May 3, 2005
IDEAS AND OPINIONS
Letters to the Editor:
Public education: need for more one-on-onePublic education is probably the hottest political topic next to immigration. The public education systems in Arizona, and across the nation, are given very little credit. People think that education costs too much and that those who run it are not doing a good enough job.
But what they don’t understand is that education doesn’t run like a business. You can not stimulate the quality of education as you would an assembly line. Reducing a teachers salary will not help them be better and giving them too much won’t help them teach better.
What will work is having a lower student to teacher ratio. You can’t produce educated children, or adults, in mass quantities with one teacher. It just doesn’t work for everyone that way.
If you had a choice of whether to go to a class with a size of 100 or 20 which would you choose? I would choose the one with 20. Why you might ask? Because I can have a better relationship with my teacher and my teacher can help me understand the material better. This situation applies to our children as well.
They will be able to perform in tests a lot better and live up to the standards we expect them to have if we only allowed them to gain more one-on-one time with their teachers.
How can we allow them this? By creating smaller class sizes through increasing funds for education.
Each child and person learns a different way and a teacher can better influence their learning by knowing them personally.
We need to stop being hypocrites by demanding better education and not doing anything about it. Especially the legislature. They are a key factor in holding back our children.
They come up with the idea to test our children and expect them to do so well and when the children don’t perform as expected they deal with the real issues.
As Americans, we need to stand up for what is right and not neglect the future, which is our children.
It is time to move forward and accept the need for increased funding for education. Our children’s future is at stake.