Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.
This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!
The idea here, I gather, is that you could have saved the $30,000 on prisoners if you had just spent it on their schooling when they were young. By the time they get to prison it's too late. Clever, but not wise. The truth is, by the time they get to school it's already too late. Other than the spending limits and the concertina, I'm already not sure how to tell the difference between a prison and a public school.
My Catholic high school spent what I'm ballparking at $3,500 per student per year in today's dollars. They didn't do this by paying slave wages to bad teachers (they paid slave wages to very good teachers), nor by exploiting the labor of people with religious vocations, who made up only about 5 percent of our school staff. They did it because the students wanted to learn, or at least their parents beat them until they simulated it. And students who want to learn can do it with old computers, old textbooks and if necessary classrooms with no air conditioning (we had it by the time I got there, but my older sister didn't. This is Texas, mind you.) My high school happens to look like a prison these days, with high walls and a cop in a box, but that's to keep rifraff out, not in.
The fault, Horatio, lies not in our spending but in ourselves. I would be cautiously in favor of spending prison money on kids even earlier if I thought the government could do anything right. But I don't.
Some of the poor really are surplus population, and has human labor is replaced by robots and AI, more will be all the time. I'm not Scrooge; I don't say that with any particular enjoyment. What I want is to help people on whom the help will not be wasted. It's no fun, and not very cost-effective, to spend prison money on kids who grow up to be felons.
Assuming that as a matter of political reality we're going to have public schools, I think the focus of their funding shouldn't be providing three hots and a cot. The purpose should be to identify, and yes, lavish unequal resources on those students of all races and backgrounds who may someday accomplish something besides drinking, whoring, and rioting. Not, as A Renegade History of the United States is teaching me, that those things don't have a useful social function. I'm okay with the idea that some of our children will be male strippers and some will sit on the Supreme Court. And even that some, like the late Earl Warren, may be both. But let's spend more money on the latter.
2 comments:
Or...if we released all the non-violent offenders filling up these costly prison spaces there would be a lot more money to spend on a felon, both before and after they become one.
This little article is practically a scene from the documentary Waiting for Superman. I strongly believe that a better investment in education can lead to a reduction in crime. Hell it would even ease unemployment. Think about this the next time you hear someone talking about high unemployment or not being able to get a job. What jobs do most people qualify for? I always hear about the exportation of jobs, and of course that happens especially to the jobs that most high school graduates qualify for. There is a new phenomenon occuring, and that is the importation of foriegners that are better educated; and thus qualify for the 500,000 jobs that are available to those that have a decent education. I can honestly say that our current education system only prepares you to ask one question, "Do you want fries with that?"
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