FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

John Dunshee seems to think that the moral of this New York Times article is that No Child Left Behind is working.

Well, sure. If by working you mean that art, history, science, and social studies are irrelevant fields, especially for poorer or lower-performing students, and therefore can be drastically scaled back if not eliminated altogether, especially for those students.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation’s 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math.

In gutting curricula to meet No Child Left Behind, of course, schools more than ever before are “teaching to the test” — or, as the article puts it, “schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.”

What’s missing from a No Child Left Behind curriculum is the basic skillset of learning how to think. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the most ferocious and narrow-minded backers of the law themselves fail to think all that much about how the law punishes actual learning.

That’s all to their own benefit, of course, because it means we’re nurturing an entirely new generation of people exactly like them.

Backers of the law like to assert that critics of the law dismiss the importance of “the basics” such as reading and math, as if the highest and loftiest goal and purpose of education is no more than to have to choose between the basics and a more substantial curriculum.

There’s no mention from these people, naturally enough, of the fact that most of what has placed education in the United States in the bind of having to slash actual education are the constant and repeated pushes of these same people to gut the funding of education, combined with their perennial attacks on science for not teaching religion, or social studies for not teaching only their moral values.

A slavish and dogmatic reliance on “benchmarks” of the type generated by No Child Left Behind is dumbing down public education, and entrenching a system that is more about rote mechanics than helping kids to learn how to think.

Ultimately, that’s a question of values. Supporters of No Child Left Behind, knowingly or otherwise, show their values to be mean-spirited: They don’t want children to know how to think, especially the poorer or lower-performing ones.

“If a subject is not tested,” asks one source in the article, “why teach it?”

Just so. And a system of public education which is forced to rest upon that principle is a recipe for a future society in which millions of kids grow up to understand nothing about how their world works, and who are familiar with no one except other dullards like themselves, and the dullards who came before them to impose No Child Left Behind.