Times are tough for everyone lately. Education, recently one of the only two growing industries–it has since lost this title, leaving health care lonely at the top–is being hit hard by budget cuts, deficits, and general re-allocation of funds. Is this a trickle-down effect, or are there more sinister forces at work here? By sinister forces, I mean, of course, the slow-brewed, new American anti-intellectualism over the last decade.

Point That Finger Where It Belongs
We’re recovering from nearly a decade of anti-intellectualism and apathy. The mistakes of an administration that boasted a regular-guy president you could go have a drink with, have left us all with a bad taste in our mouths, and the results of the last election were a case in point. Our new president boasts quite an education–not to mention a track record of using it–which actually helped get him elected, in spite of his age. Things are changing. The very mottoes of the new administration during the election–namely: Yes, we can. and A vote for change.–show that much, but our history of beating up the smart kids is still haunting us.

The Budget Cuts
The idea that those who cannot do, teach, is preposterous, backward, and even a fair bit responsible for the funding cuts in education. It’s easy to pick on the teachers and take money away from schools. It’s also a horrible idea.

I went to an overcrowded high school. It was build for 1800 and there were 2200 of us. We made do, but several of my friends and I walked door-to-door campaigning for the bond issue that was going to fund the building of a new high school. It amazed me how many negative reactions we got–and this wasn’t during a recession. Everything from remarks about teachers wasting money to schooling not being important, was thrown at us. People shouted from cars as we put up signs, and they generally didn’t have anything nice to say. It was not my first or last time dealing with the public’s ideas that education isn’t important and the schools are wasting money.

Now, we’re seeing 30,000 pink slips being disseminated throughout the California education system, a myriad schools cutting admission and classes, and students unable to even consider going to their dream schools because there’s simply not much money to go around.

The Bubble
The budget cuts are hitting universities pretty hard, leading to many questioning whether or not we’re in a kind of higher education bubble. The fact of the matter is not that a degree is being overvalued, but that large amounts of funding have been cut, forcing colleges to push the bill onto the students. We may have been floating in a bit of a bubble a few years ago, but now we’re sinking, and we must not take our education system–the basis for building our future through the betterment of our children–down with the ship.