A recent graphic from the Washington Post displayed the largest defense budgets in 2014 by country. This graphic showed the fifteen countries in the world with the largest defense budgets. It’s no surprise that the United States is at the top. We have the largest, most influential military in the world, but the crazy thing was the comparison of us to the other countries. Our national defense budget was $581 billion last year. China, the country with the second largest defense budget, had a budget of just $129 billion. In fact, our defense budget is larger than the following nine largest budgets combined. That is quite a large difference, but say our national budget for defense is decreased a reasonable amount, what would we do with this extra money? The best investment the United States could make would be education.

It’s no hidden secret that the United States is lagging behind globally in education. A recent study by Pearson, an educational book publishing company, ranked the United States twentieth in Educational Attainment. That’s quite alarming, but what are other countries doing that is putting them ahead of us?

It is generally agreed upon in research that the top educational system in the world is Finland. An article by TED.com explained that a large reason that Finland is doing so well is because they are simply teaching more efficiently. This article stated that while the average American teacher spends around 1,100 hours in the classroom per year, the average Finnish teacher spends about 600. With the rest of this time, Finnish teachers are being trained on how to be better teachers. This involves meeting with colleagues and other professionals, but also through furthering their education. The Finnish government subsidizes any additional education that their teachers need and it pays off.

That initiative to educate our own teachers could be possible with a small change in our national budget. Even a hypothetical change from $581 billion to $500 billion and the reallocation of this $81 billion towards an education system for teachers similar to Finland’s would be enough to emulate Finland’s system.

There is no discounting the need for a strong national defense, but it is possible that we are using our budget inefficiently. This small change would help out our teachers, arguably some of the hardest working people in our country and easily one of the most important, by making education in the United States more efficient and would hopefully restore our rank as one of the top education systems in the world.