Thursday, April 16, 2015

Commentary on a Classmate's Blog

In a World of Political Shenanigans: The Military and my commentary

I agree that the U.S. needs to prioritize spending. We spend too much on defense. Our involvement has caused a snowball effect that has caused us to get further involved in foreign affairs and spend more and more money. Motives behind the 9/11 attacks were because of the U.S. involvement in Israel, troops in Saudi Arabia and sanctions against Iraq. The amount the U.S has spent on wars since the terrorist attack is over $1.6 Trillion. Wars are expensive, detrimental, scary, senseless, uncivilized, devastating and not progressive. Meanwhile our education system results in less than average results, making America look like the big stupid bully of the world. Data for 2010 shows we spent 20% of the budget on defense while only spending 3% on education.

            The idea of spending less on defense and more on education would benefit society greatly in many ways. I truly think that we could come up with clever new ways to defend our country without spending so much money. The next generation should come up with less barbaric ways of dealing with world conflict, and this can be achieved by education reform. We need to learn how to cope with conflict and when to stay out of foreign affairs.

            Education reform won’t happen just by throwing a bunch of money at the nation's schools. We need to offer better support to teachers that way quality increases. We need more research done on progressive teaching techniques and new issues that effect students today, such as ADD. Maybe we can figure out a system of standardized testing that teachers actually agree with. And while we're at it let's make peace studies a required course. The point is we should be devoting more economic resources on building and deploying young minds. The more we learn, the more we understand, the less we'll fight. If we truly want our country to be great then we need to prioritize where money is being spent because spending so much military defense is just protecting our right to remain stupid.

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