Ok. These issues were in the State of the Union address, but they were not addressed with a full grasp on reality. I have no doubt that I will end up being fired on from both sides for this, and someone will try to say that these issues were adequately addressed in the speech. That’s fine. For now, I am writing this mostly because I ended up in a debate on Twitter with someone about one of these issues, and honestly couldn’t deal with it anymore in 140 characters or less.
President Obama stressed investment in the future quite a bit tonight, primarily in two arenas – green technology and education. To be clear, it is absolutely necessary for us to invest in both. That is not subject to debate. However, timing, extent of investment, and how to invest are definitely debatable. First, on green technology, now is not the time to invest a great deal of governmental money. Unless I’ve been missing something really major here, we cannot expect a major return on such an investment in the short-term. We are not teetering on the edge of the next big thing that will allow us to replace the combustion engines in use now en masse, for one thing. We also aren’t close to the point where we can get off our addiction to fossil fuels in general.
Bluntly, we are playing catch up on this, and we should have started exploring alternative fuels in earnest back when OPEC was formed. The fact that the major players in the oil industry are coming out stating that they are investing in alternative fuel research and development should have been taken as a cue. Let them. This is important, so I’ll repeat it. Let the oil industry invest the time and money in alternative fuel research. They have seen the writing on the wall, and don’t want to get cornered out of the market when (not if) demand for their product wanes. It is a market driven decision on their part. Alternative fuel should be very near the last on the list of concerns for our government right now. Right now, we need to do precisely what the President said, and stop giving money to oil companies. (Yes, I know. I must be a RINO for saying that.) But, while cutting money from the government to oil companies, we also have to let the oil companies drill more. We need to achieve energy independence before we transition to alternative sources. We will not pull ourselves out of the economic mess we are in unless we first get out of being held hostage to the whims of OPEC. We need affordable fuel to rebuild our economy – nothing gets made or moved without it. That’s reality. We didn’t start searching for alternatives to oil when we should have, so now we have to deal with that. Green technology will have to wait until we have the money to invest in it. We don’t now. We will tomorrow, provided that we don’t stay under the thumb of foreign powers for the fuel we need now.
And that brings me to the other area where we’re playing catch up. Tonight the President said that it is time to start placing teachers on a pedestal as they do in other nations. Just like his predecessor, he made no real mention of how teachers should earn that distinction. Yet again we are faced with an administration that fails to recognize that we cannot expect improvement – let alone excellence – from our children academically if we fail to demand excellence from educators. The countries that consider teaching the highest of professions all have the highest standards for individuals seeking to teach. We do not. Unfortunately, teaching is often considered a fall-back position for people that can’t manage doing anything else. (That is not the rule, but a troubling exception that shouldn’t exist.) Arguably the greatest harm NCLB did was create a “fast track” to teaching – the complete opposite of what it should have been doing. No matter how much I loath the concept of suggesting that the government regulate anything more than it already does, in the case of education, we must demand legislation that addresses the problem of disparate requirements for acquiring a degree in education. We need to set minimum standards for teachers – not just students. But this is nothing new under the sun. It has been proven time and again by nations that have surpassed us in education. Education reform should have been done from the top down, not the bottom up. As for complaints about governmental intrusion into education, perhaps time will show that this is the real way to get the government out of the classroom. If our teachers are better educated and prepared to teach, perhaps we won’t need the government to help students succeed. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think that just having the government demand that only the best and brightest take a place at the front of our classrooms is much less intrusive (and costly) than having it step in to assist students that need help for whatever reason. If we honestly start moving in this direction with education, then we will have a much better chance at settling that alternative energy problem much sooner. Maybe instead of the President’s projections that would put our full transition away from fossil fuels somewhere around when my grandchildren that haven’t been born yet hit middle age, it could happen when my youngest son is still under forty. (My youngest is nine.) The bottom line is we didn’t need to hear about investing in a future decades away. We needed to hear about what we can do now to solve our current problems as quickly as possible. I know, that smacks of the “I want it now” mentality, but that’s reality – we need it now.
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