Dustin Hilliard

A Diagnoses
In the preceding years and decades, America has consistently fallen
behind in international standards in the area of education. An abhorrent myriad of
funding cuts have been aimed at the education of the youth in this country. Skilled
teachers and professors are being laid off, textbooks from the seventies and
eighties are still being used in many classrooms, children are receiving inadequate
provisions for their needs. All of this essentially, because schools and universities
are penalized for having the audacity to act as places of learning rather than
businesses. While all this is taking place, football scholarships are handed out,
uniforms are bought, and fields are expanded.
We continue to do nothing about this sad and unwelcome state of affairs. No
wonder American education standards are falling. We have forgotten how to teach!
There is no wonder our youth face a darker future. We have forgotten the American
Dream! They used to say that we, as Americans, can pull ourselves up by our
bootstraps, but in the modern age it appears that boots and their straps are a rare
commodity. The boot factories are shutting down, and the stores are dropping the
product.
Our universities, as mine just did, are forgetting their mission in search of the
mighty dollar. They offer quick solutions that will fail in its intention except to
negatively impact the future of both the students and the faculty. They drop skilled
educators, and continue to over subsidize sports, so that they may stay afloat. They
forget what it means to be educators. So much for a college education.
There are those who seek to diagnose this college generation with a lack of
discipline. I contend, that such things must be learned by the example of our elders.
Yet, they have shown with their quick fixes exactly what they are worth. That is
precisely nothing. They show no discipline, as if cutting the weight of their
responsibilities away like an unwelcome anchor. They offer promise to the students
that they will receive a quality education. Yet are quick to deprive them of it when
they see it not working out for themselves. In doing so, they selfishly compromise
the future of others in order to preserve their own.
And we are supposed to look up to them, we are supposed to obey them! By
cutting away those educators, these administrators leave themselves as the only
viable role models. After all, by virtue of them still remaining are they not the ones
we should emulate. Do not we all aspire to be as successful as possible? And what
then, when the most successful people are the ruthless inhuman ones, the ones
who step on the shoulders and heads of those below them? Perhaps this is why
business management has become a popular major. Those business managers are
the last ones left standing, after all. But, how good is a business, I wonder, when the
workers are all gone and the consumers have moved on? I contend that these
administrators make as poor businessmen as they are role models.
All in all, when properly diagnosed, these men and women offer a sense of
pettiness, seeking only their own profit, where others only may do such profiting

should the scrapes on the table prove too much for the gluttonous few to consume.
This is the state of our university administrations. This is the state of our nation.
The fountain of knowledge has been halted to a near trickle, and quite an
expensive one at that. The taste gets worse by the day. Those keepers of this
fountain are disgustingly neglecting their duties. Instead of keeping it, they are
allowing it calcify at an alarming rate. We must act quickly and effectively to restore
flow and pressure, before the experts make it their job to do so. After all, we need
something more than simple duct tape solutions.
Without education we will become a nation beholden to predatory elites,
those few who will be allowed to educate themselves, so that we can accomplish
their own ends for them. A nation that cannot see is one that is easy to manipulate.
All of human history tells us that they WILL manipulate. There are plenty of
examples I can draw from to illuminate my point, but perhaps there is one that is
truly fitting.
Before the Civil War, southern law forbade teaching slaves to read. The
reason? So that they may not find their way to freedom in the north by the use of
that knowledge to read signs or maps. Without the knowledge, how are we to read
the signs? Are we to trust any man who comes along claiming that he can read
those signs, or that he doesnt have any alternative motive? I think we have enough
examples of blind and nefarious men leading the blind in this country as I write this.
Lets try not to allow this to be a commonality in our collective future.
If education is the remedy for this blindness, should we not offer it up more
liberally? What is stopping us besides the short sighted blindness of small minds?
Money they will say. I contend a different notion. It is simply will. The will to do, or
the lack of which that feebly convinces us not to do! All else will come as a result.
That coveted dollar. And that which should be truly coveted, education. All will
follow if only we have the audacity to stand up and take it back.
We are heading for a dark time. That much is true, but only because of our
own shortsighted blindness. We have trusted them to do the best they can for us,
while we sign the first decades of our life away to working off a debt which may
never be fully repaid. Is it so much to hope for that people who have the very
futures of others in the hands, treat those futures with the least bit of dignity?
It has become quite plain that our administrators and our leaders will not
fight for us. They feebly protest, and then give way, as they realize that they can
pass the burden onto those below them or onto the next generation, which seems
to be a popular sentiment these last decades. They grow tired of their problems,
and we grow tired of them passing their problems into our laps. Yet, we must be
different. We must be better.
To my ungrateful generation. To the whiners, to the entitled, and to those
who chafe at such ignorant and mistaken labels. To all of you, I say this. We are at a
tipping point. We must become the generation that fixes their problems and we
must become the generation that finally fixes our own problems.

But first, we must solve the most pressing conundrum. This one is at the
roots, the solution is the key to all other solutions. We must secure, for now and
forever, a new right. That right is the right to be educated. We must create for it a
gilded invincible shrine. We must make it sacred, so that those predatory men and
women will never again even try to remove it from our grasp by their folly or by
their design.