Freedom of Education

Conventional wisdom holds that the key to our future lies in the proper education of our children. Americans have been guided by this basic principal since the foundation of our country for good reason. An ignorant, complacent colonial America could never have produced men like our founding fathers, much less the determined and dedicated souls that followed them in our nation's war for independence. No matter what the state of our public and private educational institutions, our successes have been heavily dependent upon educated individuals being at the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.

Given our past and present dependency on education, it is troubling to hear news of our public schools' inadequacy. We Americans have struggled to cope with inadequate funding and facilities for years in many of our schools. We are also bombarded with reminders that students from foreign nations with economies much smaller than our own score better in important subjects such as math and science. It would seem as though the American public is given very little cause to be satisfied with our nation's schools.

Fortunately, not every aspect of American education is cause for concern. Other than the fact that our schools are still generating a fairly steady supply of graduates heading for institutions of higher learning, we also now enjoy a host of free educational resources that did not exist twenty years ago, at least not in their current form. Volumes of materials useful to students and casual readers alike exist both in our libraries and on the Internet, waiting to be exploited by those willing to learn. Naturally one must exercise caution when utilizing the Internet as a source of information; however, this does not mean that we are unable to learn valuable lessons from a computer screen. A great example of free curricula on the Web exists at MIT's OpenCourseWare. (OCW) page. OCW exists to grant access to MIT's curricula to anyone with a web browser. They go well out of their way to note that OCW does not grant access to MIT's professors and does not entitle to any participant in OCW to a degree or certificate of any kind. Clearly self-education has its pitfalls even when the source material is known-good.

One can still obtain reliable information on math, science, grammar, spelling, and other subjects all over the Internet. It should be noted that similar information exists in hard copy at your local library (in one form or another). As valuable and essential as public education may be, freely-available educational materials can also play a vital role in the education of our children. It is sad to me that most school children are not required to make use of library resources in research activities until they are well into middle school. Breeding familiarity with and acceptance of publicly-available information resources within our children at a young age could be vital to the educational future of our country. Most libraries hold all the tools necessary for a young person to learn any subject they may encounter in school and many others they may not. The tools and skills necessary to hold down a lucrative job that contributes significantly to society and the economy lie within the pages of library books. Were we better-able to tap into free educational resources, most of our school system could be bypassed entirely. Still, there is the simple reality that good faculty is difficult (if not impossible) to replace.

In order for public education to work for our nation in the future, we must learn to familiarize our children with public sources of information so that they may quickly and easily integrate new information they encounter with existing school curricula. It is a pity and a shame that students of struggling and/or failing schools often seem trapped by their schools when, in reality, supplemental material exists that could easily bridge the gap between an inadequate and adequate education for the downtrodden. Just as 'net activists often claim that "information wants to be free", education also wants to be free, for everyone.