We always hear that line—if Pat Schroeder didn’t coin it, she does use it a bunch—about how it will be a great day when we in this country have all the money we need for education and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to buy an aircraft carrier.

However, this line of thinking appears to not take into account that the educational system in this country is broken at its foundation, and that simply throwing money at it will not fix all its problems.

Money is certainly a problem for schools, but there are other issues which must be addressed as well. Plus, it seems to express that someday we won’t need a tough, effective military, and that isn’t the case and never will be, thank you.

But back to the point. If you want the real reason for the decline of the United States on the world stage, look no further than our completely faulty educational system.

The only way a country can effectively compete, or simply survive at any level, is to have a well-educated population.

Well-educated means educated across the board, in science, technology, the arts, language, personal health — every subject.

This is not to say that every single citizen should be a master of all — that’s quite impossible.

But everyone should have a base in every subject, and those who excel or show some talent in a certain field should be encouraged to press forward in that field.

But we don’t do that today. Kids just drift along through school, and hopefully they get lucky enough to find a teacher who will guide them into a field for which they have the aptitude.

At my high school, in what today feels like the Pleistocene period, we had two tracks in the curriculum, college-bound and not college-bound.

You had a choice of taking a load of college-prep courses in math, science and English, or taking the usual spread of classes in those fields, which would prep you for, say, a lifetime of cheeseburger construction. Oh, such variety!

In retrospect, those two tracks did nothing to seriously prepare the students to go out into the job market and succeed.

The scary part of this is that I went to a damn good public high school — I hesitate to think what it’s like at a lesser institution.

In order to get a good job in this country, high-school graduates absolutely must go to college or a tech school. I ask, why?

Why is it that our secondary schools cannot adequately educate our people to gain good employment after graduation? Why should many students have to go deep into debt just to get the skills they need to get a good job?

Because our educational system is woefully outdated. We are still holding on to a system that is grounded in the 19th century, a product of an agricultural society that, if not-yet dead, is certainly close to the grave.

We send our kids to school for 12 years to get an adequate education. But adequate is not enough.

They learn the basics, but the basics aren’t enough. We owe it to them and to the society in general to give them the knowledge and experience to get a good job, a job that will help them succeed and further the progress of this nation.

So just what do we do?

First, finally and entirely trash the old school calendar which gives our kids a full summer off, a summer in which many do little but work a mundane job for a few bucks, if that.

Going to school year-round would give our children another three valuable years worth of education. Three-month blocks of instruction, separated by short vacations, should do the trick.

Second, we do need to increase the funding available for schools, especially if we educate our kids year-round and want to give them a truly good education.

The federal and state governments need to fund the hell out of the schools, since most local governments can’t do it adequately.

Schools need up-to-date equipment to provide a good learning environment — everything from computers to plumbing. More importantly, good teachers need to be enticed with good pay — teachers who know how to use the equipment being introduced and who know how to connect with their students.

Third, the emphasis for late secondary education needs to be shifted toward job skills or deep college preparation, depending on the student’s abilities and interests.

Give people the basic knowledge to be computer technicians before they leave high school.

Make sure that when they go to college that they don’t have to take remedial algebra or learn how to run a personal computer, so that they can get on with studies in their major and go into them in more depth.

It’s about time that we all come to the conclusion that effectively educating our children is the key to creating a society that is healthy, vibrant and constantly progressing. And it’s time we fix the wreck of a system we have now.

The stakes are too great to ignore.

Kevin S. Kirby is a senior in journalism mass communication from Louisville. He has a B.A. in political science.