The Value of an American Education

I'm in the early stages of planning a preschool fair to target local families whose children are in need of early childhood education.  Statistic after statistic shows that access to a quality early childhood education program correlates with greater success for those students later in life.  Adults who had a preschool education have lower levels of crime and early pregnancies, get paid more, and have a better shot at staying married.  They are less dependent on welfare as adults compared to those who did not have a preschool education.  The problem is this: as a society, we don't value education, including preschool education.

The problem is cultural and, I believe, very deeply entrenched in our society.  The deep part: our current public education system was meant to spit out worker bees for factories and manufacturing.  Look at how the jobs Americans work has changed over the course of the last 10 decades.

http://statchatva.org/2012/04/06/occupation-change-1920-2010/

Obviously, we should continue to tirelessly champion for many of our high school graduates to leave high school ready to work in the sales, service, administrative, professional and managerial fields.  Manufacturing and agricultural jobs employ less than one third of these graduates.  School districts, principals, teachers and parents across the country are working hard to do just that.  I think we are making great headway in this area.

The second problem is cultural, and I believe less progress is being made here.  Culture doesn't have to do with gender, skin color, native language, or religion as much as it has to do with values.  I believe every household, every family, has a culture.  Families prioritize values differently - I don't buy into a one-size-fits-all culture.  All middle-income suburban families do not share the same values.  Nor do all families who live in poverty.  We can't prescribe a "cure" to poverty with a broad brush and expect it to result in positive change.

In America, we have a poverty problem.  Education is a key to break the cycle of poverty.  But, we generally don't value education in it's current form.  We need everyone to get desperate about obtaining our American education.  We need a sense of urgency about education.  We need to unite as Americans and see ourselves as what we are: players in a global economy.  We need to reshape the cultures of our families to truly value education, starting with preschool.  

This takes a massive education effort in itself - we have to educate people about America's role in the global economy.  Can you imagine how far we would get in turning this big cultural boat if even a fraction of the money that was spent in the presidential campaigns went toward educating our children and informing society about the cultural shift that is happening?  In the absence of millions of dollars, we do what we can: we offer free and sliding scale tuition to preschoolers whose families have need, we offer parenting classes for parents, we provide government assistance, we prescribe a number of things for people, but they don't take it because they don't value it.  Somehow, someway, we have to get scrappy, desperate, urgent about getting our education.  It may be the most important national defense issue of our time.