President Bush told Montgomery County students yesterday that math and science are "cool subjects" and warned that the country would lose jobs overseas unless more funding is devoted to the disciplines.
"It's important to understand, if children don't have those skill sets needed to compete with a child from India or a child from China, the new jobs will be going there," he said.
Earth to Planet Bush: The jobs have ALREADY gone over there.
Speaking at the Parkland Magnet School for Aerospace Technology in Rockville, Bush renewed his push for what the White House is calling the "American Competitiveness Initiative," a 10-year, $136 billion plan to improve instruction and research in math and science that was introduced during his State of the Union address.
The initiative includes a program to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced placement math and science courses and would boost federal funding for scientific research. The biggest cost of the plan next year would be a $4.6 billion research and development tax credit for private industry, making permanent one that expired last year.
"We better do something about the fact that we're falling behind in math and science today," he said. "Now is the time to act."
However, here's the kind of science George W. Bush thinks should be taught:
President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.
During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
...and here's how Bush regards the importance of education when he's NOT talking to students:
- elimination of Perkins loans
- freezing of Pell Grants at fiscal year 2003 levels in the face of skyrocketing college costs
- cuts to the Federal Work-Study program
- increase of interest rates on Stafford loans and Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS).
- no new funding for the Title I program for low-income students. Title I accounts for about half of federal spending to implement the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
- scrapping of 42 education programs
As recently as 2004, the Bush Administration was PRAISING the trend toward outsourcing:
The movement of U.S. factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said yesterday.
The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the U.S. economy.
So here we have a president who thinks that so-called "intelligent design theory" should be taught as real science (even as a fossil demonstrating the transition of animals from water to land plugs a HUGE hole in the ID advocates' view that holes in the fossil record give their view credence), and whose budgets have put us in trillions of dollars of debt, telling kids to study math and science.
When I was a kid, we used to rebel against parents who smoked and told us not to, who told us not to eat junk and then gorged on ice cream, who advocated the "Do as I say, not as I do" method of role modeling. Here we have a president playing on the fact that students don't follow budget policy to advocate studies that even he doesn't believe in.
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