Parents are key to child’s education

Unquestionably, kids can get a good education in School District 51. Many people, including me, are living proof of this. I graduated from Palisade High School in 2000 and received my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado in 2005.

I felt that I was adequately prepared for the rigorous scholastics required by my degree. But my success was a result of my own desire.

Personal desire and willingness are the keys to anyone’s success. Each student’s personal desire to excel compels or dispels his ability to overcome discomfort for the purpose of learning. This sort of aggressive attitude cannot be learned in school alone. It is learned in personal environments. For children, the home is the most dominating environment.

Parents are culpable in passing an attitude of self-discipline on by their own example. The problem is that we have been looking to external sources, such as the government, to solve our personal problems. On a personal, local and national level, the way each of us thinks and behaves determines the health of ourselves, our families, our community and our nation. We must recognize this as a society by putting responsibility back on the individual.

Parents need to be able to choose what kind of schools are good for their children. Some kids need boot camps. Others will succeed in far more loosely defined surroundings. Parents know this sort of thing.
Transferring responsibility for performance from the district, state and nation to the parents certainly emphasizes personal responsibility. If we maintained a system of public funding but gave parents the opportunity to decide to which schools the funding would go to, we could improve our education problems.
DAVID L. COX
Grand Junction

Public criticism part of cost of war

Why do I continue to subscribe to The Daily Sentinel? It’s the little “humorous” characters that intrigue me.

One trumpets a Harvard study that empirically tested his favorite notion that public criticism of U.S. policy in Iraq encourages insurgents and emboldens terrorists worldwide. That study found a small but measurable cost to open public debate in higher attacks against Iraqi and American targets, but here’s the rest of the story.

Jonathan Monten, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs said, “Our data suggests that there is a small, but measurable cost” to “anything that provides information about attitudes towards the war.” But he added that the cost was outweighed by the benefits of vigorous debate about military undertakings.

“There’s a body of research … that suggests that public debate about strategy helps the military to fight wars more effectively,” he said.
For example, it might be a factor in forcing the Iraqi government to more quickly accept responsibility for internal security. In fact, from the data it was not possible to determine whether insurgent groups actually increased the overall number of attacks or simply changed the timing by changing the days on which they attacked in response to media reports.

The researchers stated that the increases in attacks are a necessary cost of the way democratic societies fight wars, and are concerned their research may be seized upon by supporters of the Iraq war to try and silence its critics. Who could that be?

The Daily Sentinel’s “humorous” character summed his article up by stating, “Terrorists are no doubt interested in how the war is faring in this semi-representative little burg. The more interest there is here in whining than winning, the happier, and more violent, terrorists there will be.”
Should we trust characters who write only about the parts of the research that back their fancies and then label citizens exercising their constitutional rights to protest “The Grand Valley Ghouls”?

For real humor and fantasy, I’ve decided to stick to the Comics section!

LANCE OSWALD
Grand Junction

Fruita residents
still oppose rec center

I see that the losers in Fruita have raise over $5,000 to try to bring up the recreation center again. With the falling economy, we simply can’t afford it.

It isn’t fair to tax the thousands who will never use it. The actual cost would be $30 million over a period of 30 years rather than the $12 million projected by the supporters.

Those opposed did know what they were doing when they voted “No” and if it comes up, we will do so gain. We will also work harder to get those who didn’t vote the first time to vote “No.”

VIOLA WARD
Fruita

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 7:18 am and is filed under Printed letters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.