Educational Goals?

So, I'm going to start grad school. I am applying to a local university, with the hopes of beginning a curriculum studies and educational policy master's program in January. My application requires a "goals statement" of 500 words "addressing your professional goals and how the program option may help you meet them."

My professional goals.

As a teacher at the fresh-faced beginning of what is likely to be a decades-long journey in the education field, I have accumulated a few professional goals. But how to distill them into a succinct, well-presented "goals statement..."

1. Never to lose my optimistic ideals about education.
2. Don't allow the bureaucracy and red tape of the public-school system to put its stranglehold on me.
3. View each child for all the possibilities he or she possesses, even if the child cannot see them.

In a fast-changing world which seems to have cast out the opinions of the public intellectual in favor of broadcasting the antics of the public idiot, there seems to be a vast, silent majority of people who would rather just not think at all. I see it in some of my students; they simply want everything shown to them. Any time I ask them to infer or string more than two words together into their own original thought, it's as if I am asking them to conjure lightning from a cloudless sky.

I really want to learn how to make critical thinkers out of a generation of children who have been passive observers as a result of a convergence of many different circumstances. There are circumstances imposed by the poverty culture; by the entertainment culture of the modern era; hover-parents who never permitted children to think on their own and work things out.

It's been a long time, at least a couple years, since I've done any formal writing. I'm a highly cerebral person who never got into the habit of composing my thoughts on paper. Hashing this out has helped me consolidate some of my ideas; tomorrow I'll park it at my dining room table with a pot of coffee and churn out my goals statement.

Reframe

I am adjusting the scope and purpose of this blog. Commentary on current events will be addressed as they capture my interest and I work to process them. First on the agenda: the never-ending pursual of "healthcare reform" in Congress.

Why is this even an issue?

We're spending $65 billion a year in Afghanistan, and what's likely to amount to $3 trillion in the Iraq War, on the premise of "preventing another 9/11." It's a brilliant and honorable aim, to prevent acts of terror on American soil, but frankly, I don't think it's worth the cost in taxpayer funds and military lives.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans die each year basically because they lack health insurance. For the cost of a couple years in Afghanistan, we can ensure that our citizens aren't left to choose between insurmountable debt to healthcare providers and death.

Spending billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars to try to prevent a possibility of another single, tragic loss of thousands of American lives? Or investing billions of taxpayer dollars to ensure the continued health and well-being of those very taxpayers, and preventing the INEVITABLE, tragic loss of tens of thousands of American lives EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.

America is the sole developed, Western nation which does not guarantee access to health insurance to all of its citizens. Is this a distinction we seek to maintain?

Also:
Really? Health insurance to cover chemo for your hedgehog?
Seriously now.