U.S. education must change so that our future generations can thrive in an increasingly competitive world

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama advocated many changes in education. It is a fact that a U.S. BA or BS degree is not on the same level as one granted in countries that are our political and economic competitors. However, more money alone does not make better education, and when we talk about education throughout the country, we need to remember that the federal government has no jurisdiction over education, because this function is delegated to the states and territories by the Constitution.

It is important to keep education in the hands of the states, but the problem is that these authorities in turn further delegate resposibility for education further down to counties, cities and other kind of communities, and each one has its own ideas about what it is important to teach. This is what has created our current educational chaos, which becomes most evident when students apply to colleges and universities and those institutions' admissions people have a hard time deciding which of a student's credits they can accept in order to fulfill entrance requirements.

In 1983 I participated in a meeting sponsored by the Reagan White House called the National Forum on Excellence in Education, which produced hardly anything other than a book called A Nation At Risk, which said that if a neighboring country did to us what we did to our own education system, it could be a cause of war.

In that meeting, President Reagan sarcastically told us that, for our high-tech army, our educators would not be able to produce the eight million literate students we needed in the next decade, so he would have no other choice but to import them from Japan.  Since then, the reading capability of our students has changed very little, so the military still spends billion of dollars on remedial study for their recruits so that they can understand manuals written on an 8th grade level.

Foreign students from Africa and Asia are often able to obtain two years of instant advancement in American colleges and universities because they already studied, in high school, subjects American colleges offer during a student's first two years as ”general education,“ along with one-semester, good-for-nothing ”survey“ courses.

We should shift the so-called "general education" requirement back to high school and let university students start studying their major subjects in their freshman year.

Federal standards, not federal control

Federalizing education is not the solution. We just need to give local schools incentives to meet minimum curriculum requirements, and work with states according to their regional needs.
 
It is useless for the federal government to mandate special tests to measure the level of each school and student, because instead of teaching the basics, teachers then teach material for the mandated tests. So far, this experiment has been counter-productive.

All American political candidates promise better education. However, once they are elected they just suggest some educational gimmicks but never propose global solutions.

The U.S. government needs to call together the governors of all states and territories for an education summit, and set a minimum curriculum requirement for elementary and high schools, as well as universities and colleges. Each state and community should be free to add to the minimum federal curriculum at the state and local level in order to meet its own particular requirements.

We should also reorganize the structure of our educational institutions. Non-academic subject should be moved from universities and colleges to specialized institutions. In addition, all schools, universities, and colleges should re-establish the teaching and study of moral behavior, and make discipline a priority.

Educators should not think about improving education for their district's children merely as a form of "local patriotism." Education is part of our national defense. Our high-tech armed forces, not just businesses, need highly-educated high school graduates.

In world competition, both economic and military, our current chaotic curricular requirements amount to a crime against our youth, and it is one we must stop committing if we want them to survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive world.