CLASSROOM TAXING FOR BOOMERS

What’s the difference between a classroom and a business meeting?

Both involve giving a report, turning in homework.

Both require good listening skills.

You hope you pass, or get promoted, in each of them.

So, what’s the difference? Cash flow.

We go to work, get paid, and buy the necessities of life.

One of those necessities is keeping education funded for kids to learn enough to get a job, go to work, and get paid.

In other words, taxes.

Public school is publicly funded.

The problems start when childless people complain.

 

“Why should I have to pay for schools when I don’t have any kids in them?”

 

This makes sense? Sounds reasonable?

It’s the same sense and reason used on the dry end of a sinking ship.

The people don’t see why everyone’s making a big fuss, but they will. Eventually.

Oregon’s 2025-27 state budget allocates $11.4 billion to the State School Fund for K-12 public education, which is a record investment and a 11% increase from the previous biennium.

 

Education, public education, has been a topic here four hundred and eighty times.

 

Too many older guys, guys in their mid-twenties, hung around town longer than I would have, and it made me think that’s what happens if you stay too long.

I figured it all out with my eighteen year old brain. I saw guys in my hometown who’d hung around too long.

I needed more continuing education before I started.

Old guys at local keggers liked telling the new kids about dropping out with only a year left, a quarter left, a class left,  because they didn’t want to carry the brand of being college educated.

That was their story, a sad story, and it drew attention from impressionable young women starting out on their educational journey, college girls who should have been paying more attention to geeky freshman instead of world-weary losers, according to the freshmen.

 

The Best Interest?

In 1973 we learned how to say goodbye.

We also learned you never really say goodbye, things just change.

It was a time when a summer job could turn into a career, athletics could be a career, teaching could be a career.

We were on the cusp of doing something we’d never done like go to school, get a real job, get married, buy a house, have kids, do yard work.

Those were the six things I was running from when I crossed the big bridge on the way out.

No one was trapping me in domestic comfort.

 

 

As it turns out, those are six of my favorite things now.

I did them all, went to school, got a real job, got married, bought a house, have kids, do yard work, and I’ve got to say it’s not that bad.

What was I running from?

Labels like ‘uncle.’

I became an uncle through no fault of my own and felt like I aged ten years.

I was already a son and a brother, had been a boyfriend once, and it was enough with the new names.

But there was more.

I became a husband and a father and that was it. Locked in for life and loved it.

Still locked, still loving it.

Why? Because the classroom paid interest.

 

Knowledge Is Useful Horse Sense

If you pursue knowledge with a vengeance to learn, good things happen.

The more you know, the less you fear.

We’re going to have a big earthquake?

Yes, we are, and it will be as disastrous as any disaster movie with oil fires and buildings falling and land sliding.

It could be tomorrow, it could be ten thousand years, but you still need to make dinner and clean the house in the meantime.

The Yellowstone Volcano is going to erupt?

A meteor is headed for earth?

Education says yes; horse sense says in the face of impending doom you still need to use your turn signals when you drive, still need clean water to drink, clean air to breath.

Instead of getting jacked up by the latest affront to civilization, knocked out by the full disclosure of scandal, the latest in breaking news breaking you, a good education gives you pause to prioritize.

How important is laying into every new problem with all of the energy you spent laying into the last problem?

 Can you tolerate chronic problems?

You won’t know until you have to know, but knowledge, education, reading, gives an idea of what to expect.

The more you know about things that interest you, the better you’ll know yourself.

Old Ben was right when he said an investment in knowledge pays the best dividends.

I’m taking that to the bank.