Patriots Voice News Education Agenda 2000

The University of Virginia system, as we know it, must change radically.

The change agent is the very technology, which is transforming our lives. For better or ill we are no longer a rural society of isolated communities (each with their own little university.) We may be able to recreate a semblance of our great past but it will have to be in a different form.

We are, increasingly, entering an age of specialization where geographical distance means less and less, and previously established boundaries tend to overlap. Stanford, Harvard and other schools are, increasingly, offering their degree programs over the Internet. These schools, and others like them, are the “500 pound gorillas.” The big fish are preparing to eat up the small fish if it comes to that.

Why should Virginia’s John or Jane pay $200,000 bucks for a degree from “Podunk U.” when they can spend perhaps a third of that and get a degree from prestigious Stanford, Harvard, or MIT over the Internet? The future is upon us and someone will claim. It should be Virginia.

Internet “Distance Learning” is the new term. This sort of education is coming down the rails like a runaway locomotive. And it is here to stay. It will prevail, and ought to. Naturally it will be, and is being, opposed by the pooh bahs of Academe.

Imagine sitting in your comfortable home and getting your degree from a high-class school far away, paying only a fraction of the money you would have to pay to go to a so-so school that just happens to be nearby.

The point here, is that the UVA system needs to be totally re-organized to meet the needs of Virginia students into the Third Millennium. There is no justifiable reason that each University in the Virginia system should be offering every subject under the sun. Each school should specialize as much as possible. If you want to major in song and dance then you go to the one school in the UVA system that is really world class in song and dance. Who wants a second class song and dance degree?

Taxpayer and student money is far too short, and the needs of Virginia’s children too great to have all our schools offering everything average, and doing nothing excellently.

GMU should be the IT, E-Commerce, Public Policy, Non-Profit Management, Conservative, Business, University in the UVA System. Because of its location, such as specialization only makes sense. These are the things in which it should be second to none. The other schools might specialize in things like Agriculture, Biology, Medicine, The Arts, and a host of other worthy areas of study.

To keep Virginia ahead of the curve of change, plans need to be made NOW to begin this process of changing each of our Virginia Universities from “Jacks of all Trades into Masters of Some.”

Right now the Taxpayers of Virginia and their children are being shortchanged in the education department. Our schools have been OK in the past but they will not be able to cut-it in the future when every University on earth including Oxford and Cambridge will be knocking on their door with offers they can’t refuse.

The resistance to change on the part of bureaucratic school administrators and faculty is legendary. Talk about George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.

Today we have our own George Wallace dinosauers standing in schoolhouse doors all over America at every grade level. They are the NEA National Education Association and employee civil service and faculty labor unions that resist change no matter how it hurts children. They literally like, and create, a level of hurt in our children’s education to feather their own nests. It’s all about money and job security in the minds of these modern day saboteurs of education.

They hate and resist specialization of schools, and the advent of the electronic classroom, of which Internet Distance Learning is a integral part. They dissemble and pretend they are for these things but if you look beneath their constant rhetoric you find obstructionism on a massive scale. They resist school being small and locally controlled because they don’t want parents meddling in their children’s education for the same “Nest Feathering” reasons.

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