I’m alternately a compassionate conservative and a realistic liberal so I am always at odds with someone about President Trump. I think his putting Wall Street insiders in charge of an economy after what they did to us all in the late 2000’s is a terrible move, but that doesn’t mean he can't also have good ideas.
Panic over schools
I'd happily eliminate my former high school in favor of online schooling. Today my smartest, best-educated friends such as a forensic accountant, chose an online option for their kids. Trump's pick for DoE makes some sense.
If I’d had that option decades ago I'd have graduated 2 years earlier and missed out on that wonderful 30-mile bus ride each way, not to mention skipping several teachers who knew less about math, chemistry, and physics than I did as a student.
But local control?
President Trump opposes them but we need national guidelines. Our local school board spent $3 million on a natatorium (swimming pool inside a new building) instead of buying more computers, new books, or CNC machine tools for the trade school. We already have a municipal swimming pool, rivers, and ponds.
Future jobs
Trump himself shows the best Jobs of the future will require computer skills and continuing education skills, not sitting in a crowded room, repeating rote lessons in a crowd - that is training to punch a time clock and work in factories.
That’s what our public school system was designed to do, retrain farm kids to sit still quietly and not question management. Why do you think we have summer (planting and harvesting) vacations?
That worked in 1910, but not 2010 with teachers who aren’t even trained to college sophomore level knowledge in the courses they teach.
My high school physics teacher quit and went back to tending bar, my math teacher didn't understand calculus. It isn’t much better these days. Thirteen years ago a teacher told me she didn’t understand computers and couldn’t afford $500 to buy one. Her family of two had double the medium income for the rural area.
Today farms (which Trump seldom mentions) need 1% of the population to produce food surpluses, so tomorrow’s best jobs will fit in one of two categories, both equally important.
First is the trades which Trump supports - jobs such as plumbing, carpentry, heavy equipment operation, repairing machines, including robots, and so forth which can't be outsourced. I was a mechanic and it is rewarding and good paying. One of the best people I know is an Amish builder.
The other kind of good jobs will need skills including sitting alone at a computer collaborating electronically much more than being trained to be a factory drone. We know Trump knows computers.
The great wall
I seriously doubt congress will fund more than a test of Trump's great wall, perhaps a hundred miles of it before someone convinces President Trump that it makes no sense. That gives him cover for reform. Part of his speech to Congress was a path to citizenship for the dreamers and others who committed no other crime than immigrating without papers.
President Trump also said admitting the brightest and best-educated immigrants is preferable. Today we admit English illiterates who survive the coyotes and desert. We need brains more than we need survivors.
I feel sorry for those desperate people, but we aren’t the world’s savior, where is Europe pressuring those totalitarian regimes in Central/South America creating the Immigrant pressure?
As for Trump rounding up immigrants, they broke the law, if they have no small children who are citizens kick em out and let in more of the people who are standing in line legally, many of them for a decade. Why are we so concerned about the illegals when it hurts the people who follow our laws?
There is no need to be brutal, but we either have a border or we don't. If not we'll eventually have to colonize central and south America except for Brazil and enforce the rule of law on criminal regimes.
Highlights
Full speech
