For those who don’t know, or don’t particularly care, the State of the Union address was two nights ago.  In this address, the President covered a variety of important topics and offered up his opinion on how things are going and what he would like to see change in the coming years.

My favorite part of the address was the portion dedicated to education.  One of his best resolutions was to “grant schools flexibility to teach with creativity and passion — to stop teaching to the test.”  This is something that should have been done a long time ago and it’s about time it’s being brought up.

Our children can’t be expected to learn anything when half their year is spent cramming and studying for standardized tests, the result of which can impact school funding, school standings and teachers’ jobs.  Thus there is more pressure to teach the test than the curriculum.

In the realm of higher education, the President would like to double the number of work-study jobs in the coming years.  He also declared that the Federal Government couldn’t continue subsidizing our education with rising tuition.  The President suggested that higher education be a higher priority in state budgets.  I love this idea. States should be held accountable to make higher education more accessible to everybody.

President Obama is held the colleges and universities accountable, too, when he said, “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down.  Higher education can’t be a luxury.”  Hopefully this message will get our institutions moving.

He also talked about expanding a partnership program between businesses and community colleges where they will train two million Americans with skills directly leading them to a job.  This will have a huge impact because employers, mostly in science and technology fields, have vacancies and employment opportunities but cannot find workers with the skills to qualify them for the position.  This would be a great opportunity to take people from being unemployed, to being skilled and qualified for these fast growing industries.

This is but a small selection of a variety of topics discussed.  All in all, I feel confident in the direction our country is moving and take this State of the Union address as the first step on the road to reelection.  With the current group of GOP candidates standing in his way, I see four more years of Obama.