Ideas For A Better Life

The world we live in today is full of so much suffering and strife, if one were given the opportunity to make broad changes; it would be hard to know where to begin. All the resources and money in the world won't end wars, won't feed all the hungry, and make even the tiniest dent against man's inhumanity to man. It is so prevalent, one wonders if it isn't built into our DNA, this inexplicable penchant we have for destruction.

Every day, the newspapers are teeming with stories so grim that it is easy to feel hopeless. Child abductions, war, economic suffering, the list is endless and in effect, overwhelming. Do we start with our government? Can we effect policy change that will fundamentally alter our self destructive bent? How about the world? Can we make real change global change by joining a worldwide organization such as the Peace Corp or the Red Cross? Where does one begin if they are offered the chance?

When you sift through all the data, massive as our problems are, there is one common denominator that can be found. Poverty is the one element that shows its face again and again. It is at the root of most of our strife. It is the poor who suffer the most, and very often they are the instruments of destruction.

Children raised in poverty are exposed to risk factors that can greatly alter their emotional and social development. They are often being raised by parents who already have been greatly affected by their own exposure to poverty. These children are ten times more likely to commit crimes, and there is a great risk that they will stay in poverty, as will any children they themselves might one day have.

So, one should ask, what is the root cause of poverty? What is one thing that separates the poor from the comfortable? What could make the biggest impact on elevating a family out of poverty? The answer being offer by experts in every field is unanimous: education. Education is almost always a key element that is missing in the lives of the poor.

The United States is in the middle of what has been termed a high school dropout crisis. It is estimated that nearly seven million children attending high school will drop out this year alone. Fully one quarter of our students have almost certainly doomed themselves to poverty before they even reach the age of eighteen. As if that weren't bad enough, the number of young people who continue from high school on to college is just over half of our yearly graduates- and of those, fewer than half of them stay in college long enough to get a degree.

Every year we spend billions of dollars on our education system, both at the state and federal levels. Countless studies have been but the answers we get always seem to be the same, with no real new ideas or innovation. The problem may stem from the fact that the studies are being conducted by people already in the field of education. It is much like having a criminal determine his own punishment, of course he's going to serve his own self interest. Our system needs to be evaluated by parties completely outside the world of academia.

We must find ways to encourage young people to stay in school, and we need to make it easier and less expensive to attend college. One way to do this is to target a child's education not by a strictly formatted curriculum, but to cultivate programs more in tune with each child's strengths. For instance, if the child shows a great ability toward match, but isn't quite adept with English and History, don't hold the child back just to pound away at the subjects they do not excel in.

We all can agree that in the elementary stages of education, every student needs a good background in the three R's- reading, writing, and arithmetic, but high schools requirements should be handled more like college, with each student taking courses that suit their own unique talents and capabilities. We have to get away from the idea that every student needs the same course of study. By allowing high school students to excel at what they are good at, we will find that many more of them will stay in school, and by staying in school, we offer them the very best chance for adult lives that are free of poverty.