Date: Oct. 31, 2011

Education and National Security

Historically, America has been at the forefront of education. We have some of the oldest institutions

of middle, high school and higher education. We were among the first of nations to construct and

finance public education. And, ever since the beginning of our nation (1776), education has been the

backbone of our nation’s security. With the Ivy-league colleges and then the land-grant universities,

America always had an eye to higher education, specialized talents, and much-needed intellectual

ability. But for most Americans, education stops with what was and is provided as a public right.

When we were an agrarian nation (farming and so forth) education took our kids up to a solid

secondary education to become better managers of our prime industry. When we became an

industrialized nation, education lead the way with a high school education to prepare the workers for

the more demanding tasks of that industrial era. When we stood on the precipice of a more modern

industrialized society following World War II we upped the ante and created the GI Bill to allow, some

would even say coerce, our youth to follow a higher educational course. Throughout the ‘50s,

graduating college students filled the professional ranks, the more demanding careers in law

enforcement, medical support, accounting, management, aviation and pre-law.

And then we stopped. Thinking ourselves capable of meeting the pinnacle of need of the nation, we

allowed the GI Bill to fade away, we allowed the taxation system to stagnate when it came to education,

we allowed the educational curricula to fracture and fall prey to non-national needs. Of all the

industrialized nations, we lost our will to engage in a national consensus on educational need and we

allowed our educational standing in an ever-increasingly demanding industrial complex to wane. In

short, we forced the industrial base to look elsewhere for the talent needed to sustain our economy

and, when it comes to law enforcement, the military and the defense industry, we fell behind twenty

other nations in the training skills of our most vital employees.

If we can accept that the computer, metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, optical, medical, energy,

meteorological, electrical, space, and control systems are the most demanding and most vital next

generation industries and callings for the nation, then we must – as our forefathers did – fund and

prepare the classrooms for that future.

We became the No. 1 producer of agrarian products in the world simply because we got a jump on

everybody else in small one-room classrooms across this nation – and then we continued to fund those

 

schools and programs (like the FFA, the YFEA, the NFU and 4H) through today. And the result? We’re the

no. 1 farming practices’ and output nation in the world.

We became the world’s leading industrialized nation by funding public high school, turning out

students who became more capable workers and business owners, able to manage modern

industrialized machines, management and inventions. We continued to fund that level of education,

reaching higher standards for industry and agriculture by establishing state-owned universities, funded

through the land grant laws of the last half of the 1800s. To know more, check out the more than 70

universities who are funded, in large measure, by the revenue streams earned off of public lands leased

for their benefit. And yet, we allowed these land-grand universities to change from free educational

facilities to money machines for teachers, coaches, sports programs and administrators. Super bowls

alone garner huge fees, none of which is passed down to offset tuition. In 1970,what once was a

minimal fee of $80 per term for a Californian or New Yorker freshman or woman is now past $6,000 per

term. And yet they can pay even one sports coach $1.5 million a year – the tuition for 125 students.

And now? We’re stacking the deck against American industry, against the safety of our nation,

favoring greed, sports corruption, and a myopia of the real world’s newest industrial needs. We blindly

hope that entrepreneurs will make start-ups in garages to rescue America. And yet we fail to recognize

that 22% of Apple’s highest-level educational employees are not from this country. Their nationality is

not a bad thing, but it does prove our stupidity of not preparing Americans first and foremost.

We need, urgently, to turn back the clock and regain our emphasis on education, education based on

the more demanding needs to come. We cannot rely on wealthy Americans nor on students who

mortgage their future with college loans to secure this nation. The national interest must come first, we

must reprioritize our public educational – and national security’s – future.