Don’t believe me? Try building a house without pouring a foundation that is square and level and then try to square the walls or put the roof on straight. Try baking a cake without greasing the pan first. Try to win at Tic Tac Toe without making an X in the middle square on the first turn. I’m not saying these things can’t be done, but the effort required is much greater than if you did things right the first time.

In Middletown could it be that high school dropouts and graduation rates illustrate this point very well? The higher the truancy rates, the lower the grades. The lower the grades in Elementary School, the more likely the student is to not graduate.

Not only do we have a child dropping out of school, but the society will likely be burdened by someone incapable of being a productive and self sustaining citizen. Worse yet, that child may become dependent on the state.

Education is made even more difficult by the accelerating growth of knowledge itself. I heard a speaker say once knowledge doubles every five years. In other words, if you could take all the knowledge in the world and put that knowledge in a pile, then the size of the pile would double in five years. The pile would then double again in yet another five years. Yet society still has only 18 years to provide the first level of education and hopefully funding exists to provide another 4 years for some percentage of youth.

Accordingly, increasing the number of hours children are scheduled to spend in school is vital. What’s more does it make sense that children must be there for those scheduled hours? Truancy is unacceptable. In addition, children must be given the skill and desire to continue their education beyond the first 18 years.

Underachievement is nothing new. Junior High School seems to be the place where the lack of achievement in Grade School really seems to reveal itself. Junior High School is the place where physical growth can embolden students to challenge teachers and disrupt the classroom. If you’re struggling to keep up with what’s being taught, then disruption is one way of coping. If you can slow the pace of what’s being taught, then you may feel you are not falling behind so quickly.

Some will doubtless attempt to blame teachers for their role in the underachievement of students. For my part, I have often said the responsibility of teachers is to teach, but as well the responsibility of students is to learn and we seem to hamper the ability of teachers to enforce discipline so teachers are able to teach.

For example, isn’t suspending a child from school so they can sit in an empty house and watch TV while the parents are at work actually rewarding bad behavior? Isn’t that an incentive for continued bad behavior, rather than a disincentive?

Where and how do we get in people’s faces, interrupt their pattern and turn them around? I heard Tony Robbins remark once how amazing it is to look at the approach of two people who have come from similar depressing circumstances. One uses their circumstances as an excuse for lack of achievement. The other uses the circumstances as the fuel to propel their achievement. How do we get more of the latter and less of the former? As Robbins said, what if we could find the key to make everyone use their circumstances as fuel, rather than an excuse?

If we do not lay a strong educational foundation with our children, then our collective house will be unable to stand the test of time, our cake will be inedible, and we will be unable to win the competitive games of the future. Surely we do not want such a future.