David Weldon: “Though we need innovation, a thousand flowers should bloom, we do need school choice, we do need a competitive…”

“Though we need innovation, a thousand flowers should bloom, we do need school choice, we do need a competitive marketplace, the thing that the gentleman was talking about is incredibly important and that is discipline. That is something that is absent in too many of our schools. There are two components to education in my opinion. One is the book learning, knowing your multiplication tables, knowing who Christopher Columbus was, but there is another part in education, and we all know this. It is a part of our education that begins from the moment of our birth, most of it comes from our parents, and that is building character, building integrity, building honesty into that young person. Indeed if you ask an employer what is more important, that they have all this book knowledge and word knowledge or whether they are responsible, reliable, not on drugs, stable family life, they will always tell you they would rather have those character things, because they can always teach them, even though it is not their job and it should be the schools' job, but they can always teach them that stuff. But you cannot fix somebody who does not have those things ingrained in them by the time they are 18. What the gentleman was talking about, getting the good old-fashioned paddle, that is a part of it, discipline and character and training.”