I see a bumper sticker with the above almost everyday on my walk to school. I can feel myself sympathetic with the sentiment sometimes. I often feel that the sentiment is naive, that of a simpleton, and masquerading as something with important meaning while truly hollow, on the other hand. Thinking about it I've (obviously) decided to write a post on the subject, and actually I came up with an answer:
Because war is expensive, education isn't. Even as a college student who is continually hit with the cost of education-a physics major who often thinks, "Man, I wish the phys. dept. could just replace all this lab equipment with newer, nicer stuff," a student who knows how expensive books are, a student who works extensively with computers and wonders if he'd do well at all without his personal computer-I think the need for money in education is overrated. Good education requires more personal involvement on the part of the teacher and the student. That's the most important factor. Everything else is gravy. Shouldn't we have a financial investment and incentive for teachers do be involved then? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I'd love it if teachers got paid more, because apart from parents they may have the most important job for society.
Then again, soldiers may have the most important job for society. Soldiers bought us freedom from England with blood, nuclear warheads scared us, but may have also saved us from communists during the cold war, and soldiers, TSA, CIA, NSA, and others from the American war machine that seems to have too much money keep those who would kill us all simply because we don't bow to their beliefs. Moreover, soldiers liberates Auschwitz, and have stopped evil time and time again throughout history.
Guns, planes, bombs, and armour cost money though. Keeping these relevant costs more. Finding a good teacher takes, well frankly luck. Actually, it costs character. If our society doesn't cultivate character, no one is going to take a job trying to impart knowledge to others. This number will fall even farther if the students of our society don't have enough humility (which people of good character should have) to learn, instead persecuting those that would dare try to tell them they need to work harder to understand an unknown piece of the world. No one can do more to bring the character to the students of our society than parents. But most parents worry more about their children being smart, successful, or simply docile than they do about having character.
In a perfect world, we would pay teachers would be millionaires, and armies wouldn't exist because there'd be no need. Aside from religious beliefs, we'll never live in that perfect world and we have to live intelligently, according to what really exists and addressing those needs, in the real world. The real world has evil, danger, and societal problems that make education hard, so sometimes it's easier to pretend we live in a perfect world.
