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With all the schools starting back up, and of course it takes over a lot of conversations. Parents are happy to pass of their children and get a bit of a break. Some children are ready to go for their first day of school, and teachers are going back to under paid jobs. Some more of us are ready to go off to the paid level of education. This means that summer is nearly over.

There are some schools charging for registration, and sending collection notices to parents that refuse to pay. One such school in Colorado is actually collecting forty five dollars per student. Other schools are focusing on nipping attendance issues in the bud. I watch all the hoopla and I almost want to cry. Our public school system is one of our countries greatest assets, but like most things people perceive as free, it is under valued. Our children rarely look forward to school beyond the first few grades.

By high school the children are neatly placed into social grouping, and most of them are not happy with the label. They spend more time working on that caste system, then they do learning the things that are going to make our country strong with an educated work force. The depreciated statistics are demoralizing. I went back to school and found some unused aspects of my own education. Apparently I read at a college level, my math is pretty damn good too, but my grammar is horrible.

The sad part about it, looking back at things I have written in the past, I have improved in the category of sentence structure since high school. Same with math and scientific knowledge. I was not alone. Most of the kids I talked to at orientation where taking at least one remedial class their freshmen year. Most of them just left our education system.

This bothers me because our government is in a debt crisis, looking to see where they can cut funding. They are also looking at all these special programs and federally funded items. It also shows me that most politicians did not pay attention in college and their public school math skills shine through. If you make thirty thousand a year, but spend sixty thousand a year, you will be in debt. Being in debt is never good, and even worse when you feel you need to live beyond your means.

So why don't we cut enough budget so that we can really fund our future. We take out the things that our government has no business being in, or the things we really can live without. We say screw programs like no child left behind and set standards for the children to aspire to. Stop spending money handing out a fish, when we can use the money to teach our kids to fish. We work on their education, and in the process develop a stronger work force. In doing that we build a stronger future for our country.

At the very least we will teach them the reality of a balanced budget and hopefully they will be the politicians of the future. Invest in that future and we can hope that they will get into office and know basic math, and be able to balance a budget. Credit is great for large purchases, I understand that, but it is not good for large countries. Oh and maybe if we fixed that, we could pay teachers closer to what they are worth. We might even be able to have classes at a manageable level.

So lets look to the future. Cut the fluff, bring the budget under the amount of money the country brings in, and invest that money in the future. Education. Lets bring our country back to the top of the list of educated peoples, and earn our place back at the top of the heap.