Any school not anchored by universal values does more harm than good. Any school that is not open to all ages without respect to the ability to pay is deficient. Any school that requires attendance is more a prison than a doorway to freedom. In short, our education system universally is messed up. But that's OK. Things could be worse. Not every nation has a president who can with a stroke of a pen decree that education will be withdrawn from more than a million children. Only in America is this happening. Only in America could the head of the FBI affect the fate of more than a million children by enabling the election by the slimmest of margins of a man who seems to care mainly for himself and whose ethics seem nonexistent.
Tolerance, helpfulness
The universal values I suggest should buttress all education are not that difficult to guess. One would be tolerance. Another would be helpfulness. The third would be democracy. This last one is problematic if your name is Putin or Trump or De Vos, but we should never assume people are unable to change. These are the three values, taken together, have always created progress. By progress, I mean an advance toward what is good for all.
Trump Plan Could Erase This School Program https://t.co/4nLMINQ5x5
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 23, 2017
The nice word in the tweet above is could. It refers to Trump's budget ideas. The budget is one of the things a president is supposed to produce for our common good.
When the suggestions are not good there is a chance to say no. That is why we have an executive branch and a Legislative Branch. Unfortunately, the same wave that brought Mr. Trump to power also brought his political party to majority status in both houses of the legislative branch. This means that the chances of eliminating Trump's purge of more than a million kids from community learning opportunities are not that great.
One shudders to think of what a compromise would look like.
Safe, secure
In cybercommunities, education would be as outlined in the first paragraph. Kids could walk to school because these communities would be safe and secure. There would be no traffic because cars would not be present within the community. There would be eyes on the street.
Schools would be all over. They would not be housed in large factory-like facilities. They would be open to anyone who would agree not to interrupt and to respect the rights of others. Mr. Trump has never heard of cybercommunities. But they are a model of what the would be possible if people decided they wanted things that way. Otherwise, we will have to make do with a president whose care for people is confined to the minority that actually voted for hm, or whatever is left of it after 100 days of executive orders.
