It’s like watching a snowball under a hair dryer.

Thanks, at the very least, for providing a demonstrative example.

Oh, one more small exercise: Take the chart and make a mark where the War in Afganistan started. Note the change in the curves.

Even so, I believe you do have a point. There are fewer and fewer people in the US who have an interest in school, who have given up hope as the middle class disappears and wealth is transferred to the ultra-wealthy.

And a few, if not more, kids to catch on, and do well. Should we pour money down an Iraqi rathole or an Afghani rathole or should we try to find and educate Americans.

Obviously Conservatives think that the interests of big industries are more important. Oil, arms and the associated interests which are subsidized by these wars rather than American schools.

Schools could be made to be a pleasant experience, something most kids would like to attend. It wouldn’t take much, a new approach, an understanding of what motivates kids, and financial support for the research and people necessary for it to happen. It won’t as long as people would rather buy billion dollar airplanes and invade harmless nations.

But hey, I’ll play it your way.

We’ll grant that reading, math and science are “worker bee” skills, and not worthy of discussion.

Show me a public education result of any kind that has shown any correlation with the massive increase in education costs.

Now, more money does not guarantee a better education, but less guarantees a poorer one.

Print out that graph. Take your finger and move it upward along that cost line. Then downward. See what changes occur on the other lines.

An “education” teaches people how to think, expands their world beyond themselves, an appreciation of others. There’s a reason wealthy kids would take a year after high school to travel the world.

The result of missing out on an education is a blind chauvinism, an inability to understand much of what happens in the world, a reluctance to compromise so that everyone’s needs can be considered and met, and the thought that schools should not crank out thinkers but technicians who work for large companies.

Now, more money does not guarantee a better education, but less guarantees a poorer one. And educating kids is about the most important thing government does. It’s too bad kids don’t have more support for it.

When I was in high school in 1969 (not in California), California was spending $4,736 per student (2008 dollars). In 2008, the latest year I have solid numbers for, that number was $9,842. Source

Double.

In 1969, our education system was landing men on the Moon. The United States was on the top of the world, technologically and economically.

Here’s that chart again. I think for the third time, but who’s counting?

Anyone who still holds the belief that the way to improve our education system is to pump more cash into the public education bureacracy is, to put it as mildly as possible, not using their faculties to their fullest potential.

The brain on liberalism.

And when the schools are expected to not only teach but raise the children, it costs money. What better than “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need?”