Two-year teaching degree

College students and former students have tallied up a cumulative debt load of $1.3 trillion; exceeding the total accumulated credit card debt in this country.

In too many cases, the jobs available for those who took on college debt are not lucrative enough to repay their debt and begin saving for their future. Some politicians have proposed that we must respond with debt relief programs and paid college degrees. That approach does not touch the source of the problem and leads students into making illogical financial and career decisions.

The added expense is another burden to taxpaying middle-class workers. We need to approach the problem from the cost side, using teaching degrees as an example.

In the past, only two years of teacher education was needed to qualify for teaching the lower grades. A case can be made that children were receiving a better education by teachers in those two-year programs than with the four-year degree plus the master’s degree in today’s world.

The only beneficiaries of all of that added “education” are the college administrators and professors who profit from the unnecessary courses added to a student’s curriculum. What added knowledge are our future teachers receiving in those two to four years of additional classwork? Based upon the abundance of leftists being propagated by academia, I can only surmise that student teachers are being submersed in politically correct thought, climate change orthodoxy, and revisionist history.

We could do our future teachers a favor by condensing teacher college down to basic courses. If we stick to the nuts and bolts of teaching instead of trying to convert teachers into social engineers and political radicals, a teaching degree will again be affordable without government subsidies. Sadly, colleges and universities thrive on student debt, not common sense.

Dennis Gasper Plymouth