One political issue that I hope to hear more about is No Child Left Behind. Written by Congress (Including Ted "I'll never die" Kennedy), and signed by President Bush shortly after taking office, NCLB is a controversal method of holding teachers and districts accountable for their students educations, but putting benchmark requirements on their reading, writing, and math skills. When students fall behind, the schools can be punished.
There are many problems with this, so many, in fact, that I can't possibly address them all. You can read all about it on various websites and blogs devoted to discussions of the invalidity of NCLB. But as a blogging engineer, one would think I would be a proponent of students increasing their math, reading and writing skills. Wouldn't it make sense, for an engineer who writes and reads and uses math every day to love a test that forces students to be more like me? Of course it would, if only engineers were totally mindless drones.
As any fellow blogger acknowledges, reading and writing is what gives democracy its voice! Without the ability to read, we couldn't learn to dissent. Without writing, we couldn't publish our dissent. And as any fellow engineer will quickly recognize, mathematics is the rational formulation of reality. Without math, none of this would make sense. Every word I type is translated via mathematical coding (binary) and the fundamentals of how a computer works is all based on mathematical formulas. A quick example: the keyboard is "qwerty" across the top row because a typist figured out which keys should be where in order to minimize the chances a typewriter's arms would crisscross.
True, part of why I excelled in reading is because I learned to read at a very early age, but just as much because at an early age I was chugging through science fiction novels and historical fiction books as fast as I could get them.
And also true, part of why I excelled in writing is because I had to write essays in A.P. English. But just as truly, I excelled in writing because I tried to write my own science fiction novel, because I wrote love-letters to girlfriends, and because I wrote in a diary.
Finally, it is true I excelledin math because from an early age I had a grasp of multiplication and algebra, and I was pushed hard by my math teachers, but its just as true that I excelled in math because in an art class I learned how to draw fractals long before I knew the math behind their structure.
The point is, although we do need to raise today's children to excel in math, reading, writing, and other core curriculums, it is folly to not let their imaginations get some test points too. Schools concerned with making the NCLB minimums are cutting down on recess, decreasing time spent in art and music classes and P.E. class, and taking whatever steps necessary to boost their 3R's while sacrificing the whole right brain.
This is a terrible, terrible plan. If you look back at history, the greatest minds of all time, each and every one, had some very right brained tendencies. Leonardo, arguably the smartest person of all time, excelled in painting and sculpture just as much as in math and science. Einstein, the poster-child for smartness, excelled at math beyond imagination, but enjoyed debating ethics and philosophy and religion just as much as Unified Field Theory. Edison, with over 1,000 patents in the fields of science, manufacturing, and chemistry, spent his free time reading fiction.
If we neglect the full breadth of education for tomorrow's children and turn them into mindless calculators, we will do them an injustice that we cannot measure.
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