Education

I've been trying to write a post about the current education debates going on around the country for awhile now. I'm really struggling to organize my thoughts so I apologize if this comes out very disjointed.

With all the money we hand out to corporations on a daily basis, is education REALLY the area we need to be cutting in the budget? I want to see accurate statistics on this, please. The highest test scores in the world are not coming from the wealthiest countries, how are they making their budgets work?
Maine is talking about four day school weeks and nationwide we are debating how much to pay teachers and what benefits to give them. How many different ways can we find to tell our children education isn't important?
On the other hand, how many families actually feel education IS important? How many children leave school for the day and their education stops there? How do we encourage parents to continue to educate their children instead of leaving it all up to teachers?
Education is incredibly important to me. I am the daughter of a teacher, the niece of many teachers, and the granddaughter of a librarian. I wrote my first essay on why teacher's should be paid more than they are when I was in middle school, and I still stand by that view. And yet, it appears we are headed the opposite direction.
How can we justify cutting welfare costs AND education costs? Education is essential in today's world. The jobs that the uneducated used to do are being taken over by machines. The majority of welfare participants are not educated people. So we cut education, create more need for welfare and then ALSO cut welfare?
And then we have these "professional athletes" making more in a year than a teacher will make in their whole lives. Nevermind... I can't even go on with that topic...
The whole thing infuriates me. I recieved applications and resumes when I was managing the pet store that made me cringe. Incorrect spellings, red pen and in one case PURPLE CRAYON. Out of 130 resumes we went through when we were hiring we found four that looked like they were qualified.
How can we say the problem is the economy? The problem is education. The problem is a society drowning in reality tv shows and not even caring. The problem is that we can spout off all we want about how important education is to us, but actions speak louder than words. And when our children sit down to learn from a ten year old history book with "eat shit" written on the binding they don't feel like education is important.