"Idiot Nation" by Michael Moore

You can obviously tell that Moore is all about satire. I absolutely love it! Even though he is making fun of our education system, he proves a lot of points that we as a nation need to start fixing. I have known that as a nation we have been lagging behind other countries for a while now but I didn't know it was this bad. Just knowing that there are 44 million people in America that can't read above the fourth-grade reading level makes me sad. Then I continue reading and see that we only read on average 99 hours a year compared to 1460 hours watching TV. This is just not okay. We have so many opportunities offered to us, we are just to happy being mediocre.

President Bush telling people it is ok to be mediocre is not okay. Like Moore said yeah he was able to be President because he had other things going in his favor but he shouldn't tell other they have the same opportunity. My history teacher in high school used to complain about the nation being ok with being mediocre all the time. It is a problem that we have to fix. We used to be the top nation but once we got there we got to comfortable and now expect things just to be given to us. Everyone is talking about holding schools accountable for test scores and not meeting state standards but sometime students and parent are to blame too. We as a nation have come to terms that we like being mediocre and until we realize that its not okay nothing is going to change.

Moore also talks about the lack of state funding for schools. My favorite line is "its a bigger priority to build another boomer than to educate our children." This explains exactly how I feel about education funding. So many presidents and politicians talk about how important education is and how that we have to support our children because they are the future, yet they do nothing about it. Its sad that schools have to go to companies and sign their lives away just so that they can get money to buy some textbooks. Our students are getting fat because the government isn't willing to spare some money so that schools can be all around better. The saddest thing is that many politicians probably read this piece of writing or something like it, thought about how they really should try to change, but then went to bed and did nothing about it. Who is going to be the first person to move us out of this rut we are in?