National Education System.

What is thought without organization? When we are uneducated we make decisions based on survival and emotion. I don't mean in the scholastic sense exclusively; education comes in many forms and from many different sources.

The key to the success of education is to keep an open mind and be tolerant of others points of view. You cannot possibly have a well-rounded education if you do not take the lessons that are learned from another. Imagine an environment with a prevailing body determining the education that your children receive? And if all the lessons available were determined by a body that you do not agree with. Shouldn't those lessons be as general as possible to teach as many different demographics as possible?

We can all agree to disagree on the methods that are used to educate our children in the public school system; forcing religion out of our schools was a great first step. The core values of tolerance, empathy and acceptance should not be taught as a subject as it pertains to a fundamentally religious organization; those values need to be instilled by the parents and reinforced by all surrounding inhabitants of this beautiful planet, namely us.

There are always what-ifs and exceptions to any idea but the fundamental point to this post is that kindness is key to the co-existence of our society. We need to treat all the people in our society with the same kindness and respect we would extend to someone we love or respect. We talk to our friends, family and people we respect much differently than the way we interact with the society that surrounds us.

Back to education. Educating our youth and ourselves should be the focus of every person on the planet. We have the natural direction to only focus on our survival; something that makes sense from an animal sense but we are only animals by our species classification. We do not think like animals anymore, we have separated ourselves from the animals with education and the ability to record information. We have advanced based on science and factual recording of historical events. Volumes of books are written in the world to teach people; thoughts and studies transferred from our mind to another media for others to absorb, ensuring we do not become stagnant in our evolution as a species.

This is not a discussion on religion although it leans towards that because the oft-argued education points are based separating religion from our education system. The other arguments are demographical, a major driving factor towards introducing or even prolonging the presence of religion as staple in our education system. The less educated people are the more they harbor an idea that this awful, hard world will all be over soon and they can live on the other side of the gates to heaven. This is a subject for another post.

Very important to realize, our education system is only a small influencer of the outcome of our society as a whole. What education we provide at home has a much greater impact than our schools. We need to have a baseline education system so we can all function safely together in the world. We need to be able to read and do simple math which enables us to hold jobs from grocery bagger to CEO. Can't we all agree that a drivers license is a good concept for our safety while driving? That then begs an important question, how much of the bible was apart of your drivers ed class? How many questions on the written test were based on scripture? We can assume that there was no reference to religion...why then in our schools where children are less capable of forming their own opinions? I do not have facts and it may discount my thoughts for many people but I can at least hypothesize this idea:

Are people that attend schools with an emphasis on religion any smarter than attendees or public schools required to separate church and state?

If they are not smarter, more successful, more tolerant, more charitable and generally more kind then there is no reason to have religion in our schools. We need to have a foundation in our education system that meets the cultural needs of as many demographics as possible. That leads to the this post titled 'National Education System'.

We need to have federal involvement in our education system and we need be proud of the system we currently have. The work that our educators have put into our society is immeasurable. Could you imagine what your life would be like if you did not go to school? If you were the attendee of a public school that separated religious points of views from non-religions points of view; do you feel less educated? I have to assume no. The need for a national education system is to create that foundation all schools can to abide by; do our educators really have time to create rules for the schools or should they be focussed on bettering our children and society? This eliminates pockets of our society growing to a religious threat with decades of teaching a point of view that is one-sided. Could you imagine if a Muslim community popped up in South Dakota and was able to use public monies to educate their children in Muslim beliefs? Why then is it acceptable for any other religion to do so? We need rules, we need guidelines and those parameters need to be nationwide to ensure we don't create religious conflict because you were born in Muslim South Dakota or Southern Baptist Missouri.

Running that system is hard! Fighting public emotional needs for education is not an easy task but shouldn't the NEA be focussed on providing the best possible education for our children? Should they be concerned with Coke machines in schools? Shouldn't that responsibility be in the community? The NEA should be setting standards that allow for the greatest amount of information to be passed to a child in the most formidable years of their lives. All that baseline provides is direction to ensure tolerance and kindness are the foundation of our society. If you were born before 1975 you saw a totally different education system than you do today. Today we have required our educators not to paddle, curse, isolate or be unkind to our children. I think that is progression. I have gone through my entire life without reading the ten commandments and I, like the majority of the planet, turned out just fine.

We have to use compassion and tolerance when we look at our education system; it is hard to run and even harder to fix. There is a lot of work needed; it isn't just shuffling money around to different hands. We should all be focussed on creating an education system that promotes progression, not regression. We should encourage our children to look at different points of view and allow them to form into a person that can participate in any human activity with any race or religion. When was the last time you look at the library or the Internet? With all the books that have been written over time by very educated, diverse people how could we be so ignorant to think that one book can be the foundation for raising every child in the world?

To conclude, we need a system to set the standards of tolerance, kindness and acceptance. As a whole our federally controlled education system provides that. Do you ever feel unsafe when your children are in a public school and are you confident that a belief system other than your own will not be taught to your child? Generally, we don't and we shouldn't need to...that is why we are Americans...that is the message we should promote worldwide.