Did you know?

The WayneWho staff received an interesting e-mail from our good friend Osceola County School Board Member Jay Wheeler, we assume, about yesterday's post. The e-mail titled 'What our children need education to prepare them for/watch' contained no explanation as to its importance or relevance to the current discussion matter, just a link to a YouTube Video. Many of our readers know that the WayneWho staff are all great fans of YouTube, but we also know the information that is posted on it may or may not be credible. But we were thankful for the link and watched it anyway. You will not need to watch it for the rest of the article to make sense, but we suggest you take a moment when you get a chance to see the guiding principals of our Osceola County School Board Members. The link to the video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY.

The 'Did You Know?' video is basically a list of trivia style questions that are strung in rapid succession to make the viewer go 'hmm....' The video starts of with the factoid that 'If you are one in a million in China' which then flips to a picture that says '...there are 1,300 people just like you.' The second factoid shows a large Chinese flag with the statement that 'China will soon become the NUMBER ONE English speaking country in the world.' Of course by this point in the video the WayneWho staff collectively sighed 'hmmm...' with the intrigue of what the word 'soon' might mean, but we continued on in hopes that this video sharing exercise might mean something. The next question states that 'The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ's is greater than the total population of the United States.' So now we can see the scare tactics beginning to take shape. The next succession of slides basically describe the future job market starting with the factoid that 'The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.' And then the factoid bomb is dropped on the viewer that is supposed to shake them to their core, 'We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.' (Wow... that is deep.) The rest of the video trails on in more useless factoids that may or may not have any basis in reality, but we at least understand the motives behind the School Boards and teachers around the state. We want money that you have not made yet to pay for educating your children to survive in fantasy land. This explains the problem.

First let us state that everyone on the WayneWho staff believes that education is critical to the future of our country, and that continuing to educate oneself should be a top priority for every person. In the early years of development, teachers and parents play critical parts in giving us the tools we need to be able to learn. If we know how to learn, then we can adapt to new technologies and ideas. Teachers are critical to developing this ability.

Our problem is that learning a test, the FCAT, does not teach you to adapt to new technologies. It teaches you to vomit practiced answers in the hopes of more school funding and raises for teachers. Having students watch movies, play computer games, or playing trivia games in the classroom are not building the educational bridge to our nation's future, these practices are only building a bridge to our wallets and one of the contributing factors to why India has more smart people than we do. The fundamentals of education have been lost in a sea of never-ending Tomorrow Land visions that have produced the reverse Wal-Mart effect; Less For More.

While we believe that the majority of teachers and school administrators are great at what they do, we return to our premise from yesterday. We need honesty in the system. We need independent Time-and-Motion studies that audit every aspect of our school system. As taxpayers we must ask the question "Are we getting what we are paying for or are we getting sent links to videos that explain abstract concepts to justify abstract spending?" We would also like to state that teachers alone cannot be singled out for the problems in our schools. Administrators, and even many parents have contributed to the decline, not countries like China or India.

We would like to thank our good friend, School Board Member Jay Wheeler for the link and for contributing to the debate on why Florida Schools continue to slip in results while they continue to need more money. These are the types of questions we feel should be discussed before any type of tax increase is decided upon. Maybe someone can dig up some other factoids that will explain where all the money is going and what happens to our socks when the they go into the dryer.