Editor’s Note: I was on the road again this weekend, and more road confronting me later this week to attend a wedding that affirms my faith in the strength of love, and in a larger sense, the goodness of women and men.
So, expect me to be a little erratic on the information stream the next few weeks. Looming is the car show in Indiana named for my Dad, a first meeting with my grand-daughter, a very strange conference in St. Louis that you will hear more about than you want to know, and a deferred trip to Pearl Harbor as the Fall comes on.
We will see how much of this I can actually accomplish, since a simple drive our through Thoroughfare Gap to The Plains of Virginia and thence to the farm in Culpeper was about the limit I could handle this weekend.
Not to mention actually doing the laundry, but that is another story entirely. Instead, let’s look back to an anniversary with Arrias that was largely uncelebrated, and should rightly be a centerpiece of our society, and a mark of what we can coomplish when we put our minds to it.
We could do anything back then- land wars in Asia excepted- and now we can’t even maintain our infrastructure and rely on Elon Musk to do it for us.
– Vic
Moon Man
Some years ago I found myself sitting at an airport gate, waiting for a connecting flight. As there were several gates around the sitting area, there was a bit of churn.
As I sat, a man walked in, and was almost immediately surrounded by a small crowd, all talking excitedly. I recognized him as the head-coach of that year’s Super Bowl winner. I then noticed another man who’d just walked in and sat down, across the waiting area from me. He was perhaps 60, wore reading glasses, and carried a valise overflowing with papers and notebooks. He looked around the room, noted the commotion around the head coach, and then his face lit up in what can only be called a boyish grin. That’s when I recognized him, and I almost went over and introduced myself. But, it occurred to me that he quite enjoyed the irony of his anonymity and so I left him alone.
Shortly thereafter he rose and boarded his airplane.
That man was Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on another heavenly body. Navy fighter pilot (78 combat missions over North Korea), test pilot, engineer, 7 flights in the X-15. He walked on the moon.
Last week was the 48th anniversary of that first moonwalk. I asked several people if they knew what day it was; they didn’t. I looked in vain for stories on the Internet or elsewhere.
A few years ago NASA’s director said it would take 10 years to return to the moon; the first time we went we needed only 8 years. The truth is our manned space-flight program is a mess. Currently, the US can’t even put a man into space; US astronauts go to the International Space Station riding on Russian rockets.
This is more than simply a failing of our space program; it’s a failing of our education system. We talk about STEM programs, but recent college graduates know little hard science, and even less history of the nation and the figures who produced the hard science that put 12 men on the moon. Or developed the CT Scan and the MRI, or the laser, or microcircuits. Unfortunately, you can’t develop the next generation of anything if you don’t understand where the current generation came from.
During the 1980s there was a bumper-sticker that read roughly: “Wouldn’t it be great if schools had all the money they needed and we held bake sales to buy a bomber?” In 2014, when total US national security spending was less than $600 billion, the US spent $634 billion just on public elementary and secondary schools. Costs for high schools and colleges were hundreds of billions more. The “hope” of the bumper sticker seems to have come to pass; total US spending on education now exceeds $1 trillion, and substantially exceeds all national security spending.
For four decades we’ve focused on input: how much money we spent on students, how many personnel worked at each school managing this, that or the other program, etc., but we’ve lost sight of the outcome: well-educated citizens.
We live in the information age. Do high school graduates know the fundamentals, just the fundamentals, of how an Intel processor works? How is data stored in a hard drive? What does a router do? What does a server do?
We all want responsive government; do our recent graduates understand the Constitution and how representative government works?
What about economics? Do our graduates understand the benefits and risks of deficit spending? The consequences of a sustained 2% inflation rate? The pros and cons of graduated tax rates?
The US faces a host of problems, among them: a resurgent China, Islamic terrorists, a nuclear-armed North Korea. At home we have a huge and growing federal debt; federal, state and municipal retirement programs and medical accounts that will all be in the red within 20 years; an infrastructure that needs constant attention.
Our many problems have solutions, solutions that might even help us conquer the stars. But none of our problems can be addressed without an educated, informed citizenry. And for decades our education system has failed both our students and our nation.
We’ve tried throwing money at our problems; that didn’t work. It’s time to try something else; let’s try getting back to basics.
Armstrong said of himself: “I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer.” Let’s make some more Neil Armstrongs.
Copyright 2017 Arrias
www.vicsocotra.com