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Iraq. Health care. Campaign finance reform. Stem cell research. Education. All of these are issues in the 2008 presidential election. However, I submit that the most important issue in the upcoming presidential election is that of education. Education should be at the foundation of everything. We should be aspiring to be a well-educated people who can go out and effect positive change in the world.

Thus, this article will focus on the major education issues in the 2008 presidential election. We will break this discussion down into three areas: the basics, the political/legislative, and the big/abstract.

Basics
We've been hearing it and seeing it for years: Our kids are not performing very well in math and science. Basic arithmetic skills are simply lacking in many of our students and students don't appear to have much of a grasp of basic science principles. We see this as a problem because these are things that have been basic features of curricula for decades, yet more and more, students can't perform well in these subjects. Thus, presidential candidates need to address this issue, at least that is what we are told.

But how can a federal president get math scores up in Happy Harry Memorial High School? What law can Congress make to change these things? Hard to say, isn't it? The truth that we come to is that our students need to be educated by partnership. This partnership should be between parents and schools. We cannot have parents treating schools as if they are basically day care. We parents must be concerned with our kids' education. Sure, fifty years ago that was not necessarily the case, but today is different. We face abstract and hard-to-define obstacles in the school system. The problems are individual and only parents can help their individual student with any hope of a good result.

Next there is the issue of liberal arts taking a back seat to the 'harder' subjects of math and science. This is absurd. Liberal arts, or some might call them Humanities, are the soul of education. Candidates need to own up to the fact that our government has been the proponent of imbalanced education and has directed funding inappropriately. Then candidates need to work to change the national outlook that math and science are more important than liberal arts. The correct outlook, in this author's opinion, is that liberal arts need to be included in a balanced curriculum that, as an old, wise man said, "Educates not just the mind, but also the soul."

A further education issue

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