The family-unit certainly has a lot to do with the crumbling of many children's values and common sense, but let us not overlook the schools in this country and the drift away from high quality education as a core national value and goal. The schools that are fully funded and graduating kids who are ready for college and technical schools are few and far between. ACT conducted a study a couple of years ago that found only two in five graduating students will be able to get a passing grade in a college algebra class. China is emerging as one of the greatest world powers that has ever existed, yet only 50,000 students in this country are studying Chinese at the high school level while in China, there are more students learning English as a second language than there are English speaking people in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. combined. In this country, we never tire of schemes and programs to improve our educational system and spend millions of dollars that is largely thrown into the wind, showing little or no result. If a program to really overhaul our education system and provide a free, high-quality primary and secondary education to every student in the country were devised, who would pay for it? We have spent 600 billion dollars in Iraq, but if we tried to raise property taxes to pay for quality education, we'd see the vehement and militant property owners marching in the streets against any increase proposed. I think this shooting, along with so many other tragedies of this kind that have occurred in the past are just symptoms of a broken system that sadly, will take a crisis on a national scale to wake up the people and come together to repair and move forward.
