Recently, I watched a video featuring Will I Am from the Black Eyed Peas. In this video, he talks about how he was born in the projects where a school received $4,000 a year per student. However, he was born an outlier. He was able to be bussed to a “better” school district where a school received $11,000 a year per student. A seven-thousand-dollar difference. When people ask the price of education, the price of learning or intelligence, remember that statistic. The “hood” remains the “hood” because the investment in education and in children is poor; we spend trillions of dollars every year on wars when we should spend trillions of dollars every year on teaching our children how to prevent it. When you deny a child an education, when the government does not give funding to our schools, we have crime. Nothing can change until our children are taken care of.
When children are not given the means or tools to survive, they must result in something else, usually being crime. When children are not given a chance to be successful, when children are brushed under the carpet because of where they are born, you put them at risk for a life of crime. Children need an education, they need to be taught that there are other means of survival, other ways to receive the items you want or need without resulting in crime.
Over the summer I worked as a nanny. I took my boys to the pool one day and I met a mother of one of their friends. We were discussing the upcoming school year and the mother mentioned her back to school list. “How ridiculous is this,” she began, “I have to buy a pay of 100 crayons and three boxes of tissues. I work in the school district of Philadelphia and do you know what question I’m forced to ask every day? Does everyone have a pencil? A PENCIL for Christ sakes.” The children in the school district of Philadelphia are given less of an opportunity than we have in the outskirts because the state does not give enough funding for them. The result? Philadelphia is number 65 of the most dangerous, crime-filled cities in America.
We need to stop pretending this is not an issue. We need to stop pretending that it is the 65-year old white men sitting in congress again that will change the world and make the land of the free a place to want to be. People will preach until their blue in the face about how a mixture of sperm and egg is a person and needs rights, but ask them to help a ghetto-born child and they look the other way. How do we know that the cure for cancer isn’t in the head of a child who can’t afford an education? How do we deny the chance for wars to end, the drug war to stop, crime to go down, and diseases to be cured?
Children need the chance to an education. They need to be taught how to think (not what to think) and they need the proper tools to do so. Communities with more high school graduates have 30 percent less crime. How do you deny the statistics? Education teaches children how to contribute to the world, it teaches them what they mean to the world. If you are looking for someone to save our future, don’t look at the candidates on the TV, look into the eyes of a child and ask them “what are you going to do to save the world?”
