When I read the book Fast Food Nation, I recall reading that Americans spend more in fast food alone than all of education. Just think if everyone denied themselves McDonalds or other favorite fast food, let's say once or twice a week, and donated that to a school...
...maybe things can change. We are so wasteful to gratify ourselves, we have become a victim of our own success and convenience. If we could only direct and funnel our resources to help the future, to encourage others, things may change.
Sometimes, I am jealous of various Asian cultures, like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. There's such a high emphasis on education, both in prevalent society, and governmental support. Especially, in Korea, they saw the only way to develop quickly, to get ahead, and even overthrow Japanese occupation someday, was to have its citizens become educated. And in the end, the phenomenal, and I do say phenomenal, growth in a short amount of time, only goes to help illustrate the success of societal focus and push on education.
Sometimes, I am jealous of various Asian cultures, like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. There's such a high emphasis on education, both in prevalent society, and governmental support. Especially, in Korea, they saw the only way to develop quickly, to get ahead, and even overthrow Japanese occupation someday, was to have its citizens become educated. And in the end, the phenomenal, and I do say phenomenal, growth in a short amount of time, only goes to help illustrate the success of societal focus and push on education.
When I was younger, I was exposed to many Taiwanese, especially the ones that bought up houses with cash in Cupertino, California. Cupertino was attractive to Taiwanese because of its famous K-12 school system.
I then traveled to Taiwan to learn about their success, and I discovered a society, in all levels of society, whether rich or poor, shared common values toward education. I also heard about government's extreme involvement in education, setting standards, requiring education, etc. Despite the 4000 and more complex traditional Chinese characters, Taiwan had one of the highest literacy ratings in the world for its citizens. And for couples, selecting partners, it was common to consider educational background and aptitude or potential of the partner. The urgency and enthusiasm is just embedded into all aspects of the culture.
In contrast to America, many people don't consider education with selecting a partner. I joke with my sister that if the partner has a job and doesn't do drugs, then there is potential. Thus the standards are set quite low. This just shows that the planning for future, like with education,and children, is absent in the minds of many.
In different stratified levels of American society, the goals and emphasis on education is different. A wealthy family, might threaten to disown their children if they do not pursue education, while lower income families might discourage their children from going to school, or at least not emphasize its importance. For myself, I was told I was lazy for trying to go to college and not work, and I was told that I could never have a white collar job, as that wasn't for "our type of people" (meaning poor people), and this was coming from another white male. I know everyone's experience is not the same, but the results are staggering, e.g. dropouts in inner city, etc. They even talk about some of this in Fast Food Nation, on how Fast Food companies prey on the low income people for recruitment and exploitation.
And lastly, we have our governments, that are more concerned with locking people up than financially supporting education. Education is always the first to go in budget cuts, as was recently done in California. Education should be a priority for our governments (state and federal).
