It’s that time of year when students begin a new school year. Across the United States, schools are under fire, with calls to cut more and more from their budgets. The Center on Education Policy reports that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.

In these tough economic times—unless you’re a billionaire—maybe it’s good to ask about priorities. In a July 16 piece in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes, “The United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.” Then why, he asks, do we not do the same at home?

Kristof notes that “a prime factor in America’s rise over the last two centuries was its leadership in educating the masses.” Having reported on poverty around the world, he goes on to note that “perhaps the anti-poverty program with the very best record is education—and that’s as true in New York as it is in Nigeria.”

No one argues that education reform is not needed and throwing money at a broken system is not the answer. However, as Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, has observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Many have proposed ideas for reform. One interesting one comes from Susan Engel, author of Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, who says we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.

“We want young people to become independent and capable,” she writes in a New York Times piece back in March, “yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.”

Engel describes an experiment in which a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts designed and ran their own school within a school. They called it the Independent Project.

The students also designed their own curriculum, which often turned out to be more demanding than what had existed.

Engel writes: “The students in the Independent Project … demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.”

She concludes: “Perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education.”

That’s just one idea. Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari, in another Times piece in April, note that “the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education.” We get what we pay for.

Kristof asks: “How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?”

The message seems clear: Education is not as much a priority as are those other areas. And forever cutting funds only makes us more ignorant.