My thoughts on the Ferguson situation. I always pride myself in trying to see both sides of the argument and instead of blaming or complaining, I try to find a solution. I believe we all know that this is about more than just the shooting of Michael Brown. I believe it is because many people are feeling hopeless, discriminated against, and are feeling left behind in society. In my opinion, this problem is only being exacerbated by the separation of wealth that is happening in this country. Simply put “people that make enough money to live on, do not need or want to steal”. The police are the people that are stuck dealing with this frustration first hand. I personally feel terrible for all sides involved. I am very fortunate in that, I worked hard, joined the military, went to college and have made a nice life for my family. That said I have family and friends who are smart people but that are barely scraping by on a daily basis. I watch my friends who have to deal with discrimination, and I can see that their struggles are even worse. In my eyes, education is one of the variables that can level the playing field. So the key question is how can we help families that can barely pay the rent, get an education? Especially when the cost of education can be $20,000-$250,000 for a degree. You can clearly see with numbers this large, that even at a young age people would think it is hopeless, or become disgruntled, angry, and can even turn to crime, as they see no way out. The government has tried to help solve this problem by approving larger student loan amounts each year. The funny thing is this is actually making the problem worse. The schools are onto the government plan and simply use the increased loan amount to raise their tuition each year. To contrast this problem, you have a select group of ultra-wealthy families that are spending millions of dollars just on prep schools to get their kids into the exclusive colleges. I believe that with technology we now have one of the solutions to this problem. We used to have to pay professors to teach 10-50 students. We can now offer on-line courses and leverage the amount of people that can be educated by one professor. You could force all the public colleges, that receive state and federal funding, to offer 1-4 courses on-line, for free. The department of education would then put together a list of degrees that are available on-line. The important part is this is an accredited degree program. We could start with two-year degrees in areas that are in high demand. The key is you would not be required to have a high school degree, you could be fifty years old and lose your job and re-educate yourself, for free. Realize, that once someone drops out of high school, they are basically left out of most middle class jobs. We need a system that allows people to get a technical degree without spending $20,000. You could take courses while you are still in high school or while you are working. The only requirement would be you have to be a U.S. citizen to access the classes. It would probably cost the government $1-10 bln dollars to set up the web site and administer the program (heck, Princeton has more than that in their endowment program!!!) This would-be money well spent versus, giving tax breaks to buy appliance, cars, or whatever other stimulus packages the government has thrown together in the past to try artificially stimulate the economy. Every person should be fighting to solve this problem (Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, police, and the especially the government). Many great empires have fallen due to the separation of wealth; we should learn from history…. (Feel free to share, but PLEASE only respond respectfully) #ferguson #michael Brown #shooting #police #obama #education #Missouri #whitehouse #departmentofeducation #worthatry #president
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 06:13:03 +0000
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