President-elect Obama,
Congratulations, I voted for you.
With hope I'm writing to you as a high school teacher and a parent; I pray you will receive and read this message.
I've been reading in newspapers and viewing on CSPAN much in regard to the current financial crisis and the efforts to evaluate the results of the $700 billion bail out. As I listen to testimony before subcommittees, congress and senate leaders and government representatives, I am struck by the lack of discussion or realization that so much of our current economic ignorance is linked to our selfish lack of a collective investment in human capital: Education.
Few people in Congress can actually read and understand the nature of the complicated loans and financial instruments that have resulted in this massive failure. We learn the hard way that ignorance is not bliss.
In order to have informed citizens, workers, and creative inventors in this country, we need the majority of our people to be educated or enlightened. But the support for public education continues to decline. When will we realize for the sake of our children and grandchildren that economic prosperity and a healthy culture as a whole is intrinsically linked to the masses of our citizens being well educated?
A thought: Could failing banks be encouraged to adopt a failing school in their community? Would employer bonuses be better received if they were tied to the success of a less fortunate organization, a public school, that is not considered these taxpayer bailout dollars?
Please keep education reform at the forefront of your thinking when trying to work through these complicated economic market evaluations. These two issues go hand in hand. Please, our children and grandchildren depend on us.
Most Sincere Regards,
Melissa Merwin
Elk River, Minnesota
"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Madison Version FE 4:480
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384
"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1805.
Imagine if the majority of people could read, write, and think at this level like Jefferson, what kind of a world would we be living in today?








Discuss