EDUCATION 2-21-1997 Education in America needs to be a higher priority goal. People should feel education is more important than they do. It needs to be easier to continue your education after high school. Kmart has no educational videos. There aren't any. Movie Warehouse has eight racks of horror films. You've got Friday the 13th with Freddy Kruger and a thousand others. There is one rack of educational videos which is mostly empty. Most of the videos on the educational rack are exercise videos with Cindy Crawford and others. This is what people in America consider a education. There needs to be interesting videos about math, science and foreign languages. The only science videos are a few National Geographic videos. These are great, but limited to one subject - nature. There are no foreign language videos. In the whole educational rack there are only four math videos. They are extreely dull and boring with someone droning at a blackboard in a monotone. Education needs to be easy, simple, close, inexpensive and interesting. The government needs to extend the concept of public libraries and schools to other newer types of education. The government should rent a couple of racks at Movie Warehouse and Blockbuster and put educational videos on the racks. The rentals should be cheap ninety-nine cents or even fifty cents. The government should collect or have made interesting educational videos and put them on the racks. If you have the impulse to learn algebra you should be able to get your hands on a interesting algebra video within fifteen minutes at a cost of fifty cents. Now if you want to learn algebra you can't do it on impulse. You have to wait for the beginning of a semester. Then you have to drive to a college to register and pay hundreds of dollars. Then you have to buy textbooks, go to class and study. It takes a very dedicated person to plan a year in the future, drive many miles, spend lots of money and take lots of time to further his education. Twenty-five percent of the population of Kentucky is functionally illiterate. They cannot read a want ad, a job application, warning labels or even simple instructions. If they don't know about the jobs, they can't apply for them, can't do them once they get them and are likely to hurt themselves or damage equipment once they have a job. One quarter of all students drop out of high school. Lexington, KY has a population of 230,000. So about 60,000 Lexingtonians are high school dropouts. In the whole city, one high school has evening GED classes. So if you want a GED you have to drive halfway across town. Sometimes only two students show up and class is cancelled. Obviously there is a problem if 60,000 people can't read and only two students show up for class. Society does not feel education is important. There needs to be evening classes at all high schools. In order to make people feel safe at night there needs to be a security guard or a policeman and the parking lot needs to be well lit. In order to get people to go to evening classes students need to have the option of working during the day and going to school at night. This program needs to be advertised. There are no educational movies. You can watch people being tortured, shot, stabbed and beaten up, but you can't learn anything educational. In North Park in Lexington, KY we have theaters going out of business. The government needs to rent one or two screens at every multi-screen theater complex and show educational movies. The price should be cheap twenty-five or fifty cents. There needs to be some good educational movies with special effects. It would be possible to make several hundred educational movies for a couple of million each. Certainly you could get some directors and studios to work cheap or even donate their time for such a noble cause. You could also put the same movies on video. Education needs to be simple, cheap, convenient and fun. An inexpensive way to expose people at home to high school and college classes is to put a camera in each classroom. Then feed the class on an unused cable channel. Cable has hundreds of channels, we could devote a couple dozen channels to every subject imaginable. Tape the lectures to play later at night. What better way to get to sleep at 2:00 a.m. than a statistics lecture. A camera today cost under a thousand dollars. This would not be expensive. You merely require the cable company to devote twenty channels to educational videos as a part of their franchise agreement. They are a public utility. The Kentucky Theater in downtown Lexington is not in use in the afternoon. It is in walking distance of one of the poorest sections of town. Show some free educational movies in the afternoon after school. There needs to be more little neighborhood libraries. Everyone in town is in easy walking distance of a liquor store. Even if you don't own a car you can pass out drunk within twenty minutes for under three dollars. It is easy, quick, convenient and simple. Society values alcoholism more than education. Every dollar spent on education is repaid ten fold in higher earnings. Education has a fantastic return on investment. It would be possible for the government to put a few educational video games at every 7-Eleven. Make them cheap and fun. The idea is to dispurse educational oppurtunities throughout the city, instead of having education concentrated in the schools. You should be able to learn something on impulse, rather than have to plan for months or years. Education should be easy, close, quick, cheap and fun. Lunar lander is an educational video game. You have a fixed amount of fuel and are so far above the moon's surface. You must land at less than 2 meters per second. The laws of gravity apply. You have a readout of height, velocity, and fuel remaining. Good luck. And learn your laws of physics. You can choose to land on Mars with a greater gravitational pull. Currently educational toys are mostly limited to preschool activities. They teach you numbers, shapes, colors and letters. There are very few stores which sell educational toys and the toys are expensive. Examples are Natural Wonders in Fayette Mall in Lexington and the Learning Store in Zandale Shopping Center. The government needs to subsidize general stores which sell educational toys at a low cost. Put them in the middle of poor neighborhoods. Get a dozen people off welfare and you have paid for the store. If a dozen people are earning money and paying taxes society is a lot better off. With education you can get good jobs. Information technology is priced too high. A minimum wage earner cannot afford a computer, an internet account, cable and sometimes basic phone service. Computers keep getting faster, but they still cost almost two thousand dollars. The cost of information is limited only by technology. We need to set a goal of bringing affordable information to the working poor, the minimum wage earner. All of society's problems are interlinked. If housing were cheaper then a minimumm wage earner could afford cable. If he watched an educational channel he would aquire the skills necessary to get a better paying job. If he had enough money left after paying rent to buy a computer, he could acquire the skills necessary to get a higher paying job. It doesn't matter if you make the housing cheaper or the computer cheaper. But the computer has the property of processing information and the cost of information is dependent on the level of technology. The government needs to come up with a computer for under four hundred dollars and they need to get into the hands of the people who need to be educated. The government needs to help improve our communication to the point where a minimum wage earner can afford internet access. People become educated by receiving information. All forms of information transmission should be within easy reach of a person earning minimum wage. The government needs to subsidize cable service with twenty educational channels to poor people.