Military spending and education

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.

The 2015 version of the test was published on 6 December 2016 and shows that Singapore outperformed the rest of the world. The top other OECD countries were Japan, Estonia, Finland and Canada. Now, contrast this with our worldwide military expenditures.

Close to $1.7 trillion is spend annually world wide towards military expenditures; in other words to kill people. This is a category where the USA is a dominating leader.  In fact we spend more than the 7 next countries for our defense (that is close to $600 billions or about 5% of our GDP).

We clearly don't do nearly as well with our PISA scores and lag on all counts. Wouldn't it be nice if we spent less on our military and more on our students?

If we did that, perhaps would we do a sudden U-turn and reverse our decline and return to excellence?

Something to think about...