Adela
www.theblacktortoise.com

Getting kids interested in something, anything, is a grass roots effort.  Kids don't get interested in Little League because they have an innate interest in baseball; they get interested because other kids, their siblings, and their parents think it's fun.

I grew up on a farm with a passle of sisters.  We were expected to do
the work, some pretty hard physical work, because we were part of the
family.  We never knew there was boys work and girls work; there was
just work that needed to be done.  Still, when I picked up a rock and asked "why does this look like this?" someone took the time to help me find out why.  When I came home from school and said, "did you know people used to scrub their pans with sand?" someone said, "let's see if that works."

I'm a woman who went to college with classrooms full of young men:  future doctors, chemists, microbiologists, physicists, all of us.  It never occurred to me that I was out of place.  I just loved what I was learning. 

One of my grandsons is sure that Grandma is actually Mrs. Frizzle, a popular kids' book character. (Okay, my hair is red, and it does get out of control sometimes.)  Another grandchild drew a picture of a woman who looked suspiciously like me when her teacher asked the class to draw a picture of a scientist.  Everytime I see them I ask what they learned in school, and I'm ready with some really interesting tidbit, like "did you know there weren't any earthworms in America before the Pilgrims got here?" And I record some interesting stuff from Nova Now, like "Medical Uses for Leaches" to watch together when they visit.  So far, everyone loves science.  Will they be our next healthcare providers?  Who knows?  This I am sure, they all know it is a possibility.

I am happy to see the incentives in the House Affordable Health Care Bill.  Are they enough?  I'm not qualified to say, but this I know: money isn't the only incentive we need.  Not very many kids say "I want to be a (you name it) because I'll make a lot of money."  That usually comes later.

Our problem as a society is that we want to solve every problem in isolation from every other.  Well, that's one problem, and the other is that we want to solve all of them without spending any public money except to enrich corporations.

This article makes it clear that in order to solve our "health care problem" we need to solve our public education problem.  Kids who can't read or write a coherent sentence obviously cannot become doctors or nurses.  On the other hand, we are bemoaning an economic downturn that has thrown millions out of work, and medical careers are well paying and secure.  So rather than rationing health care so we don't overtax our health care providers, we need to improve the quality of our educational system so that kids who graduate from public schools can get those good medical jobs, and also can get the health benefits that come with them.

But the same problem that is plaguing the health care reform debate - that we don't want to spend any public money caring for people, is the problem that plagues our educational system.  It's not that kids are dumb or unmotivated, it's not that parents are uncaring and don't want to be involved, and it's not that teachers are lazy or incompetent.  It's that our public school system is being eviscerated by people who don't believe in public education, and are using things like privately run charter schools and vouchers to break unions and take money out of the public school system.  Teachers are being told to do more with less, and we act as if threatening them with testing and punitive measures is going to make up for the lack of planning periods, art and music and sports programs, all the things that were taken for granted in the (not particularly good) public schools I grew up in.

If we stop rationing education, we won't need to ration health care and we will all thrive.

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Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.

there are too many health workers already.  that's what inflates costs.  if we can make the system more efficient and squeeze out the 30% of care that's unneeded, fewer people will be needed. anyhow, in medicine, we have proof that supply drives demand.  areas with more doctors deliver more deserves and have higher bills without any improvement in health status.  there may be a more irresponsible idea than promoting health employment, but I can't think of it offhand.