Friday, November 07, 2008

Obama and Education

Alright, so I visited Obama's education page and was reading through his ideas. In theory, it's a wonderful plan to streamline financial aid and reduce the application to just one form, remove the standardized test requirements, push pre-school, and make a serious effort to keep kids in school. The only huge issue I have is that he most likely won't get it done. Surprise surprise. I know there are promises made by each president to improve our education system, and none of those promises are ever completly fulfilled. I'll be honestly impressed and seriously might change my mind about the effectiveness of this guy if he gets this stuff done.

The other thing I was looking at is this new movement in Obama's governing plan that will force those between the ages of 18 to 25 to serve three months out of the year on a homeland training force, so to speak. It will focus on crisis response and the proper procedure for recovery from nuclear attack and (I assume) natural disasters. My big thing about that is I'm 21, and every summer, when I would be supposedly doing this service, I'm either taking classes or working in order to graduate from college. When I become a professional, I won't have time for at least a few years to go play with shovels for three months out of the year. I'm sorry, but this is not cool. I have one summer left before I hit the real world, and I'll be danged if I'm wasting it at some training camp that I didn't sign up for. It's forced volunteering, and it's crap.

These are going to be college kids digging ditches for community service. Now, I think I know where this is coming from. Obama has this plan to give free college tuition for at least 2/3 of the total if you perform 100 hours of community service (per year, I think), so perhaps he thinks that forcing young people to volunteer their time and effort will make them more worthy of the money he wants to give them.

I have no idea if what I just said makes sense, since I was listening to talk radio while writing it, but I think it might. Let me know.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Heh, come on Pam...drink the kool-aid like a good girl! You should never question our new Communist/Soalist Overlord! :P