for us to speak out against racism and promote a good system of education.

Education, the magic word. I was entertained when a friend of mine e-mailed me a Citizen Quiz. I scored well and had fun with it. However, I was surprised and appalled at the averge score. The other thing of notice was that younger people had the worst scores and they went up with the ages of the participants. Does this mean our schools are failing? Why yes, of course. Thank You Ronald Reagan.

Thanks to the years of GOP rule, we now have lousey schools. Our schools don't even teach civics classes anymore. Remember civics classes? I hated them but now I am so glad we had them. We had to bring in a newpaper article of interest to read and share with the class, then we would discuss it. I learned a lot from those classes. I often wonder if todays adults could do that.

Not that the newspapers tell us much anymore, but kids need to learn to explore for facts and reading the newspaper is a good start, especially if the article is discussed with others.

I encourage parents of school age children to push for more current events and civics classes so our next generation can be more knowlegable then the present one. We need to raise a generation of world citizens. Today is a good day to start.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Crista!
i only partially agree with you here. I think all the public schools in america are good schools, with the resources to get a good education, but only if the parents help. And i think that without the parents help, there are not schools anywhere that will educate the children. When i was raising my kids, the biggest problem i saw was that most parents worked two jobs and expected the schools to do all the work. So, i blame our culture. It is deemed more important to make money than to raise your children, and we are reaping the results of parents that think money is more important than thier children. Yes, our civics and history in schools has been degraded by the powers that be, but the parents are to blame, not the state (IMHO).