Now that I've begun slipping down the other side of “The Hill”, having turned 51 in February, my friends and I often find ourselves caught up in conversations about the state of the world, our country, and of course, the obligatory discussion of how easy the “kids” have it these days, compared to when we were kids. Yeah, you know it; we all walked to school in 2 feet of snow with no shoes, a mere jacket for warmth, and the long trek to and from the institution of higher learning was always up hill...both ways.

A favorite topic of mine is the shambles representative of our education system. This topic is strictly prohibited by my friends and acquaintances who are school teachers, which would include my ex-in-laws. Their family members have been educators since before the Civil War, with one member having the honor of being one of the very first Senators in the newly formed state of West Virginia, established when the population of that area chose not to secede with their old state of Virginia.

To add to this grief, I come from a family where there has always been very much involvement with educational issues from the parental side of the issue. Members of my family have held officer positions in local PTA's, and when the PTA was done away with in my neck of the woods, I became a voice in the fledgling Parent-Teacher Organization or PTO, serving as Vice President, until I moved away.

During the early Reagan years, I took up the cause to fight how Reagan's block grants were to be applied to education in my home state of Pennsylvania. It was a travesty. Special Education monies were being lumped in with library, arts, and extra-curricular sports funds. Being from Central PA, we all understood what that would mean for the children with special needs, in addition to the music and art curriculum. There had already been a wave of pink slips with more to come. A huge percentage of the block grant was being ear-marked for sports teams rather than education. We spent many hours lobbying our state representatives and senators. We spent day after day, attending meetings of special interest groups such as the Association for the Blind, PA Association of Retarded Citizens, Cerebral Palsy Association, etc, as well as attending meetings with the Secretary of Education and his henchmen.

I had a two year old and a newborn at the time. Neither of them had any special needs, but besides the fact that one never knows how life may turn out down the road, it was simply the right thing to do. I became very familiar with how the game was played. At the age of 21, I became aware of the fact that no matter the issue at hand, politics will be involved, and when politics are involved, it's always about money.

Common sense would dictate that, well, of course it's about money. What I discovered at such a young age was the money issue wasn't really about the spending of money, even though that was exactly the manner in which it was presented. No, when money is mentioned, it's never really about cost, so much as it's about who stands to make the most money off of the end result. Our politician's will bemoan and belabor the cost of an issue in an attempt to scare people about the possible need for increased taxes, when truly, they are merely manipulating the taxpayers to vote in a manner consistent with earning a big pay off for the victor. We aren't privy to the private dealings and the sideline, under wraps agreements that go on in the shady world of politics.

My thoughts were going a mile a minute after a comment was made by a friend, who claimed that American education was spiraling ever downward, and it didn't seem to be possible to halt it. No one really seems to understand what is happening in our country when it comes to our education system. Everyone has their own personal opinion about who's to blame. In one corner, we've got the teachers crying about the terrible parenting that's causing their students to fail to make the grades. In another corner, we've got parents pointing fingers at teachers they believe are breaking the bank with little results to show for any supposed efforts made to teach. In yet another corner, we've got politicians blaming the lack of money required to provide a good education.

Everyone of those arguments are garbage, and while there is always some truth to all of them, these arguments only serve to cloud what has been going on for over a century, and is continuing unabated because we have all been duped into playing the blame game. To get a better understanding of what's been going on, let's take a walk into the past to the early years of the 1900's, and meet a man named William Heard Kilpatrick, the czar of progressive education. He, along with John Dewey, is most responsible for ending the traditional education our great-grandparents received.