The Voyage

Time’s cover story next week How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century is very compelling indeed.  This first paragraph says it all:

There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.” 

Are we, as a nation, truly prepared to reform and revive our public education system?

Can we see that our children are our investment in the future?  The debate over the future of their education should be moved from the back burner to the forefront.  It should be as impassioned as the debates on global warming, AIDS and The War on Terrorism.  I, for one, am prepared to take up arms and join this fight.  The time is now and the place is America.