Education, Schmeducation: Where's the Pork?

Bush announces strategic language initiative[The Daily Princetonian - Jan. 5, 2006]

President Bush today announced a new hundred-million-dollar initiative to bolster U.S. national security by expanding foreign language education in this country, especially of key languages including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Farsi.
...
Bush is requesting $114 million from Congress for the effort, called the National Security Language Initiative, which includes programs aimed at increasing foreign language education from kindergarten through the university level and into the workforce.

"You can't win in the long run for democracy unless you've got the capacity to help spread democracy," Bush said this afternoon. "You see, we got to convince people of the benefits of a free society. And you can't convince people unless you can talk to them. And I'm not talking to them right now directly; I'm talking through an interpreter on some of these Arabic TV stations."


No advances made in adult literacy, study says [CNN.com - Dec 15, 2005]

About one in 20 adults in the U.S. is not literate in English, meaning 11 million people lack the skills to handle many everyday tasks, a federal study shows.

We can't even teach our children how to speak, read, and write properly in our own language, and we're spending millions of tax dollars to teach them how to speak the languages of our enemies? How about spending some of the pork fund on giving our kids the education they really need: reading, writing, and rhetoric in English; science; mathematics; accurate, not revisionist, American, European, and World Histories; a classical liberal arts background. If these foundational elements were in place, the complex tasks of learning foreign languages would be made easy, because our students would already comprehend the thought-processes behind the foreign languages they'd be learning. Most importantly, our students would have a healthy comprehension of who they are and what their role, and their nation's role is in the world. Our educational system is currently teaching our children a globalist view of the world; instead of being taught how to speak English, they're being taught to hate English speakers. How can you possibly take those brainwashed minds and expect them to understand that the real reason we're teaching them to speak Chinese and Farsi is because those are the languages of the nations that pose the greatest threats to our safety?

George W. Bush may be a wartime President, but he ought to start focusing more on the battles in the War on Terror that are being fought every day in our educational institutions. The ramifications of being on the losing side of this fight prove that a mind is a dangerous thing to waste.