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The goal of today's schools seems to be to outfit children in the educational armor that will enable them to soldier on to their appropriate places in the white-collar hierarchy. Mr. Childress wants schools instead to chip away at that armor, to discover the true core of each student.
I AM A meandering kind of thinker. Something comes up for me, and that reminds me of something else, and then I remember a third thing, and pretty soon I'm talking about something brand new. Let me take you on a little tour of how that works for me.
I'm walking to Albertson's because Ben & Jerry's Frozen Yogurt is on sale - two pints for five dollars. I get to the store, it's about seven o'clock at night, and the parking lot is jammed; people are weaving around with their shopping carts through the stream of incoming cars trying to get their groceries to their own cars and go home.
And I'm looking at all of these hundreds of people and all of these cars, and I suddenly think, "I wonder how many of these people could resolve a trigonometric identity." Honest to Cod, that's what came into my head. Well, from there, this meandering thinker was off to the races. "I wonder how many of these people could tell you about the origins of the French Revolution. I wonder how many can still diagram a sentence."
And then I thought, "Well, why would I care if they could or not? They all have enough money to afford their cars and their groceries; they're getting by. Would they get by any better if they remembered how to construct the perpendicular bisector of a line segment using only a straightedge and a compass?"
Well, that of course took me right back to the high school that I wrote my book about and to all the kids who ever asked why they should bother learning something. "Why are we doing this?" That was the plaintive cry from the back corners of the room. "Why are we doing this?" It never came from the front: up front were the kids to whom it never occurred to ask that question or who had given up asking it. And...